How to split your CFA study hours across topics
Most study schedules are built one of two ways. Either they follow the curriculum in order, a fixed number of weeks per topic, or they follow the topic weights, giving the biggest topics the most time. Both leave something out.
Start from where the marks are
CFA Institute publishes a weight range for every topic at every level, and the ranges are not close to equal. At Level I, some topics are worth around three times as much as others. An hour spent on a topic worth 15% of the exam can move your score further than an hour on one worth 6%, simply because there are more marks there to win.
So exam weight is the right starting point. The syllabus pages list every topic with its published range.
Then move the hours to your gaps
Weight alone assumes you start every topic from the same place, and nobody does. A candidate who works in fixed income does not need the same hours on bond valuation as one who has never priced a bond. The hours that earn the most marks are in topics that are both heavily weighted and weak.
The way Charta's planner handles this is simple enough to do by hand:
- Give each topic a priority equal to its exam weight multiplied by how far you are from where you want to be in it.
- Share your available hours out in proportion to those priorities.
- Never let a topic fall below a floor. Even a topic you are confident in keeps some review time, because a strong topic you stop touching for three months is not a strong topic on exam day.
Hold some hours back
Before any of that, take a slice of your total hours off the top for full mock exams and final review. Mocks in the last weeks are where you learn to pace a whole paper and find the gaps the topic-by-topic work missed. Charta holds back 10% of the total for this; if you have very few weeks left, you may want more.
Be honest about the weekly hours
The input that most often breaks a plan is the number of hours a week. Plan on what you can keep up in an ordinary week, with work and everything else in it, not the number you hope for. A plan built on twenty hours a week that you actually study for twelve is not a plan; it is a list of things you will feel behind on.
Work yours out
The study-plan calculator does the arithmetic: your exam date, your weekly hours and where you are in each topic, turned into hours per topic. It uses the same planner as the app. The difference in the app is that a short diagnostic measures where you are instead of asking you, and the plan moves every time you practise.