Suggested strategy for the exam

[harrygo]

I am just finishing my first read of the material, and the exam is two weeks away. My orginal plan was to read again the material at a faster pace and take note, and then do the mock exam. But now I’m worrying about the time it takes, leading me to not being able to do the enough problem sets. So would you recommend me to do the problem sets now instead? If so, I guess I will do the mock exam, and then the problem sets at the end of each session? Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you!

 

[lunacy]

I think you should begin doing the EOC questions as soon as possible if you haven’t. If you have, do the CFAI topic tests online. It takes quite some time to do them, and they are quite intimidating for most of us, so don’t feel so discouraged or lose your confidence if you don’t do well. After doing questions, figure out the areas that you are not comfortable with, and then review them. Basically, just do questions and then read materials to cover what you forget, rinse and repeat.
You can start doing mocks at once, but if I were you, I would not think I am ready and I would spend some more time doing problems set and review the materials before trying mocks. There is not much time left, though, so I would probably spend a few days reviewing and practicing, and then start doing mocks at the beginning (or in the middle) of the next week, and then spend the rest of the time (~ 1 week) reviewing, redoing EOCs and topic tests, and doing more mocks if I have the time.

 

[harrygo]

Thank you very much!

 

[biuku]

Agree with other guy, but might suggest even skipping EOC at this stage. There’s 1,100 EOC problems, including multiple-part questions. And may are open answers, not ABC, so can take far more than 3 min.
There are 498 Topic Test questions (83 Vignettes). If you just went through them from start to finish, I think it would take a few days. Good idea to track performance by reading, not topic, as you go. Do a quick report at the end of all that to see what readings to go back to. (for me, I track guesses vs “confident” to weed out luck from small populations).
For many of them, I find it hard to learn from the EOC. If, after that, you figure you’re going to drill Topic Tests for 2/3 of readings, and go back and re-do 1/3 of readings to learn them more deeply, I’d recommend trying one out by just doing Blue Boxes – like, really “doing” them. Building out the model of what it’s suggesting. Probably the best use of time would be to set aside like 4 hours to do every Blue Box in Intercorporate several times, reading bits and pieces as you go to pick up the why.
Good luck!