Below is a copy of the communication sent to all IFoA candidates:
07 February 2025
We write to provide you with an update on the delivery of the IFoA examinations and the examination registration process for the April session.
Firstly, we would like to apologise for the delay and uncertainty surrounding registration for the April examinations. We understand how much this has affected your preparation for the examinations so we have made some difficult decisions to provide you with the clarity and reassurance to proceed with your registration.
We believe there is a role for remote invigilation in the delivery of our examinations. However, given the technical issues with our remote proctoring tool that we have experienced during pre-testing as well as software hosting concerns raised by some employers, we have taken the decision that wherever possible, candidates will sit their April examinations in-person. The examinations will remain closed book and on-line but with in-person invigilation replacing the remote proctoring tool.
We are working with proven in-person on-line examination centre providers in the UK and internationally to finalise the details of our service based on candidate demand. This means we will be adopting a phased approach to confirming your examination registration for April as follows:
Exam registration – Phase 1
Registration will open from Monday 10 February until Monday 24 February for both members and non-members. We encourage you to book during the first week of the window or as soon as possible thereafter.
At this stage, we would like you to register for your examinations in the normal way. We will then collate the location information provided by each candidate to help our test centre providers identify, based on demand, the best hub locations for our examinations in the UK and internationally. We have already modelled this based on historical candidate entry data but want to ensure we have the actual numbers to hand.
Exam registration - Phase 2
Once we have confirmed the locations for our examination centres, we will contact you within three weeks of your initial registration to confirm your test centre location.
We will ensure that, where possible, we cater for those candidates requiring access and inclusion arrangements. We will contact you separately if the delivery option available to you cannot support your agreed arrangements.
If we are unable to provide you with the necessary arrangements for this exam session, we will offer you a full refund.
Remote invigilation
We apologise again for the significant issues faced by candidates during the recent test of our remote invigilation system. We have been working with the remote invigilation provider to address these issues but as we have set out in this note, we are not willing to risk using the system at scale in April and so have switched to in-person invigilation.
We will continue to address the issues with our remote invigilation system during the registration period. However, we are cancelling the practice exam on Monday 10 February at 14:00 GMT so that you can focus on registering for the April examination session.
We will now work with our provider to test the remote invigilation system. If our testing is successful and the platform performs reliably, we may offer remote invigilation to a limited number of candidates who are otherwise unable to access our examination centre network.
We are particularly mindful of those candidates with access and inclusion requirements and wish to explore every avenue to support them during the April session. We will identify candidates during the registration period who may require a remotely invigilated examination and contact you.
We appreciate that these are new but necessary arrangements to ensure that we can deliver the April examination session. We will schedule webinars in the run up to the examination session so that you will have the opportunity to understand how the examinations will be conducted in an in-person environment. We will schedule these once we have confirmed examination centre locations with candidates.
We have put together these Frequently Asked Questions which we will continue to update.
If you have any questions relating to your examination registration, please contact memberservices@actuaries.org.uk
Yours sincerely,
Mike McDougall
Director of Learning