1.2 The 12-Unit Curriculum Map and a Study Plan

The Official Curriculum, Unit by Unit

NISM publishes the curriculum for this examination on its own website. The current structure has 12 units containing 87 lettered sub-topics. Every one of those sub-topics is fair game, and this guide devotes teaching to each of them.

A Trap Worth Naming Early

Search for "NISM V-A syllabus" and you will find an outline built around units called Offer Document, Accounting, Valuation & Taxation, Selecting the Right Investment Products for Investors, Helping Investors with Financial Planning, and Recommending Model Portfolios & Financial Plans, complete with a tidy weightage table running from 4% to 12%.

That outline is superseded. None of those unit names appears in NISM's current curriculum. The financial-planning and model-portfolio material in particular was moved out of this examination — that territory now belongs to the NISM Investment Adviser series. Candidates who prepare from the old outline study two chapters that are no longer examined and skip Investment Landscape and Mutual Fund Scheme Performance entirely, which together account for 18 of the 87 current sub-topics.

A second consequence: NISM does not publish unit weightages for the current curriculum. The only weightage table on the NISM site belongs to the retired outline. Any source quoting "Investor Services 12%" or "Taxation 4%" for the current syllabus is guessing, and different sources guess differently. Rather than invent numbers, treat sub-topic count as the emphasis signal — it is the exam owner's own structural statement about how much material each unit contains.

Where the Marks Concentrate

On a sub-topic count basis the syllabus is lopsided in a way that surprises most candidates:

• Investor Services (15 sub-topics) is the largest unit by a clear margin. NFO mechanics, allotment, account statements, application forms, cut-off timing, time stamping, KYC, systematic transactions, non-financial transactions and turnaround times all live here. It is dense, operational, and highly examinable because every item has a precise rule.
• Fund Distribution (10) is next, and it is the unit that describes your own job — ARN, EUIN, modes of distribution, commission, disclosure, due diligence, the distributor-versus-adviser boundary.
• Taxation (9) and Mutual Fund Scheme Performance (9) follow. Both are detail-heavy: tax rates and holding periods in one, benchmarks and quantitative measures in the other.
• Investment Landscape (9) and Risk, Return and Performance (8) cover the conceptual foundation.
• Scheme Related Information (2) is the smallest unit, but do not read that as unimportant: those two sub-topics cover the SID, SAI and KIM, and disclosure documents are examined constantly.

Put differently, Units VI and IX together account for 25 of 87 sub-topics — nearly 30% of the enumerated syllabus, and both are almost entirely about process and rules rather than concepts.

A Study Sequence That Matches the Paper

The units are not in the best learning order. A more effective sequence:

1. Start with Units II and III (concept and legal structure). Twenty pages of foundation makes everything downstream cheaper to learn.
2. Move to Unit VII (NAV, expense ratio, pricing). NAV is the spine of the entire subject; loads, cut-off timing, accounting and taxation all attach to it.
3. Then Unit IX (Investor Services), the largest unit, while you are fresh. Build a one-page checklist of every timeline: allotment, dispatch of statements, turnaround times, redemption payout.
4. Then Units IV and VI (regulation, distribution). These interlock — due diligence and the AMFI Code of Conduct appear in both.
5. Then Unit VIII (taxation). Do this in one sitting with a table, not in fragments; the rates only make sense as a set.
6. Then Units X, XI, XII (risk, performance, selection), which build on each other in that order.
7. Finish with Unit I (Investment Landscape). It is conceptual, it is quick, and it makes a good final week because it revises risk and asset allocation ideas that recur across Units X and XII.

How to Use the Practice Checks

Every section in this guide ends with multiple-choice questions written in the style of the real paper: a short scenario, four plausible options, and one defensible answer. Read the explanation even when you answer correctly — the explanations carry the distinctions that separate near-miss options, and near-miss options are exactly how this examination distinguishes candidates who memorised a phrase from candidates who understood a rule.