Avoid This Tragic Level II Mistake…

Let’s face it. If you are crazy enough to sit down for Level II, you are probably an overachiever. So you are thinking, “I am going to ace this exam. Yeah, it is hard, but there has never been an exam that I couldn’t crush with enough preparation.”

If you take that approach on LEVEL II you will definitely be warming a seat for next year’s LEVEL II exam.

How do I know? Because I did just that. Ethics is a great place to devote time. If you read the material and do a lot of practice questions you will score well. Stats is not that way. You can study that material up, down and sideways and you will find yourself on the exam, wondering where the CFAI got the questions from becuase it is nothing you have ever seen before.

Stats is 5% of the exam. Remember that. THe amount of time you have to devote to get the hard questions right is not worth the time you have to spend studying it. So blow it off. Sure, you study enough to get the easy questions right but no more.

Also, blow the stats off and leave it for the last part of the exam period – you know when you can’t see straight, it feels like your head has been baked in an oven for a couple of hours, and the proctor is screaming ‘5 Minutes!!!!!!’ in your ear? People have a strategy of “I will get stats 100% correct and that will mean I can miss a lot of other questions.” That works at level I but not Level II.

Why? because a lot of exam taking is about confidence. If you have studied ethics hard, you can leave that section quickly feeling good. But you can go through the stats (early in the exam) and feel like you are a moron – regardless of how well you are prepared. Besides it will give you more time to devote to equity and accounting where you have an opportunity to rack up points.

I really think CFAI has structured the Exam to test your analytical abilities e.g. how should I approach studying and taking the exam from a strategic perspective.

Answer: Know equity, ethics, accounting forwards and backwards. You will be rewarded with 1) questions on things you studied 2) you will be able to answer those questions.

This of course does not mean you blow off the other material. But it does mean you are going to want to adjust the level of detail you know the material down to. You have to get comfortable with the idea that you are not going to know every question. Not only that, you should embrace the fact that a question is so absurdly hard becuase it means they have freed up time for you to work on the “real” parts of the exam that are answerable. Meanwhile your fellow test-takers will be wrestling with those ridiculous questions for 10 minutes becuase they want to get every question right. Game over for them.