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Use the topic-weight ranges in the handbook for your own CAIA® exam year as a starting allocation, then adjust the hours for difficulty, retention and the type of answer you must practise. A range is not a promise that one topic will receive an exact share of your particular paper. The useful output is a reviewable schedule of study hours, practice and rechecks, rather than a list of percentages copied without a plan.
Begin with the correct exam year
CAIA Association says its curriculum changes annually and that an edition applies to the exam cycles in its calendar year. Its curriculum and study tools page directs candidates to the current Level II handbook and curriculum companion. Before you budget a single hour, confirm the year of the exam you intend to sit and open that year’s official material. Do not carry forward a table saved from a previous sitting simply because its topic names look familiar. CAIA also advises candidates that its official curriculum is the anchor for what can be examined, so use the weights to plan study time, not to replace the readings.
The candidate page says most successful candidates spend over 200 hours preparing for each level. This is an observation about preparation, not a required threshold and not a personal guarantee. Your available hours must come from your own calendar: the hours you can actually protect before the examination, after work, leave, travel and other commitments. Call that usable total H. If H is less than you first hoped, the planning question becomes which activities are essential and which calendar commitments can move. Treat an aspirational total that does not fit your week as a warning, not as a budget.
Transcribe the table without changing what it means
Create one row for every Level II topic in the handbook for your exam year. Copy the topic name, the published lower and upper weights, and any separate assessment columns exactly as the handbook presents them. Record the source year beside the table. If a section is assessed in a particular response format, preserve that distinction rather than merging it silently with a multiple-choice share. This step matters because time allocation is partly about knowledge coverage and partly about the work needed to express an answer under timed conditions.
A published interval communicates uncertainty about the precise mix on a sitting. Do not convert its upper endpoint into a promise, and do not assume every topic can simultaneously appear at its maximum. Likewise, a lower endpoint is a poor reason to skip a topic whose concepts support other readings. If your copied weights are expressed in separate columns, check what each column’s total represents before combining them. Adding percentages from different bases produces an attractive but meaningless number. An accurate worksheet should make it possible for another candidate to trace each cell to the handbook line from which it came.
If a handbook is not accessible when you make the worksheet, leave those weight cells blank and postpone any numerical allocation that depends on them. The CAIA curriculum overview can identify current topic areas, but topic names are not a substitute for the handbook’s weight table. An estimated percentage from an old notebook or a secondary summary can look precise while describing a different exam year. The appropriate interim work is to inventory the readings and measure your available time; finish the weighting when the official table can be checked.
Allocate hours in two passes
First reserve hours that belong to the whole exam rather than to a single topic: a diagnostic attempt, mixed recall, timed practice and final error review. Call the remaining topic-specific pool T. Reserving this time before topic allocation prevents a spreadsheet from spending the entire calendar on first readings. Second, choose a single planning point inside each official weight range. A midpoint is a transparent neutral starting point, but it is still your planning choice. Record why you chose another point if you do, such as a topic spanning especially difficult material for you.
Normalising by the sum of all chosen planning weights is important. Published ranges may describe different possibilities and may not add neatly when you take every midpoint. This formula makes your selected planning points share the actual topic pool without implying the exam body assigned those exact hours. Round the result to sessions that fit your calendar, then put any rounding remainder into mixed review. If the resulting hours are implausibly small for a topic’s reading load, the formula has exposed a planning tension that needs judgment. It has not instructed you to ignore part of the curriculum.
A worked plan from the 2027 Level II table
The CAIA Association’s 2027 Level II handbook, reached through its curriculum and study tools page, publishes separate multiple-choice and constructed-response columns. In the multiple-choice column, it gives Methods and Models a 7% to 13% range, Asset Allocation 10% to 16%, and Accessing Alternative Investments 3% to 9%. CAIA Ethical Principles and Emerging Topics each carry 0% in that column and 10% in the constructed-response column. The table totals 70% multiple-choice and 30% constructed response. Those are CAIA’s 2027 figures, not a prediction that a particular sitting will land on the midpoint of every range.
