CFA Institute prepares for online testing

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• The CFA Institute is moving its increasingly popular
  Level I exams online.
• The Level I exam, currently offered just twice a year,
  will be administered more often, and results will be delivered
  faster. 
• Over 200,000 candidates registered for one of the three
  levels of CFA tests in June alone, a 20% increase in just a
  year.

Hundreds of thousands of aspiring financiers sign up for the
notoriously grueling, three-level Chartered Financial Analyst
exam every year.  

To meet this rising demand, the CFA Institute plans to move the
Level I exam online, Business Insider has learned. The test,
currently offered in June and December, will also be administered
more often. To be clear, test-takers will still need to head to
physical locations for the exam, but the paper tests will be
replaced with an online format. 

Test-takers could see different types of questions through online
exams than the current paper medium allows. For example, an
online format offers more options to incorporate spreadsheets
into questions, CFA Institute head of communications Anne O’Brien
said in an interview.

The CFA Institute is still in the process of finding vendors for
online exam administration, so the changes are a few years away,
O’Brien said. A record 227,031 candidates registered to take the
Level I, II or III test in June, up 20% from last year. Tests
were administered in 286 centers around the world. 

Electronic exams offered more often could help the CFA Institute
offer a wider variety of venues – and students will see results
faster,  O’Brien said. 

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“It’s becoming increasingly
challenging to find and staff physical venues in some of our
markets to accommodate the sheer volume of candidates we have,”
O’Brien said. 

Becoming a CFA charterholder is a
huge leg up for anyone hoping to build a career in money
management. It’s also less expensive than an MBA — a CFA
costs about $2,500 in total, while an MBA can easily run into the
hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Level
I exams are six hours long and feature 240 multiple choice
questions. Since the test is offered only twice a year,
venues must accommodate sometimes thousands of students. In New
York, for example, test-takers head to the Javits Center, a 1.8
million square foot convention center. 

In Beijing, the June test was administered over the course of two
days, because there was not a large enough venue to accommodate
the candidates. 

The Level I exam focuses on investment tools and business
foundations, while Level II and II tests dive deeper into
analysis and portfolio management. It takes most candidates four
years to pass all three levels of the test. Less than one in
five people who start the CFA program make it through all three
levels and complete the other requirements to become a charter
holder.

The first CFA exam was administered in 1963 to 284 candidates in
the US, Canada, and London, according to the CFA Institute’s
website. There are now more than 154,000 CFA charterholders
globally. 

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