Why IIQE Paper 3 Has No "Priority Chapter" — Four Major Chapters at 22–24% Each

Last updated 2026-08-10

"Focus on the priority chapters" is the most common study strategy. It genuinely works on IIQE Paper 1 — two chapters alone account for 56% of expected lost marks.

But the same data gives the opposite answer for Paper 3: Paper 3 has no priority chapter.

Paper 3: distribution of expected lost marks

Using exactly the same method as for Paper 1 (expected lost marks = official chapter weighting × (1 − candidates' actual accuracy); the method and definitions are set out in the Paper 1 article):

The top two chapters together come to just 48%, and the third and fourth places are right behind them, within a percentage point or two — which is about as close to "no difference" as it gets.

Three direct conclusions

1. You cannot play Paper 3 the Paper 1 way

The optimal strategy on Paper 1 is concentrated fire: put 30% of your time into Chapter 3 and you cover 33% of the lost marks.

Paper 3 offers no such leverage. Set aside Chapter 1, where the marks come easily, and you have to get through all four remaining chapters. Pick two for focused effort and merely skim the other two, and each of those two will cost you around 22% of the expected lost marks.

2. Paper 3 is hard overall, not hard in one particular place

Look at the accuracy column: Chapters 2 through 5 all sit within 55%–60% — remarkably even. On Paper 1, the corresponding four middle chapters sit at 65%–72%.

These are two different kinds of difficulty:

• Paper 1's difficulty is local — you are fine in most chapters, and two are where the marks slip away.
• Paper 3's difficulty is global — no chapter is disastrous, but no chapter feels truly solid either.

The second kind is more likely to make you misjudge how ready you are, because "every chapter feels okay" and "no chapter is quite enough" look exactly the same from the inside.

3. Chapter 2 is the one exception — but perhaps in the opposite direction to what you expect

Chapter 2 (Types of Life Insurance and Annuities) has an accuracy of 55.0%, the lowest of the whole paper, and also the highest number of answers (769) — practised over and over, and still the lowest.

But its weighting is 20%, below the 24% of Chapters 3 and 4. So its expected lost marks (22%) do not rank first.

This is a clean example of "low accuracy ≠ high priority": it is the hardest chapter, but it is not the one to fix first. Chapters 4 and 3 should come first — they carry more weight, and their accuracy is hardly any better.

If you remember only one sentence

Paper 1 asks "which chapter first"; Paper 3 asks "is there enough time to do all four".

The two papers are often placed in the same study cycle (many candidates sit Papers 1 and 3 together). If you plan to use the same approach on both, you will most likely underestimate the total time Paper 3 needs — because your Paper 1 experience taught you that "focusing on the priority chapters is enough", and Paper 3 has no priority chapters to focus on.

About this data

The sample is 9 candidates and 7,914 answers (Papers 1 and 3 combined, of which 3,295 on Paper 3) — not big data. These are accuracy rates on first contact with new questions during practice, not examination pass rates. They answer a time-allocation question and cannot be used to predict examination results.

All other definitions, limitations and caveats are the same as in the Paper 1 article, where they are set out in more detail.