Pass rate has decreased dramatically. Seriously talk to a few charterholders that passed in the 90s or 80s, I’m shocked at poor their grasp of finance is. It was a completely different game back then. You have a few that are genius level smart, the Howard Marks of the world, but most couldn’t pass Level II or III now if their lives depended on it.
I think you might be downplaying the difficulty of old exams.
Those guys you mention studied for the exam 20 or 30 years ago. Unless you keep studying/working with the stuff, it’s pretty safe to say that you won’t be able to pass L2 or L3 if you take the same exam 30 years from now, unless you study for it. Most people would probably fail L2 or L3 if they took it a year after passing it.
Also, even today you can pass any CFA level with a pretty big knowledge gap. If you’re really strong at everything else, you can probably pass without Alternative Investments or even Derivatives. It’s possible for someone to have zero knowledge about options and look like a fool on a conversation, and still pass the exams.
Even if the exam was truly a joke, CFAI shouldn’t correct a mistake with another one (making the exams easier).
On topic, ideally I would be in favor of having tests year round, but making them really tough (cutoff at 85% or so) to avoid the “spam” issue. Although, to be fair, people “spam” already - just once a year and not so much on purpose (candidates try hard, but I’m sure we would try harder if we have only a single shot at each exam). The tests should be tougher, but less ambiguous - candidates should flunk because they don’t get the content - never because they get confused by the way CFAI asks things.
I’m also in favor (at least in theory) of having exams to keep the charterholder status, so we would always know that any charterholder has a pretty decent grasp of the curriculum - of course that’s not happening. Nowadays the charter serves to inform that a charterholder had some amount of knowledge at a specific date.
Crazyman your name is apropos. Of course someone who just took level III would want to seal up the gates. An 85% to pass would assure less than 5% of people pass level II which would be great for you since you’re practically there already. However talk to some of these pension consultants with their CFAs from the 1990s. You’ll see they don’t have any concept of pension accounting, or swaps. They’re a large reason why so many pension are under water. The new crop of CFAs will fare much better.
Let’s all just pass the damn thing and move on.
I don’t know what apropos is (non native speaker), but I feel you’re not complementing me.
If you check again you’ll see that I’m in favor of regular tests for all charterholders. If that would happen, I would have to take those tests as well. The idea of locking myself up to restudy stuff isn’t really that pleasant, but I think it is important to evaluate our motives here.
If you want the exams to be held twice a year or more because it is beneficial to the profession, that’s good. I’m also in favor of that. I actually think people should be able to take all 3 exams at once, if they think they can. If you know the content you know the content - no point in waiting around for the sake of it.
But if you want the exams to be held twice a year because it will be convenient for you and you really don’t give a damn about everyone else or the profession than there’s no point in that. You actually should not even do the petition since you’ll likely be a charterholder once they apply any of the changes.
(personally, I don’t think a petition will matter that much - CFAI already knows what’s going on in these forums, and they gotta know almost every single candidate would like to be able to go through the exams or retake them faster)
You may be right, but I don’t really think lax CFA standards from the 90s are a reason why so many pensions are under water.
For starters, if you want to matter in finance, you gotta learn more stuff after the CFA. People who work in pensions and don’t know how pensions work are a problem that goes way beyond the CFA. The swaps may fare in the example I gave before - you can clear all 3 levels without learning swaps, and you can forget about swaps in 20 years if you don’t ever study or use them again.
The charterholders I know personally are mainly from the early 2000s, and they seem pretty knowledgeable (maybe I’m just dumb - it’s all relative). But, if they’re smart about investments, it’s not because the CFA was so great back then - it is because they probably worked hard to know a lot of stuff, from the curriculum and other sources as well. Someone who sucks at Finance may simply have forgotten the CFA stuff and stopped learning.
I’m not actually disagreeing with you - I just think it’s not that black and white. Personally, I get a little annoyed when older charterholders tell me L3 is a piece of cake, since in the experience of many L3ers it is the hardest level, and apparently that wasn’t true a few years ago.
Maybe the exams were way easier back then, but then again the exams may be way harder 10 or 15 years from now. Would you like to have an asterisk besides your name because you got your “easy” charter in 2013?