Post-exam Analysis of the January 2015 CII R06 Exam

Now that we have access to the questions that were posed to delegates sitting the January 2015 R06 exam, it’s time to see how we did in our pre-exam analysis. If you’re sitting the CII R06 exam in April, then you’ll want to read this.

Case Study 1

This focused on Dennis and Alice, a married couple with two dependent children.
The first question was ‘state the additional information you would need ……… if either of them were to suffer a critical illness’.  The first question in our analysis was the same, although we had included death as well. That’s 10 marks in the bag – what a great start, enabling the candidate to tackle the first question with confidence – just what you need in a 3-hour written paper!

The second question was the ‘recommend and justify question’, and for this couple, it focused on a suitable protection policy if either was to suffer a critical illness.  Our second question covered this in full too, meaning the 12 marks on offer could comfortably have been achieved.

It was a challenge to know what would be asked on the client’s maturing fixed term building society deposit account.  We had a ‘comment on’ question in our analysis as well as other information including taxation.  Delegates using just our analysis would have scored around half of the marks on offer.

Delegates then had to suggest how the unit trusts could be transferred to NISAs whilst minimising CGT, and our section on the investments that Dennis held, specifically mentioned gradually transferring his unit trust holding into NISAs.  The well prepared candidate could have expanded this to pick up some of the marks here.

We covered half of question 5 in full regarding the pension objective but didn’t predict that a question on auto-enrolment would come up.

To end the first case study well, the 10-point question on how Alice’s estate would be distributed if she died, was well covered by our analysis, enabling candidates to achieve top marks.

Case Study 2

Moving onto case study 2, and it seemed that most curve balls in this paper seemed to arise with this couple, Martin and Julie.  Generic information that is hard, if not impossible to predict, was tested, such as the main steps of the financial planning process, how the clients would pay the adviser and the eligibility criteria for SSP.  We may not have covered these specifically, but most advisers would be able to use their own knowledge to pick up some of the points on offer.

The rest, we were pleased to see, followed the usual format of explaining why a particular product would suit the client and how they could improve the tax efficiency of their portfolio.  Luckily these were big point questions so 25 marks should easily have been achieved using our analysis just on those two questions. The paper then moved onto how the grandchildren could be looked after in terms of investment, and again we had given full information on JISAs and how to use a discretionary trust, both of which were examined and would have achieved good marks.

The pass mark for R06 is 55%, and we are confident that anyone that used our analysis to prepare for their exam should have easily achieved this.

Grab the resources you need!

If you’re studying for your R06 exam, and you feel you need an added boost in your revision, grab our free case study analysis, from an earlier exam sitting, to see the analysis layout and content style for yourself.  Click the link to download the R06 free fact-find analysis now!

Over to you…

If you’re sitting the exam in April, do you feel you have a handle on it? If not, what worries you most about taking the exam?