Since the results are so opaque, it may not even mean anything. I’m sure if you got >70 you want to assume that your exam score was really high but how do you know? You don’t. You can get >70 in FRA and Equity with a 4/6, 4/6, 4/6, 5/6.
Another candidate could have gotten 6/6 on every vignette and maybe a 4/6 on one 5% weighted topic and absolutely crushed your overall score but they aren’t able to state “>70 in every topic” even though they outperformed you.
I would hope anyone who sees this on a resume/CV/linkedin immediately discards the application. Dbag city.
this is absolutely irrelevant comparison. if you are hiring a professional test-taker, yeah, maybe you want someone who sacrifices their job, life, etc to crash a multiple choice (lol) test on a first attempt. But there are much better analysts who dedicate more time to the actual valuable things and don’t have as much time to study how to answer multiple choice questions. so yeah, it is only the bragging rights, nothing relevant;
+70 doesn’t mean anything because you could’ve got all 70.01’s on every section, you’ll never actually know how high or low your score was. Same way someone with all 50-70’s could’ve gotten all 69.99’s. Sick dude, you did .02% better than the guy who got all 50-70’s.
It’s a pass fail test, the actual score is irrelevant.
While I’m not saying it means anything important (the score matrix) aside from P/F, you can’t assume that people who do well on the exam sacrificed so much-- it’s just not the case for everyone. I’ve heard of so many people giving up so much just to barely pass or fail while others give up almost nothing and have no issues passing (and some fail).
My opinion is that the CFA Institute actually know the exact score of every candidate. However, the Board of Governors mandated to release not exact scores but a 3-band “score”. They exchanged the quantitative score for a qualitative one. Perhaps to avoid misconduct / misrepresentation on candidates who would probably refer themselves as “better” professionals when getting a 95 score; maybe to give the Institute more space to make adjustments to the exam (ambiguous questions) without generating problems; or perhaps just to communicate everyone that the important thing is to pass the exam because it represents you are good enough to move to the next stage. I see the <50, 50-70 and 70> bands as a feedback from the Institute to guide you where are your strengths and weaknesses.