The Board of Governors instituted a policy to place particular emphasis on ethics. Starting with the 1996 exams, the performance on the ethics section became a factor in the pass/fail decision for candidates whose total scores bordered the minimum passing score. The ethics adjustment can have a positive or negative impact on these candidates’ final results.
CFA Institute has a policy of not releasing either the minimum passing score or individual candidate scores. Consequently, CFA Institute does not release specific information about the ethics adjustment or the candidates who were affected. The adjustment has had a net positive effect on candidate scores (and thus pass rates) in most exam sessions. The published pass rates always take into account the ethics adjustment for borderline candidates.
CFA exams are “compensatory” : You do not need to achieve a minimum score in any topic area. The pass/fail result is based solely on the total points you score on the exam compared with the minimum passing score (MPS) established by the CFA Institute Board of Governors for each exam. The only exception to this rule is an “Ethics adjustment” that may affect candidates with scores in a narrow range around the MPS. Scores in this range may be adjusted up or down on the basis of the candidate’s performance on the Ethics section of the exam.
This is absolutely correct. Some guys have published results here, some of them had had ethics <50 and yet they’ve passed. This ethics adjustment is very unclear, at least for me.
I passed L3 with <50% in ethics, which was a big surprise to me, becuase I’d gotten >70% on L1 and L2 and the material was pretty much identical. I’d also done well in ethics on practice exams. Not sure how they fooled me so many of the questions, but I’m glad it didn’t force me out of the running. So as long as you are not too close to the cutoff score, you can do poorly in ethics and still pass.
I remember we were “discussing” some of those questions on the L3 board in 2008 and getting different answers than you. I thought I was done. I didn’t think I would pass getting so many different answers than the almighty Bchad.
Ha ha. Well, maybe there were subtle differences in Ethics that year that I just didn’t pick up on. Normally I scored pretty well on most ethics questions, and it is true that after doing well on it in L1 and L2 and noticing that the material had not changed at all between L1 and L2, maybe I didn’t give ethics enough careful attention L3 and paid for it. I do remember it being a big surprise when I saw the results, as well as a relief that it ultimately didn’t make a difference.