How Your Work and Education Background Correlates to Your CFA Exam Performance

Another explanation could be:

1) The CFA exam has nothing to do with real world work experience or education. That is in order to pass the CFA exam, you need to enter the “CFA make-believe” world where real life experience does not apply.

and

2) Those who have real world work, where the average entry level job requires 60+ hours of work, have less time to study.

I always advise CFA candidates to be prepared to memorize laundry lists of things that have nothing to do with what you learned on the job. Also I suggest to be prepared to modify your education to fit the CFA view of the world. That is the key to passing.

This is super interesting. Work experience clearly helps a lot, and in my case it’s in 2 ways:

1. There are areas where the topics are really, really clear for me because I face these every day in my role;

2. Peer pressure. Since quite a few colleagues are charterholders, and also current candidates, I have an extra bit of determination to make sure I pass (hopefully!)

Hi @LeoSchmidtCFA, welcome to the group!

On your comments, I’m a bit confused. Your explanation doesn’t explain why:

a) Groups with work experience (with or without finance education) have the highest pass rate

b) The group with finance education but no work experience comes up last in pass rates.

@christine what was the sample size? And is there a significant difference when you look at individual levels?

Do you have enough data to look at the effect of degrees other than finance-related? I think that any quantitative degree would give a candidate an advantage given the volume of formula across 3 levels.

M

I read this article and feel depressed. I fall into the finances-degree toting, no work experience candidate.

But does that relationship only hold for the first level or is it found across all three levels? I would deduce that after a candidate passes level 1 they aren’t crippled with over-confidence that stems from having a finance related degree since they know what it takes to pass.

This is just for the first level, I should mention :D, as the analysis was based on the Dec 2012 exam.

Interesting that no one asked this question before! I guess we’ll see for LII and LIII this June 😀