1.1 PCPA Exam Format, Scoring & Registration

The PCPA Exam

Quick Answer: The Property and Casualty Predictive Analytics (PCPA) requirement of the Casualty Actuarial Society has two components. The first is a computer-based exam of 40 questions delivered in a 2-hour testing window at a Pearson VUE centre for a $300 fee. The second is a separately registered, separately graded project. You must pass the exam before you can register for the project.

PCPA is part of the ACAS (Associate of the Casualty Actuarial Society) credentialing pathway. Candidates who had every other ACAS requirement on their transcript before January 1, 2026 were not required to complete it; everyone else is. Candidates who earned the CSPA credential by passing CSPA Exam 3 (rather than through an IFM waiver) are eligible for a PCPA requirement waiver.

Exam Administration at a Glance

Two hours for 40 questions works out to three minutes per item. That is generous for a recall item and tight for an item that asks you to read a block of model output and judge whether a coefficient should stay in the model, so budget accordingly and use the scheduled break deliberately rather than burning it on a single hard question.

How the Exam Is Scored

Each response is scored correct or incorrect. Your total score — the raw number of correct responses — is compared against a passing standard set by actuarial subject matter experts. There is no guessing penalty, and unanswered questions are scored as incorrect, so leave nothing blank.

Because the exam runs continuously, each candidate receives a form assembled from a pool of items, and CAS applies statistical scaling so that forms administered in the same testing period are comparable in content and passing criteria. A limited number of unscored beta items are seeded into each form to trial them for future use; you cannot identify them, which is another reason to treat every question as if it counts.

Results arrive in two stages:

1. Preliminary pass/fail appears on screen immediately at the test centre.
2. Official results are posted to the CAS candidate portal 15 days after the exam date.

That 15-day gap matters for planning, because project registration closes before a late exam result would arrive.

Item Types

The PCPA Exam is not purely four-option multiple choice. The Content Outline lists four item types:

• Multiple choice — one correct answer.
• Multiple select — more than one correct answer.
• Fill-in-the-blank — you type a value, so arithmetic and rounding discipline matter.
• Enhanced matching — match items across columns, for example distributions to the loss quantities they suit.

Domain Weights

The exam is built from three domains. These weights come from the Actuarial Professional Analysis conducted in 2024 and are the only official weights that exist for PCPA.

Note how the emphasis shifts between components. Data handling and modelling dominate the exam; interpretation and presentation carries the largest single share of the project rubric.

Cognitive Mix

Every item is written to a task and a cognitive level:

• Recall — 5-10%
• Understand and Apply — 55-60%
• Analyze and Evaluate — 35-40%
• Create — 0-5%

Roughly nine out of every ten items sit above pure recall. Memorising the density of the Tweedie distribution will earn you very little; being able to look at a residual plot, a set of AIC values, or a lift chart and say what to do next will earn you nearly everything.

Eligibility, Retakes, and Housekeeping

• Prerequisites: none formally. CAS highly encourages candidates to pass MAS-I, MAS-II and Exam 5 first, and the Content Outline states the exam assumes that foundation.
• Retakes: up to three attempts within one year of the first attempt, with a mandatory two-week waiting period between attempts. The $300 fee applies each time.
• Registration window: once registered, a candidate has one year to sit the exam.
• Discounts: both the exam and the project are eligible for international and student discounts.
• Accommodations: the same accommodations available for other Pearson-delivered CAS exams apply. The CAS religious/national holiday policy does not apply to PCPA.
• Grievances: administrative complaints (test-centre noise, technology failures) must be emailed to CAS within 5 business days of the exam date. Content feedback goes through the separate candidate feedback form.

[!WARNING] Do not confuse the 2-hour exam duration with the 2.5-hour appointment. The appointment is 2.5 hours because it also contains the tutorial, confidentiality agreement, end-of-exam survey, and a 15-minute scheduled break. Only two hours of that is time on scored items.

Official Resources

• PCPA exam and project page — fees, registration links, and the full candidate FAQ
• PCPA Content Outline — domains, tasks, readings, and administration detail
• CAS Syllabus of Basic Education — registration and administration policy