Nothing will happen. You won’t get a refund, so you lose the money you already paid. I would recommend sitting for the exam anyway… at the worst, you know you’re going to fail so it’s great practice… at best, you get lucky and pass.
^ yep I’d second this…turn up and sit the exam anyway - if you don’t even turn up you can never pass, if you do turn up you may just fluke it massively and pass…and if you fail, I guarantee the experience of having sat it before will stand you in great stead the second time. What better incentive can you have to show up knowing that you will see 120 offical CFA L1 questions first hand to help you plan your prep for your second go around.
Why not just go anyway? You only need to answer about 70% of the questions correctly. Assuming you can get 50% right, that’s barely more than random chance. I know a couple of people who showed up after wasting their preparation time, and were shocked to find that they passed anyway.
So that next time you can truly visualize your entire routine/day from waking up to your lunch break to crushing your exam and starting your car to drive back home…No surprises and an easy pass.
By showing up and failing you also help lower the pass rate, which might deter people from taking the test in the future, increasing the value of your charter if you eventually get it. No-shows are not counted in the pass/fail calculation. On the flipside, you’ll help lower the MPS and some jackass who otherwise would have failed will pass because you showed up unprepared. On the flipside of the flipside, if he only passed because you lowered the MPS, there’s no way he’s passing L2 and will probably try 2 or 3 times, generating nice revenue for CFAI.
Kidding aside, I actually see no benefit to showing up other than the outside chance that you might pass. It’s a straight-forward multiple choice test, so do you really need practice?