Practice makes perfect! Students tell us they prepare for exams in a variety of ways. Your first step should be to review the supplementary materials that are provided to you with your course—if applicable, there may be a Student Resource Guide that accompanies your text book. There are also practice questions in the CIP textbooks themselves—these will give you a good understanding of the level of learning that will be required in the exam.

Our Computer-based Exams Tutorial can help you get a feel for our exams platform prior to sitting for the exam. Please note in order to utilize it, you need to be registered for a CIP course first.

Students also find the online tutorials helpful, which you can find in your profile at http://elearning.insuranceinstitute.ca. Our website has a number of resources for students, including some handy study tools, including sample exams and tips on preparing for your exam. 

Also, students have told us that they find Study Skills courses particularly helpful in assisting them to prepare. Check with your local institute or chapter to see if they are offering one.

The new IIC Mobile Learning App is available for download on Google Play and iTunes. included in this free download is a full version of the Dictionary of Insurance and a free pack of 10 multiple choice exam questions for C11: Principles and Practice of insurance and C13: Insurance Against Liability - Part 1. there are five additional C11 and C13 question packs available for in-app purchase.

Some students find that independent study works best for them; for others, talking through concepts and applying them to real-world examples is more effective. Choose a method that works well for you, and if possible, arrange study groups with your classmates.

If an emergency arises that causes the need for you to defer an exam, you will be relieved to know that you have options.

For medical or health reasons, an exam can be deferred at no cost to the next exam session with supporting documentation. 

For work or other exceptionalities, an exam can be deferred to the next exam session, whereby supporting documentation and an additional fee is required.

We hope you understand that exam deferrals cannot be granted on the basis of insufficient study time or lack of readiness. As an association who believes in an equitable student experience, we trust that students understand our academic policies.

Among the many benefits of computer-based exams is the scheduling flexibility. Students are given a three-week window during each exam session to complete their CIP exam(s). You can transfer your exam date to another available time within that three-week window as many times as necessary up until one week prior to the examination session start date. Once the transfer deadline has passed, examinations will only be rescheduled for medical, work-related, or bereavement reasons, and you must contact Member Services to reschedule your exam date.

Please note: a rescheduling fee may apply after this deadline. If you are not able to attend your exam during that three-week examination session, your request will be treated as an examination deferral.  Please see our examination deferral guidelines.

Our computer-based exams are required to be written at a proctored examination centre—you do not take a CBE exam from a remote location such as your home, for example. Many CBE exams will be held at your local institute or chapter or at other designated proctored exam centres. Exam sites will have laptops replacing pens and paper answer books, as well as a secure computer set-up, including screen protection and locked-down browsers.

Students who are not successful on an exam and have received a grade of X or Y may be relieved to find out that they were close enough to success to receive the opportunity to write the exam again in the next exam session. This requires payment of the exam fee only, without having to re-enrol in the course. 

Please keep in mind that an exam rewrite is only granted once.  Hence, students who are unsuccessful in the rewrite of the exam will benefit from, and are therefore required to re-enrol in the course.

If you are unsuccessful in an exam and receive a Z, you are required to enroll into the course again. Students who have encountered this situation tell us that re-enrolling in the course allowed them to enhance their learning experience by choosing a methodology that works better for them through either our in-class, virtual or distance learning option.

More information on examination re-writes is available here.

Students who have had to miss an exam due to medical, professional or other urgencies tell us the process was fairly straightforward. You will be allowed to write the exam in the following exam session, providing that you contact Member Services as soon as possible and provide supporting documentation. If you are absent from an exam because of a work emergency, you will be required to submit appropriate documentation, with an additional fee. 

Students in full-time college programs tell us that the format of the college course evaluation and examinations sometimes vary – this is dependent on the individual college, course and instructor. CIP exams are designed and created by the Insurance Institute, while your college evaluations are developed and designed by your college. Most examinations in the CIP program are structured with multiple-choice, narrative and application questions to include a variety of formats which will accommodate students’ varied learning styles.

Our students in full-time college programs tell us that writing their Institute exam in addition to their college exam (see your school’s policies for further details) is a win-win scenario for them; they earn their college credits and simultaneously work toward their CIP designation. This is critical to your success in the industry and your move towards becoming a strong industry professional.

It is important to know that CIP exams must be written in the Institute exam session immediately following course completion and college students who miss this window lose the opportunity to gain a valuable credit towards a highly regarded industry designation.

Institute exams are marked by experienced industry professionals who have a CIP or FCIP designation. Markers are provided answer points as guidelines and, where appropriate, have the discretion to consider valid answers not included in the answer points. Furthermore, the answers for any given exam question in any exam period for all students across the country are marked by the same person to ensure consistency.

You may be interested to know more about what happens to your final exam after you’ve written it. After you have finished writing your exam, it—along with the thousands of other exam papers that are written every semester—is collected and distributed to a team of qualified markers. Unlike a mid-term exam or quizzes and assignments, the final examination is not intended to be a learning exercise for review and discussion. Instead, it is an evaluation tool for the assessment students’ overall knowledge, understanding and application of the course material.

Since answer books are not intended for review by students, the exam markers do not comment in or indicate which information is correct or incorrect on the exam papers. As a result, the answer books would be of little value to students in determining where they were and were not awarded marks.

Students who wish to appeal their exam grade have three levels of appeal available to them. Re-calculation, re-assessment or re-evaluation offer varying degrees of review and feedback. The fees charged for each service reflects the amount of time, scrutiny and feedback provided by markers.

No. The reason for this is that the questions on the sample exams are just to give an indication of the layout and format of questions. The questions themselves do not relate to current text material, so the answers would not be at all helpful to you in your exam preparations.

To better prepare you for your exam, we recommend you refer to the practice questions that are available in the text, or your student resource guides. These questions are current and will include model answers that are better suited to help you understand what the markers are looking for in a complete answer.

You can also purchase practice multiple choice question bundles for the C11: Principles and Practice of Insurance course on our new IIC Mobile Learning App. If you would like to review our most frequently asked exam questions, please refer to the exam FAQ.