Instead of skipping quant because it’s difficult and only worth 5%, I’ll share with you what I did…
-I skipped reading the books
-Watched the schweser videos and took notes (~5 hours)
-Did about 60% of the Schweser Q-bank questions
-Answered all the Schweser mock exam item sets and CFA website practice items sets
-Did this a week before the exam
-Took me about 5 days of practice
-Scored >70% on the exam in this topic, was originally just going to skip it
***Update
-Learning from my past mistakes, I would suggest doing this the last two weeks of April with last year’s mock item sets. This way you will be prepared for the mock exams to come in May. The reason why I waited until the last week was because I planned on skipping quant and found my mock exams were suffering by a few percentage points, so I decided to buckle down and learn it. This isn’t the only way, but this worked for me and I found the actual exam questions to be easy. The videos hit on all the major points and leave the garbage out that the books bring into play.
Thanks for the advice. I went through quant already and though I had seen some of it in my undergrad it is rather frightening. I grounded through the readings and skipped about half the questions. I’m hoping to watch Wiley videos and go back and do all questions. Thanks for the heads up, my biggest issue is just keep going.
Yea I am going through the second reading of quant now. Definately not the easiest subject, and the EOC’s are tough, but when it gave you the 2 vignettes at the end of the first reading I did well on those. Pretty tough to know all the formulas but at least it isnt open ended.
Almost 1/2 way through and I am confident I should be able to get >70 is not right in that ballpark. As with people talking about difficult sections in L1, I think just keeping your head down and grinding is the best way to handle it. Keep doing practice problems and you’ll start learning.
What you have done is to memorize formulas, concepts, questions; but what you haven’t done is to understand what you are doing. Everybody can do that in order to pass the exam, but I repeat, the main goal is not to pass the exam, it is to be a better professional. You may never use quants in your career, thats ok, but I really doubt quants is useless.
What is this enjoying or no enjoying about? CFA Studies are part of your work and you do not classify work into enjoy/no-joy category. Study, practice, pass move ahead in career; I am sure you can find better sources of enjoyment
I read through the entire CFAI curriculum in order. Quant was the first subject and I just could not understand it. I skimmed it and tried the questions. Didn’t really get a good grasp of it but I went ahead to the next topic.
After a couple of months (ie. when I finished book 6), I went through quant again. EVERYTHING made sense. I don’t know how to explain it. The second time I went through it was so much easier.
If you don’t understand something, skip it for now and come back to it later.
Anyone ever read any of those “pass the CFA in 2 months” articles. Well, here’s what this guy has to say:
_ Quantitative Methods : One of the easiest topic of CFA level II curriculum. The questions will be straight forward from this topic in the exam and it is high scoring. There are 3 chapters but if you know 2nd chapter, then you can finish first chapter in 10 minutes._
I’m on the first chapter, so far I’ve logged more than 10 hours. I’m currently in the middle of the EOC Qs.
The QM is, for the most part, introductory statistics for a university course. Multiple regression is an extension of simple linear regression, so you should be able to understand the second chapter (MR) (relatively) easily if you’ve obtained a solid grasp of the first chapter (SLR). In addition, the time series chapter shouldn’t be too difficult if you understand regression analysis from the first two chapters (similar ideas and many connections…)
