Why Do So Many Candidates Not Pass the CISI Level 7 Financial Plan Case Study?
The CISI has quietly told us the answer all along; most candidates just haven’t read it.
Every submission window, another cohort of experienced, capable financial planners sit down to write their Level 7 Financial Plan Case Study and a significant number of them don’t pass straight away. This isn’t because they are technically incapable, and also not because they lack communication skills. They don’t pass because of a much less glamorous reason: their plan is not built in the way the CISI actually asks them to.
Here’s an even more surprising point: The CISI publishes exactly what often goes wrong. It’s sitting in Section 5.4 of their Candidate Guidance, under the deceptively modest heading “Common Problems.” Most candidates skim past it. That’s a mistake because this section is, in effect, an examiner’s confession of where the marks are lost, year after year.
The plan fails before it’s even marked
Some plans never even reach an assessor’s judgement. Go over 60 pages, use the wrong font or spacing, forget your candidate number on the front cover, or lean too heavily on the CISI’s own Example Plan and your submission comes straight back unmarked. All that revision, all that technical knowledge, undone by formatting and an originality checker. It’s an unglamorous way to lose a submission window, and entirely avoidable.
The eleven habits that quietly sink good candidates
Strip away the jargon and the CISI’s own list of common problems reads like a checklist any competent planner should be able to tick off, and yet, plan after plan, candidates don’t. The recurring issues are:
- Assumptions stated but never reasoned or explained. They are also often used inconsistently from one section of a report to the next.
- State benefits and allowances left out of the picture entirely. These are often modest sums but all contribute towards a client’s financial prosperity, especially over an extended period of time.
- Timing errors on income and outgoings, with no explanation for why a contribution runs for a set period or a benefit stops when it does.
- Calculation mistakes; often the kind that undermine confidence in everything else in the plan. Examples of these could be tax and national insurance calculations or compounding and discounting errors.
- Appendices that don’t reconcile with the figures actually used in the narrative.
- Recommendations that aren’t explicitly tied back to the client’s objectives, the problem being solved, or their attitude to risk and capacity for loss.
- No stress-testing of what happens to this plan if the client falls ill, or dies, next year.
- Recommendations left uncosted or unjustified, especially against alternative approaches.
- Invented meetings or data that were never in the case study.
- External risks that go unaddressed. Think of the wider environment in terms of tax, legislative and political regimes. To what extent may these change over the period of your plan?
- No final cross-check against the Assessment Criteria before submission. This is really important. The report is assessed against the syllabus learning outcomes, so use it effectively as a checklist on your report.
None of these are exotic technical failures. They’re discipline failures — the gap between knowing the answer and proving you’ve applied it, in writing, to this specific client.
The pass mark has a sting in its tail
Here is also detail that catches out even strong candidates. It isn’t enough to score 65% overall. You also need at least 51% in every single learning outcome: Financial Management and Tax, Personal Risk Management, Asset Management, Financial Planning Practice, Retirement Planning, and Estate Planning. Write a superb plan overall but neglect Estate Planning for instance, and you can fail on that one weak outcome alone, regardless of how strong the rest of the document is. It’s a genuinely holistic test, and it punishes lopsided plans.
So why does this keep happening?
Because the Level 7 Case Study asks for something many experienced advisers have never had to produce before from scratch: a single, cohesive document that shows the joined-up thinking of the entire financial planning process, not a series of isolated technical answers. Plenty of candidates arrive from more modular qualifications and instinctively write in silos; a tax section here, a retirement section there, without stitching the client’s goals through the whole plan. The result reads like six separate essays, not one advice document. And that’s precisely what the CISI’s assessment criteria are designed to catch.
Source: CISI Level 7 Financial Plan Case Study Candidate Guidance (Version 5.1, November 2024).
