Ajit started pursuing CA and cleared the CPT exam at the first go. He was confident of becoming CA soon. It’s been 7 years since then, but he has not yet completed his CA. He completed his IPCC in 5 attempts and is still writing his CA final exams (3 attempts already taken). While others in his age group are already settled, Ajit is still trying to get a qualification. This is not the story of one Ajit, there are thousands of Ajit who have been struggling with Indian qualification like CA (pass rate: 5 -8%) and CWA (pass rate: 3 -5 %).
Then why are the students/ parents still insisting on these career options? Anand Desai, an experienced educational counselor believes “large population , lack of awareness about other options and low cost of the program, prompts large number of candidates to go for these courses.” However, these exams have low passing rate because the rigid structure of these exams, for example in CA, if a student is unable to clear 1 exam in the group, then he has to repeat the entire group. Also, these exam have a funnel structure, where the passing rate is high at first level and goes on reducing after that, leading to very low completion ratio.
The solutions for this he suggests, Exam body should change the exam structure to make them more flexible like CIMA, where if a student unable to clear one of the exam out of 3, he only has to write the paper he didn’t clear. Second, similar passing percentage at all the Levels like CFA whereas all the levels have pass rate of 40 to 50% and third to make students aware about different options available to them in Finance rather than doing only certain sets of qualifications.
