I’ll be sitting for my Level 1 exam in May and wanted to share where I’m at and get some advice.
I’ve been using the Schweser platform to study the material, alongside doing practice questions from the CFA Institute’s QBank. Lately, I’ve been seeing posts from other candidates in different forums, who have already finished their first full pass of the content, while I’m only about one-third of the way through and honestly, it’s starting to stress me out. So far I’ve been able to complete FSA, Derivatives, and Quants.
My original plan was to do one in-depth pass of the material and then follow that with 1-2 light review passes. But now I’m wondering if I should speed things up to give myself more time for practice and to really focus on the areas I’m struggling with.
For anyone who’s further along or has been through this before:
Would you recommend picking up the pace on the first pass, even if it means sacrificing a bit of depth, and then tightening things up during review?
Any helpful thoughts or strategies would be greatly appreciated.
The Level 1 exam, in my opinion, has more breadth than it has depth.
I don’t know what your current pace is, but it might be worth considering speeding things up.
The May exam window opens up on May 14th. Assuming your exam is on the 14th, you have 71 days from today to finish those seven topics, but obviously you want to give yourself a review period, which is when you are taking mocks, focusing on your weak areas, and re-reviewing troubled concepts. Most candidates give themselves a 30-day review period, which means you would have 41 days to complete 7 topics. This means you have just under 6 days to complete each topic.
Just looking at the topics you have remaining:
Ethics has 5 modules,
Economics has 11 modules,
Corporate Issuers has 7 modules,
Equity Investments has 8 modules,
Fixed Income has 19 modules,
Alternative Investments has 7 modules,
Portfolio Management has 6 modules.
Totaling up to 63 modules remaining.
(Yes, I recognize that some of the modules are short, since CFAI split a lot of things into their own modules compared to previous years).
