I'm so lost in the curriculum

[nikogeorgiev]

There are 93 days left until L1 exam and I am totally lost. I've just passed CFA Level 1 and that doesn't seem to help me at all. FRM seems to me to be chaotically written. I read and read and new concepts appear all the time and the problem is I don't even know if I am making any progress. God help me

 

[David Harper CFA FRM]

nikogeorgiev: in comparison to the CFA, I do happen to agree that the FRM curriculum can appear chaotic. In particular, some of the topics (T1 - T9) overlap with un-natural logic.

But IMO, the single largest factor in this regard is that multiple authors are employed in such a way that several concepts re-appear; e.g., probability of default (PD) manifests in more than two locations (previously, PD actually appeared under three authors!) under different terminology. This is a big difference from the CFA, which is far more coherent, and--especially for certain "organized" candidates--is a source of some frustration.

The sliver lining, also just in my opinion, is that the FRM is maybe less game-able and susceptible to mere study techniques. I do actually believe, somewhat based on prior customer feedback, that the test outcome is highly correlated to comprehension of fundamentals. Don't get me wrong, I still tend to agree with you and I still challenge GARP continuously to aspire to mirror/meet many of the CFA Institute's standards. But, I am suggesting that it's not all bad: at the steep price--and not to excuse GARP's absolute need to employ more rigor (e.g., definitional consistency) and coherence--of loss of cohesion, the benefit is that (i) world-class authors are employed against their specialties and (ii) the program rapidly updates with current knowledge.

 

[nikogeorgiev]

David, thank you very much for your email. You are doing a great job with bionicturtle.com by making this ordeal a little bit more bearable. For me the biggest problem of the curriculum is the lack of structured approach to the topics. CFA curriculum is also composed of topics written by different authors but the terminology is consistent from one topic to another and it has progressively increasing difficulty that makes it easier to understand, but all of this has been mentioned before. I do feel that I have good grasp of the fundamentals but once I begin solving problems It seems that I don't get it at all. All in all, FRM is a great challenge for all of us.

PS. Thanks for the wonderful website David. Keep up the good work