How my friend got stuck on Level II

[NANA Hachiko]

With only days remaining until the Level I & II results, I’d like to share a story to “comfort” those who did not make it this year. I know it’s not a very comforting story, but if you fail you should know you are not alone and there are lessons to be learned.

A friend of mine was stuck at Level II, and after 3 attempts, she is not “putting it on the side”.
I started around the same time she did, in fact, she got into the program earlier than I. She passed Level I with a week of studying and she felt pretty confident about it so she under-estimated the difficulty of Level II.
So once you fail once, you should know better, right?
Well, she has this “strategy” I would like to share and perhaps debate about, she only wants to focus on the topics she’s good at and completely give up on the ones that are not intuitive for her (and do not weigh as much as others).
She went into your second and third attempts completing ignoring stats and alternative investments (and i think fixed income?), and obviously… she failed.

Her theory is that, she’s never going to score really high on those sections anyway, she may as well just bet on getting 1/3 of the questions right with random answers. Since the curriculum is so large and she can only efficiently study and retain so much information, she decides to focus on the bigger topics (ethics, accounting, corp finance, equity…) in hope of passing the exam on average.

Her strategy makes sense to me (somewhat), though i didn’t follow it, but i’m wondering, if anyone else followed a similar strategy and what’s your outcome??
NANA

 

[vicky_cool400]

pass level 1 in 1 week.
Is this a joke

 

[NANA Hachiko]

vicky_cool400 wrote:
pass level 1 in 1 week.
Is this a joke

That’s what she said.. and i believed her because she registered by the last deadline and actually took her exam during her work vacation too. ^_^

 

[bloodline]

I had a similar strategy and although i am still awaiting my results, I will be very lucky to survive the July 23rd onslaught.
Nothing to argue here - it is a foolish decision! I neglected Economics and Alternatives. My reason? well, they are just too darn long and the topics do not come easily to me like the others. This paid off very well in the mocks, but who could have foretold that Derivatives -which was supposed to be one of my major stregnths - would throw me a curveball? or that Alternatives which i foolishly left out, would be 10% and not 5%?
This should serve as a lesson - don’t ever underestimate any subject/topic area …and careful to not be overconfident on what you think your strengths are.

 

[Ivan Drago]

bloodline
You never know, as the overall score matters, so do not tear yourself for now, good luck!

 

[NANA Hachiko]

bloodline wrote:
I had a similar strategy and although i am still awaiting my results, I will be very lucky to survive the July 23rd onslaught.
Nothing to argue here - it is a foolish decision! I neglected Economics and Alternatives. My reason? well, they are just too darn long and the topics do not come easily to me like the others. This paid off very well in the mocks, but who could have foretold that Derivatives -which was supposed to be one of my major stregnths - would throw me a curveball? or that Alternatives which i foolishly left out, would be 10% and not 5%?
This should serve as a lesson - don’t ever underestimate any subject/topic area …and careful to not be overconfident on what you think your strengths are.

i am sure a lot of people skip some sections, and passed!
i didn’t do it because i was too chickent o miss any parts, but if you think strategically, there is only ONE item set on statistics, so 6 questions MAX. There is sooooo much material to learn and understand for time series, ANOVA table, regression analysis… some may question, is it worth it?
If you skip studying that topic you may still end up scoring 2 points just by randomly guessing - not a bad calculated risk! Considering most people who have studied don’t get 6/6 anyway.
^_^

 

[Ramos4rm]

It comforts me to know people skipped sections…because I didn’t, hope thats not too messed up. Couldnt imagine going into the test not having touched a section.

 

[Greenman72]

I did the same thing–more or less.
It sounds like her mistake is that she completely ignored those sections. Like the great philosopher Andy Holmes said, “You have to know a little about everything, and a lot about some things.”
I definitely focused my attention on FRA, Corp Fin, and Equity, because 1.) I’m good at those things and 2.) They comprise 50% of the whole test.
I focused less on the others, but still studied enough that I hoped to pick up all the easy questions.

 

[padniaki]

NANA Hachiko wrote:
If you skip studying that topic you may still end up scoring 2 points just by randomly guessing - not a bad calculated risk! Considering most people who have studied don’t get 6/6 anyway.
^_^

This logic is flawed. You’re not necessarily trying for 6/6, you’re usually just fighting for that extra question per item set that makes the difference. The difference between 3/6 per item set and 4/6 per item set is the difference between passing and failing.
For what it’s worth, I had only a fundamental understanding of Derivatives and Alt Investments for L1 (and I passed), and my understanding of those topics on L2, although definitely more thorough, was still lacking (and I passed again). Point being: you can neglect 1 or 2 sections somewhat, but you can’t completely ignore any topic. There’s no guarantee you’ll even get 2/6 by guessing.

 

[MissCleo]

I tried that the first time I took level 2 and got slaughtered. People who tried that for this go round with Alts got slaughtered. Probably best to just brush up on everything. I’m not the smartest guy in the world but even I can fight 95% of the material in my head.

 

[Giovanni]

There’s no way I would skip a section of studying and gamble that it won’t be asked or count for as much. I would have LOVED to skip derivatives, hated every second of it. But when I sat for the exam I was sure happy I studied it.
The advice I hear often about CFA is that it’s way better to know something about everything than everything about something. Because even if you know ‘everything’ about 70% of the sections, during the exam you might get thrown a curveball that you never expected in the sections you thought you were well prepared in (it’s impossible to truly know everything cold about a section unless you memorize every word in the text and could mentally index through it), and then you may have made a human error somewhere (flipped a digit on a calculation, improperly filled in an answer, etc). That stuff adds up and before you know it, you wish you would have studied the section that you didn’t know anything about so you could have at least gotten some points to make up for those moments.

