“In addition, it was common on the early CFA examinations to give candidates choices (i.e., candidates were allowed to select the industry of their choice, the institution of their choice, or even which of two or three questions from a longer list they wanted to answer). For example, the 1965 Level III examination gave candidates the choice of answering either a bond or stock valuation question. That same examination gave candidates the choice of one of eight institutions (e.g., investment companies, endowment funds, pension funds, etc.) as the subject of a question and also asked candidates to answer a question in the industry of their choice.” Source: http://cfainstitute.org/cfaprog/overview/pdf/IntoOur5thDecade.pdf would tht have made the test easier??? ne comments Joey!!!
and then we are told that claiming the exams in previous years were easier than most recent years is a violation of the Code and Standards.
former trader Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > and then we are told that claiming the exams in > previous years were easier than most recent years > is a violation of the Code and Standards. what year did Joey get his charter… maybe he can throw some light on it…
a guy in my office was in the second CFA charter group (40 or 50 years ago?). he said the test was a joke and that they were desperate to pass people to get the number of people with charters up.
I would be shocked it Level 1 today didn’t engulf the entire 3 levels from 30 - 40 years ago, both in terms of volume and difficulty. It’s just the way things are as they evolve. I see things that my kid is doing in grade 2 that I wasn’t doing till I was in grade 4.
I believe there are copies of the first CFA exam floating around the internet. Someone posted one on this site last year. You could probably do a search to find the thread.
Just looked at that 60 year old CFA exam. It looks like duration hadn’t even been invented. This could make a few L3 candidates very angry.
can you guys post it - i hope this is not a violation of any policies? it would be fun to keep for the history!!
http://www.cfainstitute.org/aboutus/press/60thanniversary/pdf/firstcfaexam.pdf that is on the cfa site so I cant see why we cant.
People are bashing the CAIA, but man i’d take that thing in a heartbeat only for the joy of having ridiculous prestige once i’m 80 years old (hopefully, way sooner than that)! i wonder how the old geazers, first recipients of the CFA feel today! talk about being fortunate…
thats how the way things evolve ,like big babbu said earlier. Black-scholes-merton hadnt even met when the first exam was conducted. there were no ‘quants’ to speak of either. its silly to conclude that the exam is more difficult today based on the contents of the test 40 years ago.you wouldnt even be dreaming of a ‘career’ in finance in the 60s. the brightest went to physics or even journalism. you think they taught relativity in 1900 at Oxford?
Geez - I’m not that old. There is no question that CFA exams have added lots of material over the years. Take a guy who passed in 1965, time travel him forward and he would have no idea how to answer virtually all of the questions on the 2008 exam. There are a few other things going on: a) The people that took this exam prior to 1995 or so were almost all experienced finance professionals. There was a post on LI a couple of days ago “Why do bond prices go down when interest rates go up?” b) Study aids are vastly better now than they were even 10 years ago. Give someone better tools to learn something and they can probably learn more. c) The exams are curved then as now. As we just learned a couple of days ago, in 2003 the MPS was 202/360 for LII. You can mess up lots of that complicated material and pass this exam. d) Sometimes you can get something pretty easily by entering on the ground floor. If people got something valuable without much cost early on, they were demonstrating some serious aptitude as a finance professional. Maybe those same folks bought MSFT in 1982. And, yeah, I think they discussed something a lot like relativity at Oxford in 1900. Einstein didn’t just pull relativity from the ether ;-), but based it at least partly on the work of Lorentz and others. Lorentz had published about time dilation by 1900 and his work was really hot then. I’ll bet there were lots of scientists at Oxford discussing something that looked a lot like special relativity in 1900.
Can someone post the pdf with the first exam? The link doesn’t work anymore.
A thread from 08😆
It’s amazing we see this 2008 thread revived in 2021! I got my charter years ago and just noticed that they began to roll out CBT. Good luck everyone!