They could just publish a study guide like ACCA, and listing all the LOS to master. What makes me confused is if they wanted us to read the 3000 pages curriculum, why did they allow other publishers produce a distilled curriculum (study notes)? And what makes me even more confused is curriculum is written by wiley finance, the same publisher that produces study notes every year (formerly called elan guides and they cost almost as much as the whole curriculum)? Another thing is they tell us that study notes are not a substitute, so what exactly are they? I mean you can’t read 1100 during revision and they’re concise, the curriculum is well explained so we never have to refer to study notes. So what is the purpose of notes if they’re not a substitute? This is all too fishy. Wiley finance ripped me off twice, now they’re telling me that I will fail if I don’t read the entire curriculum!
Well because I paid for the notes online. I sent them an email back in August and asked If I could just use them as substitute. They said it’s not a substitute. and secondly, none of you answered my question. Wiley finance profit off of simply being CFAI’s publisher. I started late and thought I’d just rely on the notes and refer to curriculum when I don’t understand something.
the exam used to be based around college textbooks, some of which were a real pleasure to have in your personal library ( sondhi-white-fried, solnik, gwartney). however some choices always seemed a bit odd - why use don chance for derivs instead of john hull?
In appearance aimr/cfai were favoring charterholders when making selections. and of course not everyone was using aimrpubs.com to buy their boxload of books every year (i.e. amazon) and obviously the secondhand market played a part in reducing revenue (a hardback lasts a long time).
so cfai are now trying to
only use charterholders as authors
capture the revenue students pay for the books
The 3rd party providers spang up as the result of using textbooks. originally they were printed in india and a cheaper option. now as you point out the situation is crazy. - cfai print their own sylabus partnering with wiley. wiley directly compete with cfai, except it’s mandatory you pay for the ebook.
for me 1) and 2) are incompatible. the best authors are probably not cfa charterholders so as long as this policy continues this is the situation you are stuck with.
Who cares? There is a fee from CFAI to register for the test and you can pass with just the materials they give you…but…there are third parties who make shorter material and it is completely up to you whether you buy that material as a supplement or not. By the way, CFAI never endorses third party material.
The CFA curriculum published by Wiley is really just a printing contract – CFAI pays a company (could be Wiley or Pearson or Random House or McGrawHill) to print the books. This has nothing to do with Wiley’s own study guide, which is developed within an education division of Wiley. Heck if Kaplan didn’t have a printing division, they could use Wiley too, and then you’d be really confused right?