Inside the intense cheating to get a junior banking job
If you want to leave university/college and get a first job in an investment bank, you need luck. - Or you can make it.
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Big banks are overwhelmed with applications. Goldman Sachs had 314,000 applications for 2,600 summer intern jobs last year, for example. JPMorgan had 493,000 applications for 4,000 summer analyst and associate positions. More than 99% of people who apply, do not succeed.
Faced with these odds, students are increasingly taking matters into their own hands. We spoke to multiple students, at both target and non-target universities. Some had no knowledge of the cheating that occurs. Most, though, had either cheated themselves or knew people who had.
"The fourth floor of the LSE library is where a lot of this takes place," says one student at the London School of Economics, the UK's preeminent university for banking and finance jobs. "It's explicit and visibly outrageous," he observes.
The cheating mostly involves the complex numerical and linguistic reasoning tests that banks like Morgan Stanley, UBS or Nomura use for weeding out applicants in the first instance. "They're obnoxiously hard," says one economics student at a non-target university. "You have to answer questions you will almost never encounter in the real world in a really short period of time. When I was doing it on my own, I was nowhere close to passing these assessments."
After being rejected by all banks at this first hurdle, the student says he clubbed together with friends. Instead of sitting alone trying to solve a succession of complex puzzles against the clock, he and his mates now sit in a room with a large screen. Each applies to a different bank, and while the tests are taken, the others crowd around to help and learn. "Someone will take the test, and we help by putting the questions into AI and directing them to the right multiple choice answer," he says. "It means you can get things right, quickly."
Something similar allegedly occurs in the LSE Library. However, students there claim that this is simply level one-style cheating and that far more systematic cheats occur among international students in London, especially those of Chinese origin. "The Chinese group chats on Telegram are where the real action takes place," says one LSE student. "They have got very detailed documents in Chinese with questions and answers to numerical, verbal reasoning and inductive logic tests at most major employers. It's a booming industry and some of the cheat sheets are even watermarked."
We didn't speak to any Chinese students who confirmed the existence of the Telegram groups, but one said that communication with Chinese peers in London made all the difference to applications. - "A lot of members of the Chinese community have given me advice," he says, adding that it would have been very difficult to make progress without help as "English is not my first language."
It's not just tests that juniors collude on. There's also sharing of Hirevue and digital interview questions, especially in the alleged Chinese Telegram groups. Some of the sharing might simply be classed as "preparation." One student said he tries to source the questions in advance and then prepare answers so that he can read off from on one screen while he talks to another one.
Does any of this matter? The students perpetrating it would argue that it's just a proverbial levelling of the playing field and that cheating is, in any case, commonplace. Garry Stevenson, for example, famously got his first job at Citi by discovering the rules of a trading competition and practising it intently ahead of time. "I'm going into this without a banking background, and I'm up against people who are benefitting from nepotism and people who are using AI," says one student. "If I don't use AI at least, then I don't have a chance."
How do banks feel about all this? We asked Citi, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and UBS to comment. None responded, save Citi, which pointed out that it doesn't have Hirevue interviews anyway. One student said he doesn't think banks really care all that much: "The tests are just a culling method. They're a quick and cost-efficient way for banks to cut the applicant pool in half." If applicants don't realize that most people are cheating, maybe they don't deserve to progress further anyway?
Whatever the industry opinion on this, rampant cheating is causing issues. When students are invited to in-person interviews, banks retest them and find that people who aced tests online fail miserably when help is removed. It makes recruitment more complex.
Students who don't cheat say banks could do a lot more to stop it. "When it’s essentially a life changing thing, I don’t think there is any lack of motivation to cheat to gain a competitive advantage," says one. "The anti-cheating measures for the CFA exams are mental by comparison," he adds. "They check your glasses, behind your ears, up your sleeves, socks and ankles, make you show all your pockets, and then they run you over with an X-ray thing." Banks may want to take note.
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