well-hello-there wrote:JeNeRegretteRien wrote:To wit: the pass rate for EACH exam is 35%-45% (approximately like the bar exam).
I knew a few people in undergrad who were studying for CFA I and they were NOT stellar finance students. If the 35%-45% pass rate holds true for each of the three exams, then CFA II and III must be insanely harder than CFA I. I'm thinking about a large percentage of testers who likely fail CFA I and then give up on pursuing the charter altogether.
What is your source for the bar passage rates being 35-45%? Even the worst tier 4 law schools manage to pull off better than 50% bar passage rates.
JeNeRegretteRien wrote:90% of business has not that much to do with accounting - not at the level of a CPA, anyway. I mean most PE people and senior executives don't know that much about accounting, and a truly tiny number have CPAs.
I found your post informative and I'm not trying to be hostile but I think you're just speculating here about most senior executives not knowing much about accounting. Corporate accounting is a popular stepping stone into corporate management because the auditors get to know so much about how a particular corporation operates and that knowledge is critical to running the business.
No worries. Here's my rationale:
I'm thinking of bar passages rates not by school, but by state. Which of course vary by jurisdiction, but in DC or CA bar passage rates of 50% +\- 10% don't appear unusual, at least based on a casual look at ncbex data. CA is admittedly a tough state, but for a while there, 35% pass rates seemed frighteningly common, but maybe my memory is off.
But, true, the CFA pass rate is lower on average than the bar exam. Which I think affirms the basic point: CFA, not a casual or demonstrably easy exam.
As to backgrounds of senior management, my thinking isn't based on a large N data set, but is not rank speculation - it's just what my experience working with senior management teams bore out. But clearly no one person's experience is definitive. And, of course, career track varies by company and industry.
And your point seems actually consistent with mine: Do a high % of auditors go into client companies, probably. Especially into the accounting and finance function. Can it be a useful background, of course. But are a large % of senior executives (the functional heads like VPs of marketing/sales/HR/R&D or division GMs, CEOs, and CEO staff that make up the bulk of management teams) coming out of auditing or accounting backgrounds? Not in my experience. Does it happen, yes. But, in my experience, it's not the background most of those execs have. But maybe it's different in industry-groups that I haven't worked with.