The FRM Exam Day Checklist: Everything That Is Not Curriculum
Almost everything that goes wrong on FRM exam day is administrative. Candidates are turned away at the door, or have an exam left ungraded, for reasons that have nothing to do with how well they know the curriculum.
That is a strange thing to say about an exam this difficult, and it is the reason this checklist exists. The academic preparation is months of work and cannot be fixed in the last week. The administrative preparation is about forty minutes of work and can be done tonight, and it protects everything else. What follows is ordered by what it costs to get wrong, not by when it happens.
Key Takeaways
- Two items are required for entry: an original unexpired government photo ID, and a printed Confirmation of Appointment email. Digital versions of either are rejected.
- The name on the confirmation must match the identification exactly, including middle names and initials, and there are no exceptions.
- Using a calculator that is not on GARP’s approved list means the exam is not graded at all.
- No personal belongings in the room. Phones must be completely powered off rather than in airplane mode, and watches go in the locker.
- Arriving after the stated start time means no entry and forfeited fees, so plan the journey around the delay you would be furious about.
- There is no negative marking, so never leave a blank, and hold roughly 25, 50 and 73 cumulative questions at the hour marks.
Three things that end the day before it starts
GARP requires two items for admission to the exam room, and enforces a third rule once you are inside. Any one of them failing costs the entire sitting.
An original, valid, unexpired government-issued photo identification. This means a passport, or a driver’s licence issued by the country where you are taking the exam. A digital version on a phone is not accepted. A photocopy is not accepted. An expired passport is not accepted, and candidates discover the expiry date on exam morning more often than anyone would expect.
A printed copy of your Confirmation of Appointment email. An electronic version is rejected. This is the single most commonly missed requirement, because it is the only one that requires an action rather than an object you already own, and because showing an email on a phone feels like it ought to be enough. It is not.
An authorised calculator. If a candidate uses a calculator that is not on GARP’s approved list at any point during the exam, the exam is not graded. Not penalised. Not graded.
Check the expiry date on your identification. Print the confirmation email and put it with that identification, physically, in the bag you will carry. Confirm your calculator model against the approved list by reading the name printed on it rather than from memory. Three tasks, ten minutes, and they remove the three failures that no amount of preparation can recover from.
These rules apply identically to Part 1 and Part 2. Candidates sitting Part 2 having already cleared Part 1 sometimes treat the administration as familiar territory and skip the checks, and an expired passport does not care that you have sat the exam before.
The name match rule
The name on your Confirmation of Appointment email must match exactly the name on the identification you present. That includes first name, last name, and any middle names or initials. GARP states that there are no exceptions to its identification policy.
This catches more Indian candidates than most, for reasons that are entirely ordinary. Passports and driver’s licences often expand or contract a middle name differently. A name registered as it appears on a college record may not match the passport. Initials get spelled out on one document and abbreviated on the other. None of these is anyone’s mistake, and none of them will be treated as an exception on the day.
The fix has a deadline attached, which is why it belongs early in this list rather than in the final week. Compare the two documents character by character as soon as you register, not once revision is finished. If they differ, the correction goes through GARP well before the exam, and a request made in the final week may not be processed in time.
The calculator
GARP authorises a specific list of business calculators, and only these.
| Manufacturer | Models |
|---|---|
| Texas Instruments | BA II Plus, including the BA II Plus Professional |
| Hewlett Packard | 12C, including the Platinum and Anniversary editions |
| Hewlett Packard | 10B II, 10B II+ and 20B |
We recommend the Texas Instruments BA II Plus, and the reason is not that it computes better. It is that the overwhelming majority of Indian candidates, prep material and teaching videos use it, so every keystroke sequence you will encounter while studying maps onto the machine in front of you.
Whichever model you use, the rule that matters is to use the same physical calculator throughout preparation. Speed on this machine comes from muscle memory rather than knowledge, and muscle memory does not transfer between layouts. A candidate who studies on one calculator and sits the exam on a borrowed one has given away the fluency they spent months building.
Replace the batteries. Carry a second approved calculator if you can, since a failure mid-exam is otherwise unrecoverable. And clear the memory registers before you begin, because a stored value from practice carried into a live calculation is a silent error that produces a plausible wrong answer rather than an obvious one.
