Quick background. I am going to buy some 2017 level 1 books from a guy but I am a little worried that they may be old books. There have been a few stories of people buying second hand books and them being older year books with new covers.
Are there any sections or bits of info that I can check that would have been changed/updated for 2017 specifically? I’d like to check these while I amwins the guy before handing out the cash. The more points to check for the better!
I did it myself with a peer’s books. I think I found about a dozen sections that were either new or had been dropped from the previous year. So I think that I could’ve passed the exam with one-year-old books. Anything older than one year is definitely not good anymore. I purchased some audio notes that were 2-3 years old. Too much of the material on it had been updated.
As for specific topics, I would be wary of Accounting and Financial Reporting with the melding from GAAP to IFRS.
What you can do is check the copyright in the books. In the 2017 books it should say “2016 copyright” somewhere in the front of the books before the contents section. In the 2016 books it will say “2015 copyright” and so on… If you don’t do that, then look at the FRA book. The 2017 book has the “inventories” and the “long lived assets” sections dropped… They were the very first 2 readings in FRA, so if you don’t see them there then you know you have 2017.
i just received the books and they have the sections of inventories and long lived assets in them under readings 28 and 29. I also checked the CFA sillibus and apparently these readings have not been dropped for this year?