I would be interested to know what people thought of Level II, compared to Level I ? Obviously, I understand that the exam format includes essay questions but what else ?
How much harder is the material ?
Are the formula’s in Level I, reused in the Level II exam ?
How much more study time did you require ?
For Level I, I wasn’t that impressed with the official study material but thought the Kaplan Schweser package I got was excellent.
As for peoples comments concerning the costs, I believe the benefits are well worth it and I would assume that while the CAIA continues to grow, the costs will probably start coming down. Therefore, it is to our advantage to support the designation as we will be amoung those benefiting in the medium/long term.
Anyone got their March 2012 study package from Kaplan Schweser yet ?
For me level 2 seemed a whole differenet ball game. I found level 1 extremely straight forward and passed with less than 100 hours study. I found level 2 much harder becuase the material is much more dense. I was kind of fooled into a false sense of security when i first receieved the uppermark books and there was only 2 - the material contained within them is quite hard going and the number of essential things to know per page is much higher than the CFA text books for example. It definately took me twice as long to read each book than the CFA ones. The concepts are not difficult but I found that there was a lot of memorizing required (similar to what you see with level 1 when you have to remember the moments of distributions of different hedge fund types) There are a fair few instances of this (i did get quite frustrated in some of the articles when 3 different people do a study, come to 3 different conclusions then you have to remember who found what. Impossible for me!). I found this tricky becuase i like to be able to work things out rather than just remember. There are also quite a lot of formulae, i don’t remember seeing any that were also in level 1, there are alot you will have seen or heard of before (esp if you have done CFA L2). I didn’t find any too difficult but there were some you cant really derive ie GARCH so have to remember. Because of this my approach to studying was to read everything twice and take notes, particulaly on the memory points and formulae and then did a massive volume of multiple choice and essay questions. This really helped me to remember all of the important facts, so in the end they were ingrained on my brain. I totally think that this exam deserves respect, there is no way you can wing it or rely of CFA knowledge, i’m a CFA Charteholder and i do think this helped but was not a game changer. But i do think the exam is fair, in that if you put in the work (250ish hours for me) you pass.
Thanks very much for your excellent and comprehensive response, I’ll study harder for the second level. I’m now awaiting the books from Kaplan Schweser and I’ll update this forum with how I see the differences too. Cheers,
Schweser for L2 is quite good in fact. I read the official material once and now, reading/reviewing on Schweser I regret that: Schweser is way clearer! I agree with holiday: stuff is not conceptually difficult, just there is a lot of memorizing to do, especially for the essay questions I suppose.
I thought the exam was quite fair based on the material and a lot more straightforward than the CFA. It is definitely a harder exam. But absolutely passable with honest preparation.