What to bring, and what cannot come in
No personal belongings are permitted in the exam room. Everything you bring goes into a locker or a designated bag, and only three things go on the desk.
| On the desk | In the locker | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Printed Confirmation of Appointment email | Phone, completely powered off | Powered off, not airplane mode |
| Government-issued photo identification | All watches, including analogue ones | Wearable technology is treated the same way |
| Authorised calculator | Bags, notes, food and drink | Scratch paper and a pencil are provided at the desk |
The watch rule surprises people, because a plain analogue watch feels harmless. It is stored with everything else, and the exam software shows the remaining time on screen. Look at where that timer appears during the tutorial screens at the start, so you are not searching for it while a question is running.
Scratch paper and a pencil are provided at the desk, and it is worth having a plan for how to use them. Candidates who write nothing down make more arithmetic slips, and candidates who write everything down lose time. A workable middle is to write only the intermediate values you will need again and the units, which is where most errors on this paper actually originate. Ask for replacement paper before you run out rather than after, since the request itself takes time.
Restroom breaks are permitted and the clock does not stop, so a break is time taken directly out of the four hours. Carry your identification with you if you leave the workstation.
The morning itself
Arrive at the time stated on your confirmation email. A candidate who arrives after the reported start time is not admitted and the fee is forfeited, and this is not a discretionary matter that a polite conversation at the desk will resolve.
That single rule should govern the whole morning. Travel to the centre the day before if it is unfamiliar, or at least look at how to reach it and how long it takes at that hour rather than at the hour you checked. Build in the delay you would be furious about rather than the one you expect. Arriving ninety minutes early and waiting is uncomfortable. Arriving ten minutes late is the end of the attempt.
Allow for the check-in process itself, which is not instant. There is an identity verification step, belongings have to be stored, and at a busy centre there is a queue. The confirmation email states a reporting time for exactly this reason, and it is earlier than the exam start time. Treat the reporting time as the deadline, not the start time.
Once you are seated there are tutorial and agreement screens before the exam clock begins. Read them rather than clicking through, because that is when to locate the on-screen timer, the flag control and the review screen. Hunting for a button while a question is running costs more than the thirty seconds the tutorial takes.
Eat something before you go. Four hours is long, food is not permitted at the desk, and a drop in concentration in the third hour is a real cost that has nothing to do with preparation.
The four hours
FRM Part 1 is 100 multiple-choice questions in four hours, which is 2.4 minutes per question. There is no negative marking, on either part.
That second fact settles one decision permanently. Never leave a question blank. A blank scores zero and a guess scores zero or one, so a guess is strictly better even when it is uninformed. Before the final review, make sure every question has an answer selected.
Why does skipping matter arithmetically? Assume 25 of the 100 questions are genuinely hard for you and would take six minutes each, and the other 75 take about 1.8 minutes.
- Refusing to skip: you meet the hard questions as they come and spend 25 × 6 = 150 minutes on them.
- That leaves 240 − 150 = 90 minutes for the other 75 questions, which is 1.2 minutes each.
- Two-pass approach: answer the 75 straightforward questions first at 1.8 minutes, using 75 × 1.8 = 135 minutes.
- That leaves 240 − 135 = 105 minutes for the 25 flagged questions, which is 4.2 minutes each.
Answer: the same 100 questions and the same four hours produce either 1.2 minutes for the easy ones or 4.2 minutes for the hard ones, depending only on the order. Skipping is not a confidence technique. It is the only sequencing that leaves enough time for the questions that need it, and candidates who run out of time almost always ran out because of the order rather than the total.
Use the flag control deliberately rather than as a general worry marker. A question you have answered but want to revisit and a question you have not attempted at all need different treatment in the fourth hour, and flagging both identically loses that distinction. We suggest flagging only questions where a specific second look would change something: a calculation you rushed, or a choice between two answers you narrowed to. Everything else has been decided and reopening it in the last hour tends to convert correct answers into wrong ones.
