Exam permits are already available in your online account and you can find more information about permits and some other important ‘on the day’ reminders on the Prepare for your exams webpage.

Instructions for exam candidates

Before arriving at the exam centre, please ensure that you have read the Instructions for candidates document fully, as it contains important information for taking your exam.

Formulae and Tables book

Candidates are advised that Formulae and Tables books may be required for some assessments. While copies of these will be made available in examination centres for the A papers, candidates may use personal copies for the online B examinations.

Reading Time in examinations
You may have heard that “reading time” has been removed from the new examination schedule. What we have actually done is to give learners a choice of how to use this time.

Reading time is included in the overall time; for example, a 3-hour paper is now 3-hours and 15 minutes. The only exception is Paper 2 of CP1, which retains a dedicated 45 minutes of planning time, followed by a 2-hour and 30 minutes examination.

We have received a number of queries regarding the use of R in online assessments. The following guides are available online: 

CM1 and CM2 examination guide 
CS1 and CS2 examination guide and getting started with R guide 

Students are reminded that whether you are a member of the IFoA or not, all examinations are sat under the principles of the Actuaries Code.

As a reminder the principles of the existing Actuaries’ Code are:
1. Integrity: members will act honestly and with the highest standards of integrity
2. Competence and care: members will perform their professional duties competently and with care
3. Impartiality: members will not allow bias, conflicts of interest, or the undue influence of others to override their professional judgement
4. Compliance: members will comply with all relevant legal, regulatory and professional requirements, take reasonable steps to ensure they are not placed in a position where they are unable to comply, and will challenge non-compliance by others
5. Communication: members will communicate effectively and meet all applicable reporting standards.
In addition the Assessment Regulations also apply and these include:

Candidates are confirming by submitting the required files that all the material is entirely their own work and they wish this to be taken into account for the relevant assessment.

Students may be interested to read the outcome of a number of Disciplinary Tribunal Panel Hearings in recent months where collusion was discovered in IFoA examinations. 

Effective from the April 2019 exam results, we will only be offering exam counselling where it is the candidates last exam to qualify as either an Associate or Fellow. This decision was taken after much deliberation over the resources required to run the exam counselling services and takes into account that we did not want candidates to struggle on one final subject. Our larger counselling numbers are for CP1 and CP3 so these candidates should not be disadvantaged by the change in policy. 
More information and how to apply

The results for both the early and later subjects will be released in the same week. Dates are available on our website. The reason we are pulling them both together is to allow for the appropriate checks and balances to be made particularly where we have introduced subjects with two papers such as the CS and CM modules.

Planned release of results: 

• Core Principles subjects (CB1-2; CM1-2, CS1-2): Tuesday 2 July
• Core Applications, Specialist Principles and Specialist Advanced subjects: Thursday 4 July

We will be changing how we publish names in The Times newspaper. Currently there is a congratulatory piece which announces those who have completed exams for Associate, Fellow and CERA. This could be misleading as the names that appear for each class may not have also completed the PPD and other requirements to be transferred. 

In future, we will use The Times twice a year to congratulate those individuals who have met all of the requirements, including work experience and professionalism, for Associate, Fellow or CERA.

We will be introducing a five-year cut-off date for exemptions which will take effect from 1 January 2020. Further details on this will follow in future updates. More information on exemptions. 

We are making on-going updates to a number of our policies including mitigation, access arrangements and appeals in readiness for the 2019 examinations. We would ask you to make sure you are aware of these policies.

• Access arrangements for examinations
• After your exams

With the changes for students joining the IFoA after 2 January 2019, and the transition of work-based skills to PPD, we are in the process of updating our webpages to help students transition. 

These updates are expected to be completed during May and June 2019. If in the meantime you have any questions with regards to PPD then please email the Quality team.