Why are exam questions such a secret?

C

CFAdreams

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I dont understand why we cant talk about them. I know the ethics part "this is copywritten material" blah blah blah. But come on, we all paid to take the stupid thing, why cant we talk about it after? Are they worried it will give people an advantage for next time? Change the questions then. Not understanding this.. everyone has taken it already.. its over, let us talk about it..

There is nothing transparent about this organization. you dont know how they grade, you cant talk about what was on the test, and you cant see mock questions after you have taken the test to review what you have gotten wrong? Its almost like they dont want us to pass, but keep retaking the test so they make more money...

The answer to #1 was C... take that CFAI
 
oh i didnt realize that we couldnt talk about the questions? i just thought we could not post verbatim the question...hmmmmm
 
The reuse the questions! You'll learn that too if you're a retaker. Some are verbatim from June!
 
I found that the CFAI questions were clearer and more straightforward than most of the study provider questions (though ethics can be quite ambiguous sometimes).

There's a reason for that.... creating good questions is tough, and requires considerable testing and effort. CFAI wants to be able to reuse questions in subsequent years, rather than have to come up with 240 entirely new questions every year, plus 3 (now 2) bogus responses for each that catch common errors. Most questions have to be phrased, developed, tested against control groups, and then put together.

Making it hard to talk about the questions in detail means they don't have to redo all the questions at all the levels.

You can say it sucks, but there is a logic, and it isn't completely irrational for them to do this.
 
Think about it, if I remembered one question and colluded with 239 others to each remember one, we could easilly reconstruct the exam. This would make it much easier for a writer to appeal their score or appeal interpritation on one or more questions.

There were two instances where I could have used an interpritation of what they meant by thier wording (maybe because all the words were melding together by the end too) but since I or no one in the world has the exact question wording we can never appeal anything.

As you might say, they have us by the balls.
 
i understand there is logic.. but i mean how many people took that test saturday? Multiply that by $500 and these guys are making tons of money to come up with a test.. They should be able to come up with a new 240 questions each time from 3000 pages of material.. I am a retaker, didnt see too many from the first exam, but some were pretty similar. It just frustrates me because a lot of the questions are open to interpretation.

When they are open to interpretation, i will usually write my logic in the book next to the answer, but i doubt they read that. I think when it comes down to it, i am most frustrated by not knowing what i did right and wrong. Would love to see my answers marked and be able to go back and say, ahh i cant believe i got that wrong, where did i screw up..
 
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