The final fifteen minutes have their own trap. That is the point at which a candidate who has been working steadily starts to reconsider earlier answers on instinct rather than on reasoning, and the change is more often wrong than right. Spend the last few minutes on the review screen confirming that nothing is unanswered, which is a mechanical check with a known payoff, rather than revisiting judgements you made with more time and a clearer head.
Hold to the checkpoints in the figure: about 25 questions at the end of the first hour, 50 at the end of the second, 73 at the end of the third. If you are meaningfully behind at the two-hour mark, correct then rather than at three hours, when there is no longer enough remaining time for a correction to work.
The three days before
Wind down heavy studying about three days before the exam. The last three days belong to your error notes and formula sheets, not to new material.
This is not a comfort measure. Anything genuinely new learned in the final 72 hours is unlikely to be retrievable under pressure, and the attempt to learn it competes with consolidating what is already there. The last month is about intelligent repetition rather than frantic new learning, and the last three days are the extreme case of that.
Sleep is worth protecting more than an extra revision session is worth having. Four hours of sustained quantitative concentration is a physical demand, and the difference between a well-rested candidate and a tired one shows up in the third hour, which is precisely where the harder flagged questions are waiting. A late night spent revising a topic you half know is a poor trade against the accuracy it costs across the whole paper.
Do not sit a full mock the day before. A poor score has no time left to be acted on and does real damage to the state you sit in. If you want to touch the material, review the formula sheet and the error log, both of which reward a light pass.
Everything in this checklist is a small thing. That is exactly why it is worth writing down. Months of preparation are protected or lost by whether a printed page is in a bag, whether a middle initial appears the same way on two documents, and whether a candidate is willing to leave a question unanswered for two hours. None of it is difficult and all of it is easy to leave until it is too late.
The short version
- Two items are required for entry: an original unexpired government photo ID, and a printed Confirmation of Appointment email. Digital versions of either are rejected.
- The name on the confirmation must match the identification exactly, including middle names and initials, and there are no exceptions.
- Using a calculator that is not on GARP’s approved list means the exam is not graded at all.
- No personal belongings in the room. Phones must be completely powered off, and watches go in the locker.
- Arriving after the stated start time means no entry and forfeited fees, so plan the journey around the delay you would be furious about.
- No negative marking, so never leave a blank, and hold roughly 25, 50 and 73 cumulative questions at the hour marks.
Frequently Asked Questions
What identification do I need for the FRM exam?
An original, valid, unexpired government-issued photo identification: a passport, or a driver’s licence issued by the country where you are sitting the exam. Digital versions and photocopies are not accepted. You also need a printed copy of your Confirmation of Appointment email, and an electronic version of that is rejected too.
What happens if my name does not match exactly?
You are not admitted. The name on the confirmation email must match the name on your identification exactly, including first name, last name and any middle names or initials, and GARP states there are no exceptions. Compare the two documents character by character as soon as you register, because a correction requested in the final week may not be processed in time.
Which calculators are allowed?
The Texas Instruments BA II Plus, including the Professional model, and the Hewlett Packard 12C including its Platinum and Anniversary editions, along with the HP 10B II, 10B II+ and 20B. Using anything else at any point during the exam means the paper is not graded. We recommend the BA II Plus, mainly because most Indian candidates and most prep material use it, so keystroke sequences transfer directly.
Can I take a watch or my phone into the exam room?
No. No personal belongings are permitted in the exam room. Watches, including analogue ones, and all wearable technology go into the locker, and phones must be completely powered off rather than in airplane mode. The exam software displays the time remaining, so find where that appears during the opening tutorial screens.
Is there negative marking on the FRM exam?
No, on either part. A blank scores zero and a guess scores zero or one, so a guess is always at least as good. Before your final review, confirm that every question has an answer selected, even the ones you are certain you have got wrong.
How should I pace the four hours?
Part 1 is 100 questions in 240 minutes, or 2.4 minutes each. Aim for roughly 25 questions by the end of the first hour, 50 by the end of the second and 73 by the end of the third, answering what you are confident about and flagging the rest for the fourth hour. The arithmetic matters: refusing to skip leaves about 1.2 minutes for each straightforward question, while the two-pass approach leaves over four minutes for each hard one.
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