just confirming that the Australia exams for at least the last few years have been held on Sundays. The upcoming exam will be on Sunday June 3 (the change kicks in from December). I think you guys are right in terms of the reason for the change being to stop cheating in this region. I can’t think of any other reason to make the switch.
Can anyone confirm if the religious exemption is still valid to take the exam on Sunday? I assume the CFAI wouldn’t just screw over millions of potential applicants by not allowing an exemption.
well considering there are only like around 200k candidates worldwide, i highly doubt there are millions of people being screwed over here
Wouldn’t impact millions for one specific exam, but in perpetuity it would.
> Cheating being the reason I don’t think that it’s possible. Consider a timezone ARB between US EST. and IST* (last in asian region). This is a 10.5 hour time difference. Any more time diff makes the cheating possibility further remote. US takes test on Saturday 9:00 a.m. Test completes at ~5:00p.m. (US EST) Immediately a guy in US EST calls his IST ‘friend’. This is at approximately 3.30 a.m. IST on the test day Sunday morning. Candidate will need to reach center by 8.00 a.m. so he needs to leave home by 7:00a.m. Assuming he/she doesn’t sleep; he then has 3 - 4 hours to get the download and work on it. Are these 3-4 odd hours in the wee hours of the morning enough to give the test taker in that region an ‘edge’ on a curriculum that generally takes a few months to cover! To have an edge I) The US EST friend would have had to remember ‘enough’ from the exam 2) CFAI would have had to ask those same (type) of question in the IST question set 3) CFAI would have to kept the numbers in numeric questions to be same (a slight twist in numbers could change the answer but the question ‘looks’ the same) 4) The alternative answers a to c are worded same in US and Asia question sets. I am not saying that this is impossible; this could be happening. But multiple things need to coincide in order to get an edge and therefore cheating to materially alter examination outcomes. However, having said all this, may be the Delhi Medical exam scam might have nudged CFAI to take this decision. — *IST - India Standard Time.
CFA_Bombay raises a great point: Even if you receive detailed information about the content of the exam 10 or 11 hours before the beginning of your exam, it will do you little good since most candidates will spend virtually all of that time sleeping and traveling to the exam site. On the other hand, once religious alternate dates are thrown in to the mix, it opens up the possibility of getting information about the exam a full day or more ahead of your test time.
I really wonder what the incentive is for someone who just took the exam to go and spill the beans to someone else in another time zone. It takes months and months to prepare for this thing, and now you’re going to go help another person pass more easily while waiting for your score. Perhaps you can pay a friend in another time zone to take the exam and divulge the questions for Level 1, figuring that they’re not going to go on to L2 and L3, but why would someone taking L3 want to make it easier for their some other guy to pass, when it’s taken at least a few years of their life to get to this point? Money? Maybe, but it better be a LOT of money. And remember, for a lot of people, even to get to the point where you know the material enough to report what is needed to solve it requires an enormous amount of study. So perhaps the time zone issue is a bit of a problem at L1, but I find it difficult to believe that people studying so much for L1, L2 and L3 are going to want to make it easier for other people to pass the exam without doing similar amounts of work. It’s got to cost a LOT of money to get people to throw away all that effort, and people with that much money probably have other attractive options for their lives anyway.
Haha!
I think there are some flaws in the “cheating methods” you discredited Mainly, I don’t believe the point is to memorize the answer (A B C) to a particular problem. Realistically, the cheating here would be passing information such as “know the Black Litterman model thoroughly, as you’ll need to calculate X and Y” or “know the Z accounting ratio because it shows up 4 times in the test” (yes one stupid ratio did appear 4 times in the L2 exam one year) or “there were no options tested AT ALL, don’t review it” So, it’s not “answer to question 77 is B”, but it still allows the second person to really focus in and lock in what’s on the test. L2 is only 120 questions, and say the tipster only lets you lock in 12 questions, well that’s 10% of the exam right there. Which is pretty impactful, even if you would have got half of that 12, gaining a 5% edge on the exam is powerful stuff. And that’s only assuming the guy gave you 12, which is probably on the low end. So I still think the cheating aspect is very much a real possibility and is viable.
I am an observant Jew and took the L1 Sunday exam. I don’t know anyone who used the sunday test to cheat, but I guess that risk always exists. I just spoke to CFAI on the phone, and the gentleman assured me 100% that they will still offer the religious alternate date, and are just changing the testing in some Asian cities. So the decision might have been based on cheating, but not by observant Jews.
Yeah, in my bigoted “I’ve lived in Asia for five years” opinion, I can’t see what they were thinking holding the exam in Asia 1 day later than the rest of the world. Cheating isn’t even considered cheating here, it’s just considered being smart. If you check out any of the Chinese versions of this site you’ll see that they are filled with illegal schweser material and other stuff blatantly in violation of the code. I even had people calling me from India on the day of the exam (I took the exam in the United States) most likely for this reason. I didn’t answer my phone because I didn’t want to get put in this situation. I have a really hard time believing that at levels 2 and 3 you don’t get a huge benefit from people telling you about the vignettes or essay topics a day in advance. This could mean easily another 10-15 points which is huge. At level 1 it wouldn’t matter that much. If someone had told me, don’t study GIPS last year worry about XYZ I might have passed. Simple as that. 1 sentence could have been a game changer.
CFA Bombay, If someone calls you in Bombay on Saturday morning during the lunch break after they have taken the morning section of level 3 it would be incredibly useful.
Yeah, I was much less blatant before, but I will go ahead and say now that ASIAN PEOPLE CHEAT. This is the single most credible reason for the CFA exam day change. It doesn’t even matter if the cheating is not a “game changer”. If you get 10 more questions correct due to cheating, it’s still cheating. If you get 1 more question correct, it’s still cheating.
Remember Raj Rajaratnanaramamalamaaamamadingdong and Rajat Gupta? This is just what you do for your friends in this part of the world. You help each other out.
It’s simple. People in some cultures just don’t think cheating is a big deal. Cheating to help your friend is like holding a door open for them. You don’t think about it - it’s normal.
Did the CFAI offer religious date modifications to observant Christians in Asia / Oceanic regions when the exams were on Sunday there? (Doesn’t matter to me at all as a Canadian, just curious). Were they allowed to write 1 day early (i.e. on Saturday)?
Well, I think that’s taking it too far. It seems to me that people that grew up in countries with strong functioning democracies behave more ethically that those that grew up in, say, communist dictatorships. If you grew up in China or Russia, you’re likely to have learned that playing by the rules is for suckers, and that the only way to get ahead is to cheat. I’ve generally found asian people from, say, Singapore or Japan to be quite ethical. Conversely, I’ve met blonde aryans that grew up in eastern Europe that were shockingly shady.
Ok, obviously, not all Asian people cheat. However, it is completely true that people in Asian countries, especially China-ish places or India, are much more likely to cheat than people in western countries. I don’t even know what your post is saying. You say I’m going “too far”, and then admit that you think that people in certain countries are likely to cheat. You can rearrange the words in your sentence to include “democratized upbringings” and such, but why twist the statement? Simple fact: who cheats? China India. So, who should take the test first? China India.
I don’t want to get drawn into a flame war, but I agree with: Make China and India take the exam first.
It’s not just the CFAI that has recognized this, MOVIE COMPANIES are now releasing Hollywood movies FIRST in countries like India, China, and Russia before they are released in the USA because everything gets pirated on bootlegged DVDs in these countries. It is the only way they can get people to show up to the cinema - if the movie isn’t already available at their corner bootleg dvd store.