Only 60 days until the December Level I CFA exam! How are you learning? This is the time to hurry up and you should finish your first round of learning. Prepare and complete every part of your notes and summaries. This is also the time for you to do the first mock exam test to know where you are right now.
We know exactly how you feel now - it's so close yet so far. You've worked hard for the past few months, revising and doing tons of practice papers. You're exhausted, stressed and tired. Worse of all, you don't know whether you're ready for the exam and whether you'll pass? The dream is to ace the CFA exams in 18 months, if possible.
First off, take a super deep breath - yup, give me a BIG inhale and exhale. Whatever stage you're in your studies now, there's always room to improve and make the most of your time left efficiently to maximise your chances of passing the CFA exams. Here's our little guide for doing it right.
Am I Prepared?
Big question, a hard one to answer. However, you probably know by now that I'm one of those people that prefer to take a view on tricky issues like this, so here are my thoughts of what you should have done (or are in the process of finishing soon) by now:
1. Revised all your core CFA syllabus at least once (shouldn't be hard if you strictly follow your CFA study plan),
2. Did tons of practice questions, and at least 4 practice papers (preferably under timed, exam conditions).
3. Showed improving scores across the practice papers, at least 65% and above is a good place to be. 70% is my preferred target gives sufficient buffer as it'd be a pain to be in Band 10! If you're not achieving these scores, fret now, there's still some time to improve on them.
4. Tracked your scores by topic area. Or at least know which area you're weaker in (and why).
Have an objective assessment of this, there's no point lying to yourself. If you're extremely behind the schedule of achieving these 4 points above, I highly recommend adopting our Cramming Strategy for the best use of your remaining time. For others who are close to finishing the above 4 tasks in a few more days, please refer at the next section.
Yay, What Should I Be Doing Now Then?
First of all, well done for being so disciplined and delivering consistent results so far! It's not the time to slack off though. You've done a solid base level preparation, now it's for the final push - all you have to do is 'plug the (knowledge) gap'. Here's how:
1. Based on your score tracking above, what are your top 3 weak areas?
2. More importantly, how do they compare to the CFA topic weightings?
With our experiences, we see that preparing summaries for the content you learn is very important because the amount of knowledge is so huge that you cannot memorize all with one round of learning only.
One of the best way to summarize is to use mind maps, which helps thousands of people pass this challenging exam. We also made some and we would like to send it for your further consideration. Hope it works for you. Please check the link below for FREE download: