NSE's Certification in Financial Markets

I took the NCFM last week. The exam itself was easy enough; it seems to have been set keeping in mind the fact that traders have very little leisure to devote to the perusal of the NCFM study material (and even less to decode its legalese). One of the questions asked was:

Regarding which of the following is the NSE not flexible when candidates take the NCFM exam?

a) Place of the exam
b) Candidate’s presence
c) Time of the exam
d) Date of the exam

Since we had all selected Mumbai, June 6 and 9:30 am on the NSE website, but none of us had found an option to take the exam by proxy, it was fairly straightforward.

Any euphoria we felt at our success in the exam was swiftly driven out of our minds by hunger; we had several hours to wait until our second exam in the afternoon, and the NSE seemed not to want us to eat.

We had brought our lunch with us, and on asking the guard at the door where we could eat it, we were told to go to the canteen on the first floor. Thither we went, and as soon as we stepped out of the elevator we were accosted by another guard who demanded what our business was.

We explained, in as few words as possible since we were ravening by then, that we were between exams and wanted to eat lunch. He shook his head ruefully and told us that the NSE was always sending people up here to eat; it was, however, the ONGC office and he was very sorry but he could not permit us to enter without legitimate cause.

We went back downstairs thinking dark thoughts of the man who had sent us there. “I think,” said one of my friends, “that they make bets on how long people will argue with the ONGC guard before returning. Ten-to-one on two minutes, fourteen-to-three on five minutes, that kind of thing.”

After the second exam we were positively starving. We went and asked the guard if we could, at least, eat in the atrium.

“No,” he said conspiratorially, “but why don’t you go back to ONGC and sneak in while the guard’s back is turned?”

In the end I ate one sandwich standing on the sidewalk outside the NSE and the other when I got back home. But it was, without exception, the hungriest I have ever been while writing an exam.