14 November 2024
Thank you for your patience as we make changes to our exam experience for the April 2025 sitting. We appreciate that October’s announcement of significant changes to our exams may have come as a surprise and left many of you with questions about how the examinations will work in practice.
In the weeks and months ahead, we will provide more information as soon as it becomes available. This will include emails, updates on our website, and webinars where you will have the opportunity to ask questions and gain direct access to support. In this email we will outline some of the resources and guidance that are currently available to help you prepare.
Information Resources
We have set up a dedicated section on our website, which will contain all the information you need to know for the April 2025 exam sitting and includes a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page. You may wish to bookmark these pages as they will be updated regularly to reflect the latest information available and to answer questions that are raised by our students.
Remote invigilation and closed book/closed web
While many of you will have sat our exams previously, the addition of remote invigilation and closed book/closed web for April 2025 means that this will be a different exam experience.
You will need to be aware of the potential impact these changes and that the way you sat IFoA exams previously, may no longer be suitable for future sessions. We will provide full details of all actions that are, and are not permitted, and fully worked examples of what you will need to do in each case well in advance of April 2025.
Updates to our Access Arrangements policy
To support you, we have updated our Access Arrangements policy to reflect the requirements of remote invigilation. We have expanded the policy to ensure IFoA exams remain accessible and inclusive.
The revised policy includes a list of items (known as ‘comfort aids’) that you may want to review, to see if there is anything that you need to declare before sitting an exam. The documents on our access arrangements web page will guide you through applying for access arrangements.
If you have any questions about our new Access Arrangement policy, please contact us. We are here to support you as much as we can, and it may be that a question you have is also concerning other students and we can publish the answer in our FAQs to help everyone.
Updated technical requirements
We have updated our technical requirements, which you can find on our technical requirements web page.
We have also prepared information on technical requirements for April 2025 for employers, which we are sharing with them directly. If you are unsure whether your employer has received this information, please check with them.
You can find more information on how employers can connect with us on our Student Employer Contact volunteer vacancy post.
Exam rules
To help you navigate sitting exams in April 2025, we have prepared a set of exam rules, which you should read alongside our updated Assessment Regulations. These will help you understand what will or will not be allowed in IFoA exams. We hope that this information will answer some of the questions candidates have raised recently.
You can find our exam rules for April 2025 on our assessment regulations web page.
In the forthcoming weeks, we will be releasing further information including a revised Examinations Handbook, and what these changes mean for our inappropriate conduct processes. In early 2025 we will be giving you an opportunity to practice sitting an exam using the new system so you can experience this before sitting the live exam. More details as to how to enrol on this will follow soon.
We appreciate that the changes we are making are significant, however they are essential to ensuring the integrity of our exams and to reducing the risk of students unintentionally violating the exam rules. We are fully committed as an organisation to supporting and guiding you through the changes and to making April’s exam experience as good as possible. We hope this email has been helpful and our next planned communication will be in December where we will share details of how you can participate in one of our webinars.
If you have any questions or feedback please email us.
Yours sincerely
IFoA Examinations Support