Level 1: Less important topics from the test-ability perspective

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zubiboy

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As of now i have completed FRA, Economics, Alt Investments, Portion of Quant and 50% Equity. If there are any topics which are less important and don’t get tested please mention them as i have very little time.
 
Well you clearly haven’t read ethics yet. Alt & derivatives are smaller portions of the exam so you can skim them quickly and learn the types of questions they ask in mocks.
Also don’t read the optional sections in the material.
 
From Quantitative and Equity sections; are there any topics which i should leave.
 
You are asking what sections they do not test on? Each test is different, and talking about what you are tested on is an Ethics violation
 
But I felt they did a pretty fair job of giving you a solid overview of all the tested material
 
What i am asking you is that some recommend not reading Hypothesis testing from Quant. I am asking you about which topics to leave if i have less time and that is not a violations of ethics because you are not telling me what would appear on the exam.
 
Well the biggest mistake you made was completing Econ, thats the biggest waste of time on the exam as its like 30% of the reading for 10% of the exam.
With your question specified, I say skim Alt & Derivatives. I got >70 on them and didnt read them fully, just learned them by doing practice tests & mocks
 
You could get tested on anything that appears on the curriculum, if you want to skip chapters, do it by yourself. Really, I’m not being rude, it’s just the truth.
 
well one thing you haven’t covered it seems which you really need to get cracking on is fixed income…
 
Look at the subjects that overlap. For example, there is a lot of overlap between equity, FRA, and corporate finance and even quant and portfolio management to a degree. To me, if a concept keeps showing up in multiple subjects, it’s probably a pretty important concept in the eyes of the CFAI.
 
agree w. jenjenks, you should also get a sense of what’s “in the weeds” and what’s highly testable from taking multiple mock exams
 
zubiboy wrote:
What i am asking you is that some recommend not reading Hypothesis testing from Quant. I am asking you about which topics to leave if i have less time and that is not a violations of ethics because you are not telling me what would appear on the exam.
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If you don’t have a decent background in (basic) statistics (and I mean answering >90% in the CFAI statistics questions), you’d be misguided to skip hypothesis testing. It’s a fundamental idea in statistics that goes a very long way. You will also need hypothesis testing in Level II.
Personally, I think it’s silly to skip any topic unless you already have a solid background in it and can answer a high percentage correct of CFAI questions on that topic. The goal should be to learn, rather than merely to pass. I understand your question is coming more from an area of time constraint, but do your best to truly learn as much as possible. If you actually learn, you will pass the exams.
 
I wouldn’t recommend this as a best practice, but Derivatives was something I completely ignored. It wasn’t very intuitive to me and it only represented 5% of the exam.
I was a little behind with my studies so time was limited and I would rather hit the bigger weights ( FRA, Equity, Quant, Ethics, FI) then spend my time there. I even looked at Alt’s even though it was only 3% but that came easier to me as did the aforementioned topics.
Whenever I took the time to look at it, I felt lost, so I was willing to sacrifice 5% of the grade if I could spend my time on the bigger topics.
On exam day, I litterally just circled any answer and didn’t read the question at all. I failed the section, but passed the exam. Again, not a best practice.
They give you ranges of exam weights on Level II so its probably not something you can pull off (5-15% weighting on the Level II exam). It could come back to bite me so if you do it, you will need to be on your game come time to take level II!
 
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