Magic quiz for deciding whether to study CFA exams

Is a CFA Charter really worth it? And are you really ready to give up years of your life to studying the increasingly difficult CFA® exams in your spare time? 

If you're deliberating about the answer, CFA Institute is here to help you. It's devised an interactive quiz to determine whether you're ready to embark on the charter. Known as the 'CFA Readiness Assessment', it's not new, but it's taken on new relevance in light of the plummeting exam pass rate. - Given that only 22% of candidates passed the level I exams in the July sitting, readiness to pursue the Charter is surely subject to an increasingly high hurdle.

CFA Institute says 113,000 people consulted its interactive oracle between January 2020 and the end of September 2021. Given that over 200,000 people took the exams during this period, comparatively few were presumably dissuaded. - But the readiness assessment sets a comparatively low bar. 

Among other things, the multiple choice assessment queries whether you know much about finance already, whether you think you might want to work in finance one day, whether you can bothered to study in your spare time, whether you want to do all three CFA exams or only one, and whether you think a career in finance is all about money or has a deeper ethical meaning. 

The optimal answers are all fairly clear. It may have been more meaningful for the Institute to help would-be candidates calculate the opportunity cost of hours spent studying in relation to the waning exam pass rate and the potential for gaining other (easier) qualifications that could be more relevant in the future.  

Photo by Julius Drost on Unsplash

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