Booking the CMFAS M9 exam: portal, fees and dates

You register for M9 through the Singapore College of Insurance (SCI), the body that runs every CMFAS paper. Create an account on the SCI candidate portal, pick the Module 9 paper, choose a date, and pay by credit card. The whole booking takes about ten minutes. The part that trips people up is choosing the right paper code and giving yourself enough lead time to actually study before the date you booked.

This guide walks through the booking itself, then the things candidates wish they had known before they clicked confirm.

What M9 actually is before you book

M9 is the life insurance paper, officially Life Insurance and Investment-Linked Policies, and it sits inside the CM-LIP qualification. The exam is 100 multiple-choice questions over two hours, and you need 70% to pass. The syllabus runs to 17 chapters, with the premium, cash value, and investment-linked policy calculations being the part most candidates underestimate.

There is a second paper, M9A, that completes CM-LIP. SCI lets you sit them as one combined exam or as two separate papers. That choice matters more than people expect, so deal with it before you log in.

Sit M9 on its own, not combined with M9A

When you register, the portal offers M9 alone or the combined CM-LIP sitting that covers M9 and M9A in one go. The combined option looks efficient. It carries a real risk.

In the combined sitting, both halves are scored together. Fall short on the M9A portion and you fail the entire paper, including the M9 work you got right. Booking M9 by itself means a pass is banked the moment you clear it. You then prepare for M9A separately with no chance of one paper dragging down the other.

Unless you have a specific reason to clear both in a single afternoon, register for M9 only.

Setting up your SCI account

Go to the SCI website (scicollege.org.sg) and look for the candidate login or account registration link. New candidates create an account first, then book from inside the portal.

Use a personal email address rather than your agency one. Representatives change agencies, and your exam history, result slips, and eBook access stay tied to whichever email you signed up with. Losing that record because you left a firm is an avoidable headache.

Selecting the correct module

Once you are logged in, open exam registration and choose CMFAS as the category. In the module list, select Module 9 (M9): Life Insurance and Investment-Linked Policies.

Read the line carefully. CM-LIP appears in the same list, and that is the combined M9 plus M9A paper described above. Picking it by accident is the single most common booking mistake, and the only way to undo it is to cancel and rebook, sometimes with a fee. Confirm the code says M9 before moving on.

Day, evening, or weekend pricing

The fee depends on when you sit. Non-member rates are:

Session	Timing	Non-member fee
Day	Weekdays, 9am to 5pm	S$130.80
Evening or weekend	After 5pm, or Saturday and Sunday	S$149.33

A weekday morning slot is the cheaper option by about S$19, and a fresh mind handles the calculation questions better than a tired one after a full work day. If your schedule allows it, book the morning.

Paying and getting your study material

SCI takes credit card only for online registration, either Visa or Mastercard. Have the card ready before you start so the session does not time out.

Printed textbooks are no longer issued. Once payment clears, SCI emails an access link for the digital study text. Check your inbox straight away, and check spam, because the access email often lands in the junk folder. If it has not arrived within a reasonable window, contact SCI rather than assuming it will turn up.

The eBook covers the syllabus, but reading is not the same as drilling questions under time pressure. The calculation chapters in particular only stick once you have worked through enough practice items to recognise the patterns. If you want to see how the eBook stacks up against dedicated question banks, the M9 mock exam comparison lays out what each option gives you.

Booking early gives you room to fail safely on paper

A booked date is a deadline, and the calculation-heavy chapters punish anyone who leaves them to the final week. Premium computations, cash value, and ILP allocation questions reward repetition, so the candidates who pass comfortably tend to start three to four weeks out and treat their weak chapters as the priority.

A retake costs roughly the same as the first sitting, so a rushed booking that ends in a fail is expensive twice over. Spread the prep, drill the maths early, and walk in having already made your mistakes on practice questions. The worked examples in our premium calculation mock questions cover the exact question types that catch people out.

What to bring on exam day

SCI does not hand out calculators, so the calculator is the item people forget. Sort it out before the day, not in the carpark.

• A non-programmable calculator that you own. Approved models include the Casio FC-100V and FC-200V, the HP 10b and 10b2, the Texas Instruments BA II Plus, and the Sharp EL-738. Confirm the current approved list on the SCI exam page before you buy.
• Your physical NRIC, or your Employment Pass if you hold one. Digital copies are not accepted.
• Arrival 30 minutes before the start time. Latecomers are turned away and forfeit the fee.

Test your calculator on a few practice questions in the days before. Knowing the buttons under exam pressure matters as much as owning the right model.

After you have booked

Booking is the easy part. The pass rate is decided by how well you handle the calculation and law chapters, which is where most of the lost marks come from. Build your study time around those first, then fill in the policy-type and principles chapters that are more about recall than working.

When you are ready to practise, the CMFAS Prep app lets you drill M9 questions by chapter and runs full timed mock papers, so you can see which chapters are still costing you marks before your exam date arrives. Start with the calculation chapters and work outward.