No Band 10 "Ethics Adjustment"

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WellThatSucks

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I was band 10 and scored >70% in ethics. For those of you who believe there is an “Ethics Adjustment”, because it’s listed on the CFA website, you are wrong. I emailed the CFA Institute in regards to the adjustment, to see if it was considered. This is the response:
“I am sorry to hear that you did not pass the Level II exam. Unfortunately, we do not have an “ethics adjustment” for candidates with a score band 10. We do, however, have a retabulation process. We take pride in our grading systems and have significant quality assurance processes. We would not publish results in which we are not confident. However, you do have the option to submit a retabulation form. To access complete information about the retabulation process, please visit
http://www.cfainstitute.org/programs/cfaprogram/candidate/Pages/understanding_cfa_exam_results.aspx.
We strongly encourage you to reregister while awaiting the result of your retabulation to ensure that you do not miss any deadlines.
I do commend you for your commitment to the CFA Program. I wish you the best of luck in the future.”
Not real sure who the adjustment is for, but it’s not for people in Band 10 apparently. Glad I paid extra attention to Ethics, it really paid off.
 
This concept of “Ethics adjustment” makes the grading process more complicated and unfair. I’m a strong believer in “pick a mark, whoever scores higher passes, and those who dont fail”. CFAI probably put it on website to make sure ppl actually put in the time to learn Ethics without giving it excessive weighting on the exam.
 
They can simply say and do this:
if you are 1 answer short of MPS and incorrectly answered only 1 eithics questions, you pass;
If you are 2 answers short of MPS and correctly answered all ethics questions, you pass;
Your exam results has already reflected all these it it had applied to your exam.
 
I’m sorry about your experience, man. I can’t even imagine how frustrating that must be. I’d be curious to see your score matrix, if you’re willing to post it.
 
Ethics adjustment applies to boaderline candidates - i.e the minimum passing score is 67%, candidates that score 66.66% ….not necessarily band 10 candidates.
However, that said, I will agree that there’s too much ambiguity surrounding CFA that creates some genuine questions about the integrity of the entire marking and grading process.
 
no one really knows what it takes to get awarded the coveted “ethics adjustement”.
It’s possible you were on the lower or mid range of the band 10 folks, and were simply not close enough to be chosen.
 
WellThatSucks wrote:
“I am sorry to hear that you did not pass the Level II exam. Unfortunately, we do not have an “ethics adjustment” for candidates with a score band 10. “
Click to expand...
This statement is ambiguous. Depending on how you interpret it, the statement is true by definition since being in “band 10” means you are in the top 10% of candidates who failed, so how can there be an adjustment for someone who has already failed? The bands have probably already taken the ethics adjustment into account, so anyone in band 10 must have already failed even after considering ethics.
 
Here is the matrix, happy to share.
>70%: Corp Finance, Deriv, Ethics
51-70%: Alt Inv, Equity, FRA, FI, Quant
<50%: Econ, PM
Not real surprised with the PM result, that topic was a joke this year. Normally I test very well in Equity, and I was surprised I didn’t score >70%.
 
This is it.
p.s. damn it, the quote did not work. I was refferring to Devilz’s comments in #7 post.
 
I’m not seeing how your results imply a lack of ethics adjustment. Couldn’t it be the case that you would have been band 9, and a strong ethics score bumped you into 10 (assuming they overweight ethics points)?
 
May be you wouldb have missed borderline required for ethical adjustment by couple of questions, so it didn’t apply as CFAI never tells it applies to all band 10.
 
I’m not saying my results imply a lack of adjustment. The email from the CFA institute specifically stated there is no ethics adjustment for my score. If you are in band 10 it’s never the case you were band 9 and they adjusted you to band 10 based on your ethics score. Your ethics score does not help you in any of the bands.
“The Board of Governors instituted a policy to place particular emphasis on ethics. Starting with the 1996 exams, the performance on the ethics section became a factor in the pass/fail decision for candidates whose total scores bordered the minimum passing score. The ethics adjustment can have a positive or negative impact on these candidates’ final results.
CFA Institute has a policy of not releasing either the minimum passing score or individual candidate scores. Consequently, CFA Institute does not release specific information about the ethics adjustment or the candidates who were affected. The adjustment has had a net positive effect on candidate scores (and thus pass rates) in most exam sessions. The published pass rates always take into account the ethics adjustment for borderline candidates.”
My point to this post is to show that this is very misleading. It gives the impression that they place a higher signficiance on ethics, but in reality there is no evidence that this is actually implemented. The email from the CFA institute confirms that if you were in the top 10% of the failing scores, your ethics score did not affect the pass/fail decision.
I’m okay with scores being final. Some people pass and some people fail. My issue is their claim to be place added signficance on ethics after the total scores are calculated, and to allow for a positive ”adjustment”.
“Consequently, CFA Institute does not release specific information about the ethics adjustment or the candidates who were affected. “
This implies that an ethics adjustment is not built into the final score for everyone, and that the adjustment is only for a selected group. You would assume people in Band 10 would be part of the group considered for this adjustment.
Placing claims like this on the website cause people to adjust the way they study, and the way 3rd party companies prepare candidates. I spent more time on ethics because it supposedly would help you pass if you were on the border. To be band 10 and find out it didn’t matter is disappointing and a complete waste of my time.
The lesson here is to treat ethics like any other topic, and give it no special attention.
 
Nobody here really knows what the Ethics Adjustment is, or if it even exists.
One thing you have to consider is it’s possible that not everyone in Band 10 had the exact same score. Hypothetically, it’s possible that Band 10 included candidates that scored BOTH 78/120 (65%) and 79/120 (65.8%). Perhaps there is no Ethics adjustment for those that scored 78/120, but there was for people that scored 79/120.
I’m sorry you were so close to clearing the exam.
Whether or not there is an Ethics Adjustment, Ethics is only one of three topics in the Level II curriculum that is guaranteed to have at least two item sets so that makes it pretty important to study. You shouldn’t feel like you wasted your time studying the topic.
 
I would still recommend people spend time on ethics because they’re easy marks and you’re guaranteed two item sets.
 
People are obviously allocated to these bands after any potential corrections. So the e-mail is correct: there is no ethics adjustment for band 10.
 
There was a good thread on this a few years ago. My inference was that the MPS is actually a very narrow range. If you are above the range, you pass. If you are below, you fail. If you are in the range, the ethics adjustment is applied to determine if you pass or fail. This could explain why there seems to be a large percentage of poor ethics scores in Band 10, given that candidates with high ethics score that fall in the minimum passing range are bumped to a pass. Because there are Band 10 scores with a high ethics scores only means that less than 10% of failures were caused by a negative adjustment. Or maybe the ethics adjustment only applies if you score greater than, say, 80% on ethics. I would not discount significantly the chances of the ethics adjustment existing. The chance of it existing is probably similar to the sun coming up tomorrow in the tropics. The idea that it makes sense to spend more time on ethics than the 10%-15% would imply could be answered by a statistician, but the odds of you actually falling in the relevant range must be fairly low. And I don’t recall seeing a statement from the CFAI guaranteeing that a candidate will not be in Band 10 if he or she scores well on ethics. Why all the hate….
 
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