The February and April exam
The February exam will be held in 17 centres across Australia from 13 to 18 February, FASEA said in a statement.
In addition to metropolitan locations, regional centres for the February sitting are Gold Coast, Wollongong, Cairns, Ballarat, Launceston, Port Macquarie, Traralgon, Tamworth, Townsville and Newcastle.
FASEA said registrations for the February exam are open and will close on 24 January 2020, with over 1,700 advisers already registered for the February exam.
The April exam will be held in 18 centres across Australia from 2 to 7 April.
In addition to metropolitan locations, regional centres for the April sitting are Townsville, Gosford, Sunshine Coast, Geelong, Toowoomba, Bunbury, Mackay, Geraldton, Wagga Wagga and Coffs Harbour.
Registrations are now open for the April exam and will close on 13 March 2020, with 140 advisers already registered, FASEA said.
The June exam
FASEA noted that the June exam will be held in 18 centres across Australia from 11 June 2020 to 16 June 2020.
In addition to metropolitan locations, regional centres for the June sitting are Townsville, Gold Coast, Newcastle, Wollongong, Cairns, Bendigo, Albury/Wodonga, Rockhampton, Port Macquarie and Orange.
Registration for the June exam will open on 2 March 2020 and close 22 May 2020.
December 2019 exam update
A total of 2,981 advisers sat the December 2019 exam over 95 sessions, of which results will be released by the end of January 2020.
Further, FASEA announced the launch of its remote proctoring solution. The solution will be available for the February exam and all subsequent exams.
“FASEA continues to work closely with ACER to ensure exam processes are streamlined, accessible and effective, and exam sitting opportunities are optimised,” it said.
pleas excuse my ignorance but what is “proctoring solution”?
@chris; it’s an online capability whereby the user is logged on and tracked via their PC camera. Any attempt to cheat/ use foreign materials/ converse with someone else during the sitting is therefore detected by the system, and the exam is automatically cancelled.
PF Sounds like a normal day in a para planning sweat shop in the Philippines.
I sat the December exam and found it to be written as a culling exercise and is not written to test knowledge or create a learning experience, such as a Uni exam or CPD test. I didn’t find it that hard but I did find the style of questions and how they were written…. tricky… It’s not your traditional exam paper, in that questions are literally written to “trick” you. [b][i]I would not judge a person on being a quality adviser based on this exam and if you did fail it’s nothing to be ashamed about or worried about.[/i][i][/i][/b][b][/b] On that basis could it be claimed it’s a FASEA FAIL? I’m saying this not to alarm people but to forewarn people in that most advisers are used to an exam that tests knowledge and not to intentionally get rid of them. Once you recognise that style of question it’s much easier to sit it. Good luck to all.
(Dec Sitting too). Definitely only about 30% of content you can study for the exam, 70% gambling. The Exam paper contained a few mistakes without any ability to raise the matter. I felt it was more of a Responsible Manager case study questions – designed to be discussed; but having the Adviser thrust into the questions with your vocal cords slashed. Not possible to score high, but impossible to fail (if it were 50% rating). If you take a literal consideration of the FASEA code, you can’t accept the engagements in the questions. Yet not enough guidance or assumptions to the questions, so you end up crash landing a burning plane, and repeat.
It would have been more beneficial if perhaps if ASIC actually wrote up the exam questions, the interpretations would be more uniform, and less nonsense.
Wow, what a disaster. These numbers suggest a massive exodus is underway. 20% have already walked, but given less than 1/3 have attempted or registered for the exam in the first 5 sittings, I would say we are on track for a 60-70% wipe-out. On top of that, there will be support staff losing their jobs and millions of clients will lose their trusted adviser, so they will be feeling very uneasy. This will have a significant and measurable impact on the Australian economy. No doubt about it. When will the Coalition wake up and realise LIF and the FASEA experiment have failed miserably?
You may ultimately be proven correct, but I think it’s still a bit soon to be calling 60-70% wipeout. There have only been 3 completed exam sessions so far. Registrations haven’t closed yet for any of the other 6 sessions scheduled for this year. And in theory the deadline will be extended for an additional year beyond that, with another 6 or so sessions.
Many advisers who have to do bridging courses are completing them first, as there’s a lot of overlap between bridging course and exam content.
Lol relax mate. Some of us aren’t worried about it and are using the extension to our advantage.
It will not be that big of an exodus.
Agree but always risky counting your time extension chickens before the cross bench has passed the extra year egg. I doubt Labor and Greens will support the extension so definitely not guaranteed
can’t we just do the exam online?
You must be kidding. It’s done in official exam centres, with lots of rules and regulations, and a team of bureaucratic Nazis to supervise. I was expecting a cavity search, which thankfully didn’t eventuate, but I now understand why “proctor” and “proctologist” are such similar words.
Timed perfectly to coincide with the annual SMSF org conference which many (1200 plus) have to attend to get their CPD. The timing being even more curious since FASEA have previously presented and will no doubt be presenting at this years conference too…which takes place in the same week EVERY SINGLE YEAR.
You might find ASIC want advisers to undertake their CPD based on their listed licensed services. So despite going to the SMSFA conference, a stack of it might not be able to go towards your individual CPD requirements. So ended up having to skip the 2019 conference and hammer out Kaplan CPD’s which are aligned to the ASIC prefered blue print.
Basically it looks like discretionary CPD is on the way out.
Sat the December sitting 2019, the most unprofessional, badly set out and mistake riddled exam I have ever sat.
I thought I’d accidentally walked in to the Greek Mythology exam by mistake
I sat in Dec, my thoughts as well
how so?
One mistake i read was SG at 9%…. I thought it was a trick Q but it wasn’t.. just a dumb mistake in an exam written by someone who is probably not even a planner
I think a lot of the questions are sourced from old complaint files and rejigged into exam questions by compliance bureaucrats who know nothing about the real world. The 9% SG probably came from a complaint file when that was the rate.
My exam even had a question about a licensee who required all clients to sign a “client protection document” which actually provided legal protection to the licensee rather than the client. Wonder where they got that idea from?!