Have you decided if you are going to rely on the full CFA® exam level I curriculum, a study guide or a combination of both?
The CFA Institute will only be able to ask you questions about material covered in the curriculum on exam day. So in theory if you are able to understand and recall the entire curriculum you will be able to answer every single questions on the test. This is not necessarily the most effective way to prepare for the test however.
I am sure you have come across some of the various CFA® exam study guide providers like Wiley and Schweser. Common for all of these is that they abbreviate the curriculum leaving out whatever information they consider insignificant and unlikely to be relevant for the test. If you rely on one of these study guides as your primary study material you do run the risk that the study guide provider may have removed various bits of information that show up on the test. I do however believe that the benefits far outweigh this potential issue. Abbreviated materials are a lot less daunting to get through which reduces your risk of falling behind your study schedule and increases your ability to really focus on the material that is most likely to actually matter on the test. You would be able to go through most study guides twice in the same amount of time it would otherwise take to cover the underlying curriculum. As long as you are using a quality study guide like the one provided by Wiley CFA Exam Review Products, most candidates are much better off having a deep knowledge of the most testable material, than a superficial knowledge of the entire curriculum.
I am not sure if you are following the 21 week study program outlined in our free newsletter? If you are not you can sign up in the sidebar. In this program we recommend a 21 week study program divided up into 2 phases. In the first phase we spend 15 weeks absorbing the content from a study guide (We recommend Wiley CFA Exam Review Products, but we are also happy with Schweser, and acknowledge that there are other guides out there that will do the job too). Every candidate will be able to get through the material at least once in 15 weeks using a study guide, if you putting in the hours. If you work hard you might even be able to cover difficult passages multiple times. This is a much better outcome than putting in a mammoth effort to barely cover the underlying curriculum once. If you don’t manage to cover the entire material in the first 15 weeks you will invade the last six weeks that should otherwise be used for revision time. I cannot tell you how many times I have been contacted by candidates relying on the underlying curriculum, that have fallen way behind their study plan and wonder what to do next. Don’t let this be you!
Should I completely ignore the curriculum then?
No, the underlying curriculum does serve a purpose.
- I recommend studying ethics in the underlying curriculum as it is relatively brief (9.2% of the curriculum), but carries a 15% guideline exam weight. The majority of the Ethics material will be repeated at all 3 levels, so it pays to learn it in details from the start. Lastly, the CFA Institute will pay special attention to your ethics score if you are a borderline pass. So it really pays to study this topic in detail in the underlying curriculum.
- I also recommend that you solve all of the end of chapter questions in the curriculum books and revise the answers until you are comfortable with all of them.
- If you are using a quality study guide like Wiley. The information will be structured around the curriculum Learning Outcome Statements (LOS). If you are using another study guide and these are not covered in detail, make sure that you have obtained the required level of understand defined by the command words in each LOS.
- Lastly, if you are struggling with a particular reading or passage, it is sometimes worth it to read the same material in the underlying curriculum to get a different perspective and a bit more background information.