Hi team, hope the prep is going well for everyone!
Can anyone shed light on taking your phone to the exam? I need it to uber/lyft to the venue & then to meet up with friends afterwards, followed by another uber/lyft home. Am I 100% not allowed to bring it, even if it’s switched off & not kept on my person? Would love to hear from someone who’s alread taken a CFA test.
I’ve seen people just turn off their phone and leave it in their pocket or in their bag. Apparently, they don’t search you. Just dont’ take it out during the exam for obvious reasons.
In London, they have a box that people put them in at the beginning of the exam when everyone has sat down… Just means that you dont have to leave them unattended in ur jacket pocket…
**** - I fretted about this at my last exam experience, and then as I was pondering the possibilities as I turned it off and stuffed it into my pocked, it dawned on me: being nabbed by a proctor for having the thing inside the testing hall was grounds for an ethics violation.
Given that many of us find the writing and the expectations of the CFAI regarding ethics to be a royal pain in the you-know-what-I-want-to-say - empirically supported by our results on topic tests and exams - I stuffed it in planter outside the hall.
I decided to accept the present value of loss-given-someone-steals-my-phone, to be materially lower that the present value of loss-given-an-ethics-violation. I guess it felt something like the opportunity cost of being ethics-violation-free. Now you have to understand that there are factors affecting the PV of loss, which include the fact that I stuffed it in that planter, standing in the midst of about 500 people waiting to enter the hall. Or perhaps it was being an option writer; and by sticking the phone there, then, in front of all those people - seemed to affect the perceived value like that of volatility…
So, as a risk-adverse person, I stuffed the cell phone in the planter outside the hall, under something toward the bottom, and walked bravely into the Hall of Our Futures, only to bomb the exam.
DC states they have “detectors” to sniff them out during the instruction reading. I always leave mine in my bag – I figure no test taker would risk getting booted out of the program for steaing a 2-year old iPhone. The local security people, on the other hand…
By ‘detectors’, they esentially mean proctor eyes… I learnt that back in uni.
There wasn’t much info before I went on where we could leave bags etc… I ended up leaving it in my bag in the storage room. They had a tub for phones, but putting my generic iPhone with no case in a tub for of other iPhones seemed like a pain in the arse when trying to retrieve it.
You can all chill out, my phone wasn’t stolen. Just 5-6 months of my social life.