Enough to cover every Learning Outcome in the curriculum, plus extra practice on the ones you keep missing. A bank of about 1,800 CFA Level I questions that covers every Learning Outcome, used with a good feedback loop, gives you full coverage in less than half the answering time of a 4,000-question bank.

I took all three CFA levels while working full time as an actuary. At Level I, the biggest time sink I saw other candidates fall into was treating the number of questions as the goal. They bought the biggest bank they could find and tried to finish it. But the exam doesn't grade how many questions you did. It grades whether you can apply each Learning Outcome under time pressure, so I'd spend the time on the ones you keep missing, not on a question you've already gotten right three times.

I run FreeFellow, so I have an interest here, but the math works the same whichever platform you use.

Why a bigger bank isn't better

Big commercial question banks advertise 4,000 or 5,000 questions or more. The CFA Institute Learning Ecosystem that comes with your registration adds thousands of end-of-reading and topic questions on top of that. It's easy to assume more is better.

There are two problems with that. First, past a certain point the questions repeat. A 4,000-question bank doesn't test 4,000 different ideas. The Level I curriculum has a limited number of testable Learning Outcomes, and a big bank covers each one many times over. Once you've answered eight questions on money-weighted versus time-weighted return and gotten them right, move on to something you're still missing before you do a ninth.

Second, volume with no prioritizing spreads your effort evenly. If the bank serves questions in curriculum order or at random, you spend as much time on your strong topics as on your weak ones, when the hours you have left should go to the Learning Outcomes you're missing.

Grinding through a huge bank feels productive, but it eats time you'd be better off spending on your weak spots.

Coverage and the feedback loop

A question bank has full coverage when every Learning Outcome is represented at each difficulty level. That's set by the curriculum, not by the size of the bank.

FreeFellow's CFA Level I bank has about 1,800 questions across all 10 topic areas, built to cover every Learning Outcome. Every question has a step-by-step solution, and most also have notes on why each wrong choice is wrong. That matters more than the count, because a question you got wrong only teaches you something if the explanation tells you what you missed and why the wrong answer looked right.

The Learning Ecosystem is worth using alongside any bank. Its end-of-reading questions come from the same organization that writes the exam, so they match the style closely, and you should do all of them.

When you miss a question, knowing the topic isn't enough. "You got a fixed income question wrong" doesn't tell you what to fix. What helps is the specific misunderstanding behind it: you discounted at the wrong rate, mixed up clean and dirty price, or used current yield where the question wanted yield to maturity. That's the thing to fix, because the same misunderstanding can sit behind other questions too, not just the one you missed. On FreeFellow, Common traps (part of Fellow Plus) does this. It matches your wrong answers to the misunderstanding each wrong choice was written around and shows you the ones you keep falling for.

The math, and a plan

Say you spend 90 seconds answering each question, which is the Level I exam pace (180 questions in 4.5 hours), plus a minute reviewing it. The review minute is my assumption. At 150 seconds a question, a 4,000-question bank is about 167 hours of question work before you've read any curriculum.

Now the focused version. Work through a bank that covers every Learning Outcome, drop the topics you keep getting right, and spend the time you save on your weak spots. At the same pace, 1,800 questions is 75 hours, and a second pass of 150 to 600 questions on your weak topics brings it to roughly 80 to 100 hours. Those are time budgets under my assumptions. They don't tell you how much you'll remember or how you'll score.

Here's how I'd lay out Level I:

  • Months 1 to 3: read the curriculum, do the end-of-reading questions in the Learning Ecosystem, and do 20 to 30 questions per topic as you finish each one.
  • Months 3 to 5: practice heavily, and let your results decide what you practice. Work your weakest topics each session, not the ones you like, and review every miss down to the misunderstanding, not just the topic.
  • Last 4 to 6 weeks: take a full timed mock each week, review every wrong answer, and read your readiness score alongside your mock scores when you decide whether you've done enough.

FreeFellow is a CFA Institute Prep Provider, independent of CFA Institute, and does not promise a passing score. You can start with the free CFA Level I practice questions: the full bank of about 1,800 questions with step-by-step solutions, free with an account.