Here is an illustrative planning calculation based on the actual 2027 rows. Choose each multiple-choice range midpoint as an initial planning point: Institutional Asset Owners 8, Asset Allocation 13, Risk and Risk Management 8, Methods and Models 10, Accessing Alternative Investments 6, Due Diligence and Selecting Managers 9, Volatility and Complex Strategies 8, and Universal Investment Considerations 7. These chosen points sum to 69, slightly below the handbook’s 70% multiple-choice total because midpoints of intervals need not reproduce an exact exam mix. Add the two fixed constructed-response topic shares of 10 points each and a 10-point planning reserve for constructed responses across the remaining topics. The planning worksheet has 99 units, which you normalise before allocating hours. The extra 10-point reserve is your bookkeeping choice, not an additional CAIA topic weight.
Suppose your own calendar provides 220 usable hours. Reserving 22 for mixed timed practice leaves 198 topic hours. At two hours for each of the 99 planning units, the first pass gives Methods and Models 20 hours, Emerging Topics 20 hours, Asset Allocation 26 hours, and Accessing Alternative Investments 12 hours; 20 hours remain in the constructed-response reserve for written work across other topics. This schedule is entirely illustrative, and it is not a recommended minimum. If a diagnostic shows that your model comparisons are weak, move some Methods and Models time towards written explanations, then recheck. The published ranges set an initial scale for the plan, while your evidence of weak or secure knowledge changes the activity within it.
Adjust for weakness without destroying coverage
A weight-based plan should be revised with evidence from your own work. Mark each topic by the kind of failure you observe: forgotten definition, misapplied formula, weak comparison, slow response, or poor transfer to a new vignette. Each failure calls for a different repair. More reading may help missing understanding; retrieval practice may help recall; timed writing may help expression. Reallocate a limited number of sessions from topics that are secure, but preserve at least a maintenance review across the full curriculum. Repeatedly moving every hour towards the most uncomfortable topic creates a new coverage gap.
Set a review date for each adjustment. A single bad attempt can reflect an unfamiliar wording rather than a durable weakness, and a single good attempt may reflect recent exposure. Use more than one check over time, with fresh prompts you wrote yourself or official practice resources. Record the evidence that justified the change: what you could do, what you could not do, and whether the next check improved. This keeps the plan from becoming a reaction to mood. It also makes it possible to reverse an unhelpful transfer of hours without pretending the initial weight-based split was sacred.
Turn the allocation into a calendar
Convert topic hours into appointments, each with a deliverable. A session could end with a short explanation from memory, a worked calculation whose units you can defend, or a comparison table written without looking at the notes. Place mixed practice after several topics have been studied, because the exam task is to recognise which idea applies when the topic label is absent. Leave time for a final check of the official curriculum and any updated materials for your exam year. The planned hours are a way to protect attention; completion is demonstrated by an answer you can produce, not by the hours logged.
Review the timetable at a fixed cadence. Compare planned and completed sessions, but also ask whether the completed work changed your ability to answer. If work expands unexpectedly, update H and the topic pool rather than silently carrying missed sessions forward. If a topic takes longer than planned, identify whether the extra time is repairing a real weakness or repeating familiar material. The CAIA program page provides the qualification context, and Omni’s editorial methodology explains how its supporting sources are presented. The official handbook remains the source for the exam-year weights.
Common planning errors
- Treating the highest end of every range as if all could occur on the same paper.
- Using a prior-year topic table after CAIA has released a new curriculum for the intended exam year.
- Spending all available hours on initial reading and leaving no time for mixed or timed practice.
- Mistaking time spent for mastery when no fresh answer has been produced.
- Reallocating so aggressively towards one weak area that other examinable topics receive no maintenance.
The final worksheet should show the exam year, official source, topic rows, the planning point selected for each range, the total usable hours, the common-practice reserve, initial topic hours and the next review date. Its purpose is to make your choices visible and revisable. When the current handbook is available, fill the weight cells from that primary source and recompute the plan. Until then, retain the structure but make no claim that an unverified number is an official weight.
Sources
- Curriculum and Study Tools - CAIA Association · caia.org · Retrieved
- Candidates - CAIA Association · caia.org · Retrieved
- Explore the Curriculum - CAIA Association · caia.org · Retrieved
- 2027 CAIA Exam Handbook · nxtbook.com · Retrieved
