My R06 Experience – Part 1
Members of the Brand Financial Training Team regularly sit some of the CII exams to ensure we keep in touch with how they are evolving and to understand the pressures faced by candidates. In this, the first of two articles, I share my thoughts on the remote invigilation process and in next week’s article I will give my feedback on the CII R06 exam itself.
This article is correct as at 13 December 2022.
Written by Ann Mora
It was my turn in September to sit the R06 Financial Planning Practice exam, which I sat remotely from home. As a member of our resource authoring team, it’s always interesting to experience taking the exams. This was the first time I had used the CII’s remote invigilation system, so I was feeling a little extra pressure!
Thankfully, the systems played ball and the exam was, to some degree, what I was expecting, but there were certainly some things I gained from the experience which I’m sure future R06 candidates would find useful.
I am by no means an IT expert, and although I had used the CII’s PSI system in exam centres, I hadn’t sat a remote exam from home before and this was certainly one of my biggest concerns. Would the system crash, would my room check fail, would my dogs stay quiet? Needless to say, I had a few nerves on exam day!
Pre-exam preparation is essential
The CII emailed me the login details for the exam well in advance of the exam date. This allowed me to do a lot of preparation beforehand. As soon as I received the details, I downloaded the software to check there was no issue with my company firewalls as I was using a company laptop. I spent time practising how to show ID and doing room checks, and I also spent a good amount of time looking at the familiarisation test. This made me feel a lot more confident about the remote exam process itself, and I would definitely advise candidates to do this too.
Even though many candidates would have sat their multiple-choice R0 exams remotely before, R06 is a written exam and therefore has a different look, with different features, so practice is needed using the familiarisation test specifically for written exams. It is based on AF1 but is an accurate representation of what will be seen in your R06 exam. It is worth spending time checking where everything is, such as where the case studies and the questions are positioned, and where to find the tax tables and calculator. I found accessing the tax tables to be quite time consuming, but the good news is with R06 you’ll not need to refer to them for many of your answers.
To replicate what I would be faced with on exam day, I used the self-test questions in our analysis and gave myself 40 minutes to answer these questions using the familiarisation test. This gave me the chance to not only practise answering R06-style questions but to practise typing them out and using the features of the online system. At the end of this short exercise, I felt so much more comfortable moving between the questions, and I also found the ‘flag’ tool very useful as it highlights the questions you’ll need to go back to as a priority. I used this on a couple of questions where I felt I could eke out a couple more points if I had the time. Putting this work in beforehand undoubtedly saved me a lot of precious time in the exam.
Exam Day
During the exam, my internet connection was absolutely fine, but we do know from past candidates that the connection to the PSI system can be a little temperamental. If it does fail and your exam is halted, you can simply log back in and you will not have any time deducted – just a bit of lost momentum no doubt.
In terms of taking the exam at home, I found it less distracting than at the exam centre. When I took my last exam in the exam centre, candidates were starting and finishing at different times, so lots of coming and going, and the frantic tap-tapping of all the candidates on their keyboards drove me a little nuts! At home, I was surprisingly well focused and even when the dogs did inevitably start barking at the (you’ve guessed it) Amazon delivery drivers, I was so zoned in, it really wasn’t a problem.
All in all, my own personal experience was that it was an incredibly smooth process and, pleasantly, a lot easier than expected from start to finish. That is also the feedback we’ve been getting recently from many other candidates, so it looks like the CII have ironed out some of the initial teething issues with their remote invigilation systems and processes. From personal experience, I can now highly recommend sitting the exam in the comfort of your own home rather than travelling to an exam centre.
Grab the resources you need!
If you’re studying for your CII R06 exam, and you’re wanting to feel more confident on exam day, grab our free taster analysis to try out one of Brand Financial Training’s resources for yourself. Click the link to download the R06 case study analysis taster now!
