Of the 27,468 candidates who sat for the Level III CFA exam in June, 53% successfully passed, the CFA Institute announced.
The 2015 pass rate is directly in line with the 10-year average.
Stephen Horan, managing director of credentialing at the CFA Institute, Charlottesville, Va., said that while the exam and/or pool of candidates might change, the organization looks to “establish a consistent standard of achievement over time.”
Pass rates for June's level I and II exams were 42% and 46%, respectively. In June, 51,134 candidates sat for the Level I exam, an 8.8% increase from a year earlier and the highest year-over-year increase in Level I candidates to sit for the exam since 2008.
Mr. Horan noted that new candidates are increasingly young people entering the investment management profession, with a large portion of them coming from the Asia-Pacific region.
“The program is focused on the mastery of the core skills needed to be a reasonably seasoned investment professional,” Mr. Horan said. That is particularly important in developing markets where investors “rely very heavily on competent investment professionals to promote fair and transparent markets,” he added.
The CFA Institute has administered 2.17 million exams since the first exams were given in 1963.
