Why is it a violation? motivation, specific, because, against, natural

hariRaj

I have been observing (and criticizing) people discussing specific exam questions because that violates the SPC. Does anyone know what CFAI’s motivation is behind the rule? I don’t know of a similar rule made by any institution that administers exams. It goes against people’s natural instincts (clearly) and I don’t see what harm it does if specific questions are “leaked” AFTER the exam is over.

LorrinCFA

I’m not trying to bash you.  They are clearly trying to keep questions from leaking out into the general public and avoid a compendium of “here are the questions that were asked on the CFA exam for the last 10 years, so you can memorize the process for answering each one.”  So I was trying to figure out if you genuinely couldn’t understand their interest in that, or if you were just trying to get them to change their minds about it.
Perhaps you underestimate the difficulty of creating good test questions, which is easy to do if you’ve never tried to design an examination.  It’s a lot more difficult than it looks.  It’s got to capture the concept, be doable in a reasonable amount of time, tricky enough that some proportion of awake candidates will fail it, and you have to have “wrong answers” that a candidate might reasonably get to.  By the time you put on all these constraints, it’s actually quite difficult to do.  Throw in the logistics of creating a globally distributed exam all given on the same day, and you need to have a lot of control over that process.
You might notice that the test providers often have questions that are harder to understand and figure out what they want.  With CFAI questions, you may not know or remember how to get the answer, but you do know pretty clearly what they are asking you to do.  With study provider folk, not nearly as often.  That’s the difference that being careful about this stuff makes.  And with 10’s of 1000s of people taking the exam, the stakes on clear quesitons that are challenging and measure what is being studied are high.

soverby

Are you genuinely trying to understand why they do this, or are you just trying to develop an argument to get them to change their minds?  Good luck on the latter.

jbaldyga

I actually prefer that questions are held in such high regard and kept private. If the questions were public it would make it a lot easier to gain the charter because there would be lots of third party vendors slinging “Crack the CFA”, “CFA Premier Power Test” “ETC” books.

dirk01

The exams are basically the only intellectual property that the CFAI actual owns.  Why would you think that they wouldn’t want to protect that?

cityboy

Covering the central portion of the curriculum is possible without repeating questions. Every other testing body manages to do it. No curriculum changes that much year to year. So why can’t CFAI?
For example, for L3, they can set an example to change stock portfolio beta one year, bond portfolio duration the next year, shift one to the other in year 3, synthetic cash in year 4 and so on. All test similar (and core) concepts but knowing previous year’s questions would not help you answer this year’s unless you know the subject.
Maybe you are making a subtle point that’s going whoosh over my head.
EDIT: And what’s so special about L3 AM exams that they can be released, but not the MCQs (L1, L2, L3 PM)?
EDIT of edit: Ha, I know, CFAI has a set pattern for all MCQs (AABCCCCABCCBBBBAA…) and they would be screwed if we figured that out :-))

OmarAdnan

There are sections of the curriculum that are more central/important than others.  Those don’t change so much because the skills required of analysts and portfolio managers don’t change dramatically from year to year.  You need to design an exam that is about 70-80% stuff that is central to the discipline at all times (or which changes rarely), and then maybe 20-30% stuff that is more topical (things like accounting shennanigans, or corporate governance, or ESG criteria, etc.).  So yeah, there are only so many styles of questions.
One year, someone took the exam and posted a spreadsheet of all the questions and answers for the exam.  Just think how useful that would be if questions were reused.  CFAI came and shut that guy down pretty quick.  He apparently had left a followable trail.

Unforseen

I find it hard to believe that with a vast curriculum (~2500 pages for each year), it’s tough to come up with different questions.
Reusing questions would also not work because of retakers - even if they don’t remember all previous questions, they would remember a few and might find those easier to tackle than freshcomers would. And that would be unfair to first-time exam takers.
(::begin snark:: this year’s L3 AM exam certainly did not reuse any questions, it hardly even used the curriculum! ::end snark:

ba736

My suspicion is that it is very challenging to create good questions that test the material, are clearly worded, and have distinct correct answers.  If you haven’t tried to design fair tests, it’s easy to underestimate how much work it is to do, and how easily questions can go the wrong way, particularly if you have to print and distribute tests worldwide every few months (as with L1).  Therefore, I suspect the CFAI reuses questions a fair amount and they want to avoid people reading the wording and and saying “oh, it’s the question with the Treynor model, the answer is ‘correlation’.”
With L3, the AM section is harder to defend, but maybe they just make it a blanket policy.

KungFuPanda

Especially when the exam will be public for all to see in a few months.