Cracking CA12
I'm picking up on two questions in this thread:
1. how to memorise the large quantity of material
2. how much effort should you put into recapping on CA11
1. It is certainly daunting when you look at the notes for the first time.

However, we've found from preparing forteaching tutorials that each chapter boils down to a side or a double side of A4. Remember it's the Core Reading that you need to be concentrating on. The ActEd material is useful to help with understanding and applying but you certainly don't need to rote learn our paragraphs! I would endorse the message from steven74 - after studying each chapter, produce your A4 page summary. The process of doing this is invaluable since we only remember about 10% of what we read but 70% of what we say or write.
Other things that will help with learning the material are:
- mnemonics (as mentioned by Lin) - make up your own or speak to students who have been on CA1 tutorials in the past - perhaps this forum is a good place for people to post any that they have come up with?
- practising questions by chapter - something to do during revision rather than now - doing questions by chapter forces repetition and you start realising that it's the same key ideas coming up from each chapter time and time again (the CA12 ASET has a cross ref grid by chapter, equally the revision notes, to be released later this session will have questions grouped by theme)
- doing the assignments - not everyone's cup of tea but we've certainly found that exam results tend to be better, on average, from those who've had a go. I realise this is partly due to self selection but why not be one of those self selecting students? Again, it's the "doing" rather than just being passive that makes the difference.
2. If you've sat Subject 301 in the past, you will have quite a lot of investment knowledge lying latent, which will come back when prompted. I certainly would not recommend a full study of the CA11 materials if you are just sitting CA12. The aim of the CA12 exam is not to do a detailed test of the CA11 materials. The aim is to sometimes link the two parts together. For example, you might be considering a particular set of liabilities and be asked to think about the types of assets that would be a good match, or the basic principles of setting an investment strategy. So, the key things are to recap on the SYSTEM T type features of each asset class and to revise the factors affecting investment strategy from Chapter 27. If you do get more time, I would look over the chapter summaries for each of the CA11 chapters, particularly the chapters that are new to CA11 - Chapters 12, 14, 26, and 32.