FASEA has confirmed the September 2019 round of its Financial Adviser Exam was ‘no more difficult’ to pass than its initial June exam series.
This confirmation comes as the Authority announced last week a pass rate of more than 88 percent for the 1,697 advisers who sat the September exams.
There had been speculation in some sectors of the industry that the 90+ percent pass rate achieved by advisers in the June round of exams would prompt FASEA and its provider, ACER, to re-calibrate the difficulty level of the exam (see: FASEA Confirms 90+% Advisers Pass First Exam Series). There was also anecdotal feedback to Riskinfo from advisers that the September exam was indeed more difficult.
…it was no more difficult to pass the September exam than it was to pass the June exam
Responding to this speculation, FASEA’s CEO, Stephen Glenfield, noted:
“The processes undertaken by FASEA/ACER ensure that the same standard is applied to each Financial Adviser Exam. This means that it was no more difficult to pass the September exam than it was to pass the June exam.”
Glenfield added that any difference in the final pass rate between the June and September exams represents differences between the cohorts sitting each exam.
FASEA also confirmed that at the close of the registration period last week, 3,286 candidates had been registered to sit the December 2019 exam series, while 190 advisers have already registered for the February 2020 series.
The December 2019 exams will be held in each state and territory capital, as well as in these 11 regional locations:
- Townsville
- Rockhampton
- Mackay
- Sunshine Coast
- Toowoomba
- Gosford
- Orange
- Wagga Wagga
- Albury-Wodonga
- Bendigo
- Geelong
The February 2020 exams will again be conducted in all state and territory capitals except Darwin, while only Townsville features again in the ten regional locations:
- Gold Coast
- Wollongong
- Cairns
- Ballarat
- Launceston
- Port Macquarie
- Traralgon
- Tamworth
- Townsville
- Newcastle
Advisers can click here for more background on the FASEA Adviser Exam.
The antedotal conversations have also suggested that maybe the “bold” who jumped in early where generally fairly confident of their ethics/subject matter? Perhaps the thought that they were super prepared and in the first batch, whereas anyone less confident (even just with the exam conditions, let’s face it many of us haven’t done that type of thing in a long time, and many never on a computer like that), perhaps are leaving it later and later to “see what happens”?
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