Changes... the 2013 CIPM Expert Curriculum

This blog post summarizes the changes at the Expert Level of the "New CIPM Program."

Expert Level

Last year, the topic area weights were broken into three broad areas:

• Ethics and Professional Standards (15%)
• Performance Evaluation (50%)
• GIPS (35%)

Ethics is still given about a 15% weight.  The major changes here are that:

- The GIPS component has been reduced significantly, both in terms of content and in terms of the weight given to it.  GIPS (combined with a new topic of "performance presentation") now carries a weight of 20%.  In previous years, candidates were required to master the content of sections I.0 through I.5 of GIPS (i.e., the main provisions excluding real estate, private equity and wrap/SMA) and the related guidance statements, Q&As and interpretations.  Now, candidates are required to have a more general knowledge of GIPS concepts, plus also understand concepts of performance presentation.

-  The "calculations" component" (performance evaluation) is effectively bumped up to a weight of about 65%!  A large portion of the total exam weighting is devoted to the new sub-topic within evaluation of "manager selection". 

Thus, the 2013 topic area weights for the Expert Level are:

• Performance Measurement (10%)
• Performance Attribution (15%)
• Performance Appraisal and Manager Selection (40%)
• Ethical Standards (15%)
• Performance Presentation and GIPS (20%)

A common question I get is "how many more pages do I have to read?"  The new changes constitute somewhere in the neighborhood of 204 pages.  Of these, about 67 of the new pages at the Expert Level are duplicate new pages at the Principles Level for the 2013 period (mostly pages dealing with the topics of manager selection and investment performance presentation).

One of the statements that I think could have been made prior to this year was that the Principles Level content was fairly "light" compared to the Expert Level.  At this point, I definitely believe that the new changes make the two levels more balanced.

Happy studying!