So I have a question, we all want to discuss with our peers their thoughts on the exam - question specific thoughts. It appears to me, that in our instructions, we are told we cannot disclose to others, take any part of the test out of the room, etc, but I have never heard anywhere that it is an ethical violation for us to talk about the test among ourselves - even specifics.
Now obviously analyst forum is a public forums and talking about it would be disclosure. But what if we did a skype chat (or some other type of text collaboration) that only lasts for the duration of our discussion and we had some kind of gatekeeping process to determine that the participant is truly a person who took the test the other day, maybe by asking some specific content question or something.
Would that be an ethics violation? My premise is that it is not a violation because we are discussing it only among people that have seen it and it is not documented in any way nor disclosed to the public. Much in the same way two friends who are candidates at the same level sitting over lunch during the exam process discussing an am question of difficulty is not an ethics violation as far as I know.
I still think it would be a violation because it dosent say that we should not discuss it with our peers, it says that We should not discuss the exam material. Period, so i guess thats no discussing it at all.
CFAI doesn’t want you to discuss any part of the exam with another candidate. I think this is one of their examples, even saying “I was surprised the test had nothing about immunization” would be a violation.
Now, whether that will get you kicked out of the program is a different story. I think not, given that it’s a minor violation. If I remember correctly, the guys who got kicked out of the program sometime in 2009 put together a website/spreadsheet that had every single question on the L2 exam, including what the final answer was, and you had the ability to see the likelihood that you passed based on the responses you put down. Clearly, that’s quite different from saying that you prepared for XYZ topic but it wasn’t on the exam.
In general, I think there is value to discussing the PM part of the exam because we’ll never get those answers. There were ethics questions I remember clearly that I would love to have someone tell me the right answer to, because I can’t find the answer anywhere in the curriculum and CFAI will never post the correct answers for these. But it’s better safe than sorry.
Also, at this point, even if someone told me all the right answers to questions, I wouldn’t be able to remember what I put down.
I’d like to point out that although this is addressed in the Ethics section, it isn’t an ethical violation. Not discussing the exam is just a CFA rule, like those regarding referring to the designation. In the eyes of the organization, the CFA testing benefits outweigh our ethical obligations to improve my financial competancy (by learning the concepts in questions we may have gotten wrong), so this isn’t a well-defined rule. It may be a somewhat convenient rule to have, but it is somewhat contradictory to our ethical obligations.
Well that is my premise, do not allow the 2013 candidates who have not seen the exam this year to participate in the discussion. We would do it privately and not document anything so that once its over its over, no material for others to gain insight from…
True for PM, but AM I think this is hardly an issue since CFAI makes the AM exam public anyway. Granted, it’s released LATER on, but, I mean, the majority of test takers don’t take the AM tests before the release date anyway.
I think otheriwse they should post the right answers. How would I know that my assumption during the exam was right or wrong? May be I was wrong but then not told otherwise, I may use the same approach again or would not be able to correct myself next time if at all be. May be CFAI wants us to have a way like: CLOSE YOUR EYES YOU WIL REALIZE YOUR OWN WRONG ANS…argh…
They publish the AM questions anyway, so I see no reason whatsoever why we shouldn’t discuss it.
I guess CFAI wants to recycle the PM questions. So I guess by talking about their questions it seems like piracy. But we’ve paid to sit the exam so I don’t see the ethical violation here either.
They publish the AM questions anyway, so I see no reason whatsoever why we shouldn’t discuss it. It’ll be like us pretending that publicly-released information hasn’t been published.
I guess CFAI wants to recycle the PM questions. So I guess by talking about their questions it seems like piracy. But we’ve paid to sit the exam so I don’t see the ethical violation here either.
Hank, who is Level III candidate, has signed the candidate pledge of the CFAI exam. In preparing for the exam, Hank has followed LOS and command words written by CFAI. In this respect, Hank has a two way agreement with CFAI: CFAI is responsible for compiling exam questions in accordance with LOS, while Hank has pledged not to reveal exam details to anyone.
In the exam, Hank notices a question which calls for calculation. After the exam, Hank checks the corresponding LOS and notices that the command word is ‘explain’ which does not require the ability to perform calculations.
If Hank discusses the exam content after the exam, he would not be in violation of Code and Standards:
(a) if he limits discussion to the above mentioned question only since the question is not technically an exam question.
(b) since the agreement was broken first by CFAI in misrepresenting the LOS.
It’s funny how CFAI says transparency and fairness is the key to market quality and adequate disclosure is integral to financial community but they couldn’t practice what they preach. Not disclosing past exams is one thing, but no exact score for candidates is a joke.
There are a hundred thousand charterholders plus a lot of candidades, plus a lot of candidates, and it’s hard to think that any decent amount of them would agree with those very unusual rules.
This secrecy benefits CFAI only.
It would be good to us and more fair to know how many questions they made wrong. The mock had that covered call question - maybe we could find a few in the actual exam with both the actual question and the books in front of us.
I don’t think “gaming” of the 2013 exam should be a possibility. CFAI should make each exam based on the LOS, not on what they asked last year.
It’s nice for them to reuse questions and sell some of them as sample exams, but I don’t think it is really that incredibly hard to build 60 decent questions. In my country, you need to take tests to get a public job in many cases. Some of those are pretty hard and successfull candidates study a couple thousand hours for them. The providers charge a hundred bucks or less for those tests, with tens of thousands of candidates just like CFAI, and they are able to generate new questions, publish them all after the test, and allow the candidates to pledge changes to the answers of any questions that may have the wrong answer. And here we consider our country’s ability to run standardized tests to be just awful.
I wouldn’t even want to discuss the exam before the grades, but the principle of this prohibition seems really off.
I think there was a Schweser level 2 question where a candidate got home from exam and told his mother - “mom, they screw me up by testing derivatives minutia” and that was a violation. Really??? The Ethics Standards still allow a couple of ways to screw the customers really well but I can’t tell mommy about my day? Oh well…