 

[random shots]

NANA Hachiko wrote:
i didn’t do it because i was too chickent o miss any parts, but if you think strategically, there is only ONE item set on statistics, so 6 questions MAX. There is sooooo much material to learn and understand for time series, ANOVA table, regression analysis… some may question, is it worth it?
If you skip studying that topic you may still end up scoring 2 points just by randomly guessing - not a bad calculated risk! Considering most people who have studied don’t get 6/6 anyway.
^_^

I lost a lot of time trying to comprehend stats on Level I so when I saw the limited weighting on Level II I skipped it completly during my studying. I just went with the same answer for all six questions since I could not fake my way through it.

 

[sooraj]

Skipping a section in itself is taking too far. I get slaughtered each time in Alt Investments because I use this strategy. But I just cant learn Alt Invs and Level1 and 2 I got less than 50 And this year is going to be no different.
But I love FRA, Corp Fin, Equity and FI just like Greenman said. This is more than 50% and I like these subjects.. Will not skip one line in these subjects. But I read Economics, Quants selectively. If a topic doesnt look intuitive to me (lots for me in economics actually), I just read it once so that I dont miss out on straight forward questions And I am not one of those smart learners, I spend loads and loads of time infront of the book

 

[QuangHoang]

Off topic!
I’m wondering, MissCleo, how come you call yourself a ‘guy’?

 

[NANA Hachiko]

padniaki wrote:

NANA Hachiko wrote:
If you skip studying that topic you may still end up scoring 2 points just by randomly guessing - not a bad calculated risk! Considering most people who have studied don’t get 6/6 anyway.
^_^

This logic is flawed. You’re not necessarily trying for 6/6, you’re usually just fighting for that extra question per item set that makes the difference. The difference between 3/6 per item set and 4/6 per item set is the difference between passing and failing.
For what it’s worth, I had only a fundamental understanding of Derivatives and Alt Investments for L1 (and I passed), and my understanding of those topics on L2, although definitely more thorough, was still lacking (and I passed again). Point being: you can neglect 1 or 2 sections somewhat, but you can’t completely ignore any topic. There’s no guarantee you’ll even get 2/6 by guessing.

I don’t think the logic is flawed, the underlining strategy is to ace all the other sections because she has more time to dedicate to bigger topics.
Clearly some people pass the exam with failing 1 or 2 topics. Picking all B for one section may not guarentee anything but it’s satistically valid.
I am not saying it is the BEST strategy, i didn’t do it and obviously my friend didn’t make it.

 

[cgottuso8190]

QuangHoang wrote:
Off topic!
I’m wondering, MissCleo, how come you call yourself a ‘guy’?

I’ll offer up a guess and say it has something to do with reproductive organs…

 

[darthplow]

[/quote]
i didn’t do it because i was too chickent o miss any parts,
^_^
[/quote]
Thus you passed

 

[klumzyfule66]

Yeah, completely skipping I would say is a no-no. And Greenie, referring to Andy Holmes as a great philosopher I don’t think is giving him enough credit.
What I did was go through the curriculum, to see how many pages there were for each of the topics. I would put that figure over the weight of the subject matter to get how heavily weighted questions came per page of text. IE 20-30% weight in FRA, 200 pages of text gives you 6.67-10 (pages of text per percent of exam), and 10-20% in Fixed Income, 200 pages of text gives you 10-20. Obviously that means (in this example) that FRA was going to give you more questions on the exam per page that you read.
Also what I did was go through all of the Schweser mock exams and write down the LOS that each of the questions came from. This got me to see what single readings were “more testable” than the others.
I wanted to get through the entire curriculum before I started to focus on the “mosaic” I put together from the above two exercises but I couldn’t do it. It got to be May and I decided to skip a portion of the curriculum to focus on the test-taking skills, and the “heavily weighted” topics.

 

[NANA Hachiko]

klumzyfule66 wrote:
Yeah, completely skipping I would say is a no-no. And Greenie, referring to Andy Holmes as a great philosopher I don’t think is giving him enough credit.
What I did was go through the curriculum, to see how many pages there were for each of the topics. I would put that figure over the weight of the subject matter to get how heavily weighted questions came per page of text. IE 20-30% weight in FRA, 200 pages of text gives you 6.67-10 (pages of text per percent of exam), and 10-20% in Fixed Income, 200 pages of text gives you 10-20. Obviously that means (in this example) that FRA was going to give you more questions on the exam per page that you read.
Also what I did was go through all of the Schweser mock exams and write down the LOS that each of the questions came from. This got me to see what single readings were “more testable” than the others.
I wanted to get through the entire curriculum before I started to focus on the “mosaic” I put together from the above two exercises but I couldn’t do it. It got to be May and I decided to skip a portion of the curriculum to focus on the test-taking skills, and the “heavily weighted” topics.

That is a very diligent analysis, i am impressed.
I have to say, after writing 10 mock exams usually prior to actual exam, i do think that the actual exam is largely predictable. So as long as you have done sufficient number of mocks and really study each question (why you got right and why you got wrong), you wouldn’t be too shocked on the exam day.
Yes, the deciding factor always seem to lie on the 5% “over the top” questions on the exam. And i always think of those few questions as write-offs - meaning i would never get them even if you give me 3 more months to study because i would never thought to learn them.

 

[Babsfrey]

Why on earth will anyone skip sections? This amazes me, knowing that the MPS may just be anything; unlike the regular exams where the MPS has been pre-announced.
You run a risk of being outperformed by other candidates by gaming the sections. Wrong strategy anytime! Moreso, for all the curriculum is worth, I will focus more on the topic areas that do not come readily to my mind. That way, I think I will get the most out of the CFA. You do not want the charter without knowing your stuff!