All this week the Brand Financial Training team will be answering the questions put forward by paraplanners around forthcoming exams, studying methods and motivation.
Q: Do you have any tips for the multi-response questions in the R0 exams?
A: Thank you for today’s question – this will be really helpful to anyone studying towards the CII’s R01, 2, 3 or 4 exams as they all contain the dreaded multi-response questions. There are 11 of these style of questions in R03 and R04, 13 in R01 and a whopping 28 in R02, so it’s well worth spending some time mastering them as they account for a good percentage of the marks in each of the exams.
A multi-response question will have between 4 to 6 answer options (thankfully 6 options are very rare) and at least 2 of these will be correct, so they can be more time consuming than the standard format questions where you know there will always be one correct answer from 4 options. These questions always appear at the end of the exam so if possible, save a little extra time for answering them. Some candidates often feel they are harder too, but in reality, there’s no difference in the difficulty level it’s simply a case of eliminating fewer options.
Let’s look at an example from R02.
Alex, aged 30, is contributing for the first time to a Lifetime ISA (LISA) in tax year 2021/22. She should be aware that:
- she can contribute up to £9,000 per tax year.
- the Government bonus is 20% of her contribution.
- the Government bonus is payable until Alex reaches age 50.
- there may be a penalty upon full encashment of the LISA.
Disregarding wrong answers
The amount she can contribute is £4,000 so we can disregard option A as incorrect.
Option B starts off as a promising correct answer as there is, of course, a Government bonus, but the amount is 25% rather than 20%, so we can disregard this option too.
A quick solution for the 4-option answer
The brave candidate who remembers that at least two of the multi-response answers are correct could then just mark C and D as correct and quickly move onto the next question, but we think most would want to make sure by reading them through anyway and of course some questions will have more than 4 options so you’ll need to read on.
The Remaining Options
C states that ‘the Government bonus is payable until Alex reaches age 50’ and we know this is correct. Finally, option D says there may be a penalty upon full encashment of the LISA, and we know this is true as well; a withdrawal charge is made if cash or assets are withdrawn before the age of 60, for any reason other than buying a first home or being terminally ill with less than 12 months to live.
This makes the answer to this question C and D.
Worth Remembering
Multi-response questions can be challenging, but it might be worth remembering that MOST of the time, only 2 of the options given are correct. For example, the latest R02 exam guide shows that out of 28 multi-response questions, 22 have two correct answers, and only 6 questions have 3 correct answers. Another welcome relief is that out of those 28 questions, just 1 of them has 5 options to choose from, with all the rest just having 4.
We hope this has given you some helpful pointers. A multi-response worked example for R01, 3 or 4 is also available in the How to Pass Guides which you can download for free via this link.
Information in this article is correct as at 14th September 2021.
