Dunno who’s aware of this but it’s the same story as last year (I saw this in the level 2 forum lastyear). When you do your free CFAI sample exam and eventually get to the screen where they show you the answer pdf you can change the URL in the address bar of you browser to access the other exams answersheets ie change it from http//(blah blah blah) v1 (blah blah blah) to http//(blah blah blah) v2 (blah blah blah) to see the answers to the other exams. Should I have pointed that out? Is that an ethics violation? One thing’s for sure, it’s pretty hypocritical to force us to learn by rote such ethical standards as “strive to maintain the competence of other investment professionals” and then not allow us to hit printscreen on a fvcking exam so we can go over the questions we paid for in an attempt to learn from our mistakes.
What I’d be interested in knowing is – other than CFAI asserting it’s a violation on the first screen of the test site – what exact provision of the Code & Standards would be violated by doing a screen capture? If you’re using it for your own study purposes, not distributing it, etc., I would have to believe it would be considered fair use even under either traditional copyright law or under the digital copyright act. Any intellectual property lawyers out there?
if you first sign that you will not do it, you are violating a signed contract = violating of knowledge of the law, and misconduct
nothing, doesn’t matter
Hala – That’s probably true, but I’m asking the broader question of what independent violation there would be. Also, if I were to be hyper-technical about it, I seem to recall that what the site actually says is that the user acknowledges that such actions would be a violation of the Code & Standards; not that the user agrees not to print scrn, etc. (I could be wrong about this.) That would imply that there is some independent basis under which such an action would be a violation. The only thing I can think of is general copyright law. Anyway, no matter how you slice it, it’s annoying to shell out $60 (okay, not for the free one) for a few questions and not be able to print out a reference copy for studying later…which, as you can probably tell, is something I really don’t feel much doing at the moment…