Should I review CFA Curriculum or Schweser Notes?

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doctortt

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First of all, I tried to research abou tthis, but I couldn’t find anything useful.
Are Schweser Notes more like a supplment to CFA Curriculum? Can you study Schweser Notes without reviewing the Curriculum? I was looking at one of the Schweser books that talks about debt securities, and a number of sections just talk about the characteristics of those instruments, throw you those fancy terms, etc. Am I supposed to remember these stuff? Rote learning isn’t the way to go, in my opinion. I must be missing something here. Can someone please shed some light?
 
doctortt wrote:First of all, I tried to research abou tthis, but I couldn’t find anything useful.
Are Schweser Notes more like a supplment to CFA Curriculum?
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Schweser’s notes are intended to be a distillation of the curriculum, not a supplement: all of the important information with nothing that is unimportant.
doctortt wrote:Can you study Schweser Notes without reviewing the Curriculum?
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Many people do. I, for one, passed all three exams (on my first attempt, not that that makes me a better analyst …) using only Schweser’s materials (and their 2-day and 3-day final reviews).
doctortt wrote:I was looking at one of the Schweser books that talks about debt securities, and a number of sections just talk about the characteristics of those instruments, throw you those fancy terms, etc. Am I supposed to remember these stuff?
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If you don’t remember that stuff, you reduce you chances of passing the exam, possibly significantly. Do you want to risk that?
doctortt wrote:Rote learning isn’t the way to go, in my opinion. I must be missing something here.
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Some knowledge cannot be had by any other means. If you need to know the capitals of all 50 US states, the only way to learn it is through rote memorization. There are various mnemonic devices that can help in that regard, but the bottom line is that you simply have to commit to memory those facts. Sometimes life’s hard.
doctortt wrote:I must be missing something here.
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Sounds like you’re on top of it.
doctortt wrote:Can someone please shed some light?
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I hope that I just did.
 
If you think L1 debt securities has a lot of fancy mumbo jumbo to memorize wait till you get to L2 private equity
 
L1 - Schweser is more than sufficient. Q-bank is awesome.
L2 - A mix of both. At a minimum, do EOC questions from CFAI.
L3 - Schweser sucks. CFAI only.
 
Agree with spunboy on L1 & L2. Disagree on L3. Schweser + EOC + using CFAI for topics that give you trouble is generally fine for L3.
 
i think the benefit of having study guides is to save you some time on some topics, but don’t forget you always have the curriculum to fall back on if you do not understand something. They are not mutually exclusive! You can read Schweser on ethics and economics, but read the curiculum on accounting and corp finance, there is nothing wrong with that! Plus having the study guides also give you mroe end of chapter questions.
And there will be times when you don’t understand something even AFTER you read the curriculum, then you come onto AF and ask for advise or go onto investopedia or something for more definitions.
 
I like to organize my studies with the Evernote note-taking software.. creating a note for every single LOS.
After going through the entire curriculum using Scheweser notes, I’ll take a look at which notes are blank or very short.. then I’ll go back to the CFAI curriculum and cover those there.
 
higgmond wrote:
Agree with spunboy on L1 & L2. Disagree on L3. Schweser + EOC + using CFAI for topics that give you trouble is generally fine for L3.
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+1 to this.
I never looked at the official curriculum for any of the three levels. Only did EOC questions.
 
I read the entire CFA curriculum every year - I found it’s not that bad! LOLOL I used QBANK for level 1 and it was great. I did QBANK for level 2 and failed. I did mock exams for level 2 and it was great. I will read CFAI text for level 3 too.
 
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