Level 3 Prep Providers

ChP wrote:
Out of curiousity, what is the appeal with third party providers? I only used the CFA books to study and I had no problem passing L1 and L2 first time. In my humble opinion it’s a waste of money but I would be interested to hear what advantages other candidates find in them.
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How valuable the 3rd party providers are will depend on your learning style. Personally, I would rather learn by doing questions than by reading the material 2-3x, so I like having additional questions. I always do the CFAI EOC questions, but once I’m done those there’s no added value in simply redoing them (I frequently recall whatever their small twist was to make it difficult, making it so I don’t have to think very much). Instead, I will then dig into the FinQuiz/Elan questions until I am confortable with the questions. Similarly for mock exams, while CFAI provides one, and I usually have mocks from previous years, prep providers give me a chance to do an extra 5-10 if I have time.
Alternatively, if I preferred audio/video to digest the material, the CFAI does not offer these mediums and I would be greatly advantaged to use a 3rd party provider.
What makes no sense to me is people who purchase 3rd party materials without any intent on doing extra questions or videos, but simply “read the condensed version.” They will not magically make your score increase - they simply make it easier to put in the time necessary to succeed.
 
ChP wrote:
Out of curiousity, what is the appeal with third party providers? I only used the CFA books to study and I had no problem passing L1 and L2 first time. In my humble opinion it’s a waste of money but I would be interested to hear what advantages other candidates find in them.
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I did CFA only for level 1. It worked, but it took a hell of a lot of time at over 3200 pages. With CFA like material it takes me on average 6 minutes per page or 10 pages an hour. That’s 300+ hours right there, just to read the material once.
For level 2 I wanted to do the same thing, that had slightly fewer pages (like 2900 readable pages I calculated). After getting about 60% through it and encoutering fixed income, I started falling behind schedule and decided the right thing to do was to switch to Schweser. It really helped keep me on track and did a better job at explaining derivatives without going through all these crazy derivations that CFAI spent way too much time on.
The CFAI curriculum is good, but Schweser is more direct without having that academician’s desire to explain where everything was derived from (a PhD-ism). Granted as Level 2 candidates will tell you, this year CFAI threw some questions that basically said ‘Aha, didn’t want to sit through all the boring details - well we gotcha now!”. But as you can see, I survived.
The best part about things like the Schweser videos is that you have people going through problems step by step. If you just prepare on CFAI material alone, you basically just see the textbook response for the question without any in depth explanation of how to solve the problem and what steps might be helpful. That to me is the most valuable part of them.
 
I need notes from prep provider because… Everytime i read curriculum, i always fell asleep within 4 pages. I found it too verbose. I still do eoc and bb though

bought finquiz.. Now debatin whether that shud be enuf or shud i buy schweser notes or elan vids as well
 
I think prep provider is much less important at level 3. More more important is time spent working port management questions.
 
The difference for me is that the cfai text is a collection of academic articles so reading it all is hard work. schweser is written as a textbook for the purpose of learning the material. Having said that, the schweser notes seem to get worse with every level.
Hats off to people that can read the cfai text cover to cover but for me that would take way way too long and I’d rather spend time doing questions.
I’d try elan but their schedule is ridiculous and I think they’re quite new to L3.
Maybe I’ll have to bite the bullet and read the cfai text for L3 though.
 
I used FinQuiz some for level II and I caught a couple mistakes fairly quickly and it discouraged me from continuing with them because I kept second guessing everything I did from that point forward. But it seems to be pretty reasonably priced and maybe worth trying it out again for level III?
 
Don’t know if I passed yet or not, so take this for what it’s worth.
I used only Schweser (not even CFAI materials) for all three levels. I felt like Schweser did just as good in preparing me for the test at L3 as it did at L1 and 2.
And just like at L1 and 2, Schweser doesn’t cover EVERYTHING. There is some stuff that they leave out. But I thought the did a good job at teaching what’s important. I only recall one question in last year’s L3 exam that I had no clue what they were asking (meaning that I had never even heard of it). Everything else was covered by Schweser. (Whether I remembered it or not is a different story.)
 
Greenman72 wrote:
Don’t know if I passed yet or not, so take this for what it’s worth.
I used only Schweser (not even CFAI materials) for all three levels. I felt like Schweser did just as good in preparing me for the test at L3 as it did at L1 and 2.
And just like at L1 and 2, Schweser doesn’t cover EVERYTHING. There is some stuff that they leave out. But I thought the did a good job at teaching what’s important. I only recall one question in last year’s L3 exam that I had no clue what they were asking (meaning that I had never even heard of it). Everything else was covered by Schweser. (Whether I remembered it or not is a different story.)
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I’m in the same boat, I felt like it was better use of my time to read Schweser twice and make a pile of notes and do a bunch of qbank Q’s in the same amount of time it would take me to get through the CFA text’s just once.
lets hope we are both proven right a week tomorrow/
 
Greenman72 and fraser, do you use only notes mock n pq or,with videos as well
 
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