Was doing ACCA (Chartered Accountancy qualification) and you had to pay over £100 to sit an exam then the failure rate is so high. Most exams had a passing rate of less than 50%. When I was about to sit an exam there was a lady there who had failed one exam 7 times, and you had to pay for it over and over till you pass. I had to stay up studying most nights which I never did in college. Their is also a yearly subscription fee that goes up to over £300 upon qualifying and you have to pay this inorder to keep the qualification. We get back nothing in return after paying this btw. Meanwhile in my corporate job you had people with just bachelors and even alot of managers with just associates making 3 times my salary and they did not have to go through half the stress I went through (months of studying late nights to barely pass).In conclusion, we pay thousands of dollars plus years of constant late night studying, failing and passing, and getting depression just to come out the same as everyone else who have a degree.
Edit: Just to add, I realize alot of persons in this sub are americans. So put it this way, compared to CPA (US accountancy qual), acca is a scam. Cpa is much more reasonable and don’t force you to pay such high subscription fee to keep your qualification after you have put in all that hard work. Cpa encourages you to take courses to keep your knowledge in tact which is reasonable. I prefer the CPA.
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Yeah, I want an accountant who failed the test(s) to be certified as a CPA to do my taxes …
Sounds like you had a bad experience and you’re trying to discredit everything else
So you pay thousands of dollars, you spend late nights studying, failing and passing, and get depression. That’s literally college my brother.
Scam is probably the wrong term for certification programs.
I work in IT, we have these and they are all scams; if you don’t have a degree of some type the resume goes to the trash.
you get your employer to pay for these certs
It’s fine if you get your work to pay for it. Many employers sponsor their accountants going for qualifications.
50% pass rate means you only have to be smarter than 50% of the people, look at those people though.
I want certain jobs to have very high standards, which means a high failure rate.
My brother taught the EMT basics class for a few years. The number of kids that came to him and would have killed someone if he hadn’t failed them on their final exam is massive. I’m a teacher in a place where certificates aren’t required. You can tell who came in without one. They might know a subject well enough but they don’t know any kind of strategy beyond infodumping random facts onto the kids, and can’t analyze anything to see if it’s working.
I want my nurse to be able to take care of me without killing me, I want my lawyer to be competent.
The only part of this I have an issue with is that for in demand fields the first test should be free.
Just don’t fail
This makes me want to start my own certification company
The scam is requiring you to pay to keep the certification.
What you’re describing is a barrier to entry functioning as intended.
Canadian CPA here. I paid $1300 PER COURSE after my bachelors. 6 courses before I could qualify to write the final exam. The final exam cost $1600. It was an incredibly hard exam. You have two chances to pass ($1600 each time) before you have to retake all the courses before trying again.
The yearly dues are around $1400 and these are the continuing education requirements:
Primary members are required to obtain 10 verifiable and 20 total CPD hours annually and 60 verifiable (including 4 verifiable ethics) and 120 total hours every three-year cycle.
The British accounting cert looks damn cheap in comparison, but also looks lacking in the education requirements.
Without the CPA, I would not be making six figures. Its a grueling course but definitely paid for itself. And I don’t even do audits or reviews.
I’m retired. Got my CPA decades ago. I know when I was working I don’t think I ever would have reached the level I attained without it. I heard it’s not as difficult now. I passed all parts the first time but when I took it, it was very hard and some people would have to take certain sections three times to pass them.
Sounds like the exact opposite of a scam
You can either have A) a stringent, expensive examination process with a 20% pass rate giving you a credential that sets you apart from the pack or B) an easy, cheap test with an 80% pass rate giving you a credential that means nothing. You can’t have both.
In my field when the schooling is complete we have to apply to the government for permission to write the exams a practical and three written exams, that costs a few hundred, and then book the tests, which costs about $600 for the practical and $400 for the written. Then every five years we pay about $300 per cert to keep them and every ten years you have to do a practical and pay again to keep them. Some of the certs you have to prove you actually worked that cert in the last five years or they won’t recert you. The when you get booked for jobs the client will have a qualifier exam to wrote before you can work for them and then more exams based on the induvidual projects at the job. I do a lot of testing, but I work at the biggest company in my industrybin my country and there’s only a handful of us who can pass the qualifiers.
I think it’s shitty to have to pay, but it keeps the pool of people with the certs low and employment is easy.