Why do people complain so much about the CFA? It's pretty easy

People on these forums act like the CFA is some kind of insane holy grail that takes stupid amounts of effort. You even see some idiots who studied 500+hrs for a single level and failed -- how is this possible?!? I passed Level 1 with 70-80 hours and Level 2 with 200 hours. 

Then when you actually tell people that you don't need to study insane hours they attack you in a pack. Dude, if you're studying for more than 200 hours tops for Level 1 and 300 hours for Level 2 and fail, you're probably not cut out for finance 

 

Cuz a lot of people who don't come from finance backgrounds are learning all of it for the very first time and just haven't had the knowledge application yet. Also, random thought, but I think the studying you do immediately leading up to the test is pretty important, so people who cram doing 80-100 hours around that time just have better recall since they went through the material more recently than the people who did 300 hours over 6 months. 

 
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I think you’re generally right that it’s not THAT hard, or honestly that useful outside of being a resume builder for certain roles like LO AM (although it did solidify some basic concepts for me which was useful). However, it does objectively take a ton of effort to pass all three levels while also in a full time demanding job (e.g. sell-side ER). For me, I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t have to retake any levels. To garauntee that, I overstudied a bit, but it was 100% worth it passing them on one try versus seeing what some colleagues had to go through retaking levels.
 

I’ll also add that I thought L3 was underrated…everyone said it was by far easiest, but I thought the writing portion was a bitch, especially because you can’t really grade your practice tests with certainty.   

 

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