Beginning with the Fall 2025 exam administration, the CAS stopped publishing named lists of passing candidates. Individual names no longer appear on a post-results roster; instead, exam-passing windows appear in CAS Public Directory profiles for candidates who choose to make that information public. The CAS continues to publish aggregate exam statistics: in Fall 2025, 383 of 847 MAS-I candidates passed, a 45.2% raw pass ratio (CAS Exam Statistics, Fall 2025).
What the Passing Lists Contained
Candidate-level public data formats look like administrative trivia until a format change breaks the shortcuts that recruiters and researchers built around them. For years, the CAS published post-results pages naming individual passing candidates by exam and sitting. The lists were available publicly on the CAS website under Exam Results and were updated within days of each results release.
Recruiters used them as the fastest way to identify candidates who had just crossed an exam milestone. A fresh MAS-I or Exam 5 pass is a meaningful hiring signal for entry-to-mid-level P&C roles. The passing lists gave recruiters unmediated access to that pool at the exact moment candidates are often most open to outreach. Candidates who were not actively searching for a new role were still discoverable, which created a passive inbound recruiting channel specific to exam timing.
Employers used the lists differently: as a first-pass verification step when a recent hire or candidate claimed a particular sitting's result. Confirming a name appeared on a specific sitting's published list was faster than routing a query through the formal CAS verification tool, especially for preliminary exams and early CAS-specific exams where quick informal confirmation was sufficient.
Researchers and pipeline analysts used the lists for yet a third purpose: constructing a sitting-level count of new passers. An analyst tracking how many candidates cleared MAS-I in a given calendar year could aggregate across both sittings from the published pages. The lists were, in effect, an ad hoc census of the candidate pool at each milestone exam.
The Directory Replacement and What Opt-In Means
The CAS is directing candidates and members to the CAS Public Directory as the replacement mechanism. For candidates who have chosen to make their profiles public, the exam-passing date appears in the directory as a passing window tied to the sitting, not a specific score or rank. "Candidates and members can view the passing window in which an exam was passed through the CAS Public Directory," the CAS stated when announcing the change (CAS, 2025). That window shows the relevant exam administration period rather than a precise date.
The structural shift is from default public to default private. Under the old system, a candidate appeared on the passing list regardless of their preference; opting out required contacting the CAS office directly. Under the new system, the default is private: a passing window only appears in the directory if the candidate has affirmatively enabled public profile visibility. The asymmetry runs the other direction now.
For candidates who want to be found, the friction is low: enable visibility in profile settings and the information flows to anyone searching the directory. For candidates who prefer privacy, an exam pass event generates no automatic public footprint. Professionals navigating internal career transitions, candidates at firms with strict confidentiality norms around job searches, or simply people who found the automatic disclosure discomforting now have a default they do not have to actively override. The practical consequence depends entirely on what the candidate chooses.
Employer Verification: What Still Works and Where the Constraint Is
The CAS maintains a separate Verify Candidate’s Exam Status tool, accessible through the CAS portal at portal.casact.org, which remains the authoritative mechanism for employer credential verification. It searches active candidate records and returns current exam and education status. Its scope is explicit in the CAS’s own framing: the tool covers "most active CAS candidates (those who have taken an examination within the last two years)" (CAS, Verify Candidate’s Exam Status page).
That two-year window has always been the design boundary for the active-candidate search, but it carried less practical weight when passing lists provided a complementary cross-reference for recent sittings. With the lists gone, the two-year constraint is more exposed. A candidate who passed Exam 7 three years ago and has since been working without sitting additional exams would not appear in the active-candidate search. Verifying that credential requires a different path: checking the CAS member directory for ACAS or FCAS credential holders, or contacting the CAS office for records outside the two-year window.
For most hiring situations this gap does not create a practical problem. Candidates still active in the pipeline appear in the tool, and the CAS member directory captures anyone who has earned ACAS or FCAS. But the gap is real for employers trying to confirm a mid-career hire’s specific exam completion record when ACAS has not yet been conferred and the relevant exam sitting was more than two years ago. The CAS’s guidance on the tool also notes that if a search returns multiple results for a given name, the system requires direct contact with the CAS office rather than providing an unverified match (CAS, Verify Candidate’s Exam Status page). Common names mean that employer verification of a senior candidate might require a formal inquiry regardless of the tool’s general availability.
Selection Bias in Directory-Based Pipeline Analysis
Anyone who tries to measure the CAS candidate pipeline by counting public directory profiles will be measuring a self-selected subset, not the full population. Candidates who make their profiles public are not a random draw from the passing population. They are more likely to be actively job-searching, to be earlier in their careers where networking and visibility generate returns, and to be engaged with professional associations in ways that correlate with exam performance and career trajectory. Candidates who are secure in their current roles, who prefer privacy, or who completed their exam pathway years ago and moved into senior positions have less structural incentive to maintain a visible public profile.
This creates a systematic skew in any count that uses directory visibility as a proxy for exam pass volumes. A researcher who counted MAS-I passing windows in the CAS directory across years would be measuring something closer to "how many recent passers chose public visibility" than "how many candidates passed." Those two numbers diverge in a direction that understates the total pool, and the magnitude of the understatement will vary by career stage, firm type, and economic cycle in ways that are difficult to adjust for without the full population count.
The aggregate exam statistics the CAS continues to publish are not subject to this problem. The Fall 2025 administration produced 847 total MAS-I takers and 383 passers at a 45.2% raw pass ratio (CAS Exam Statistics, Fall 2025). The August 2025 sitting had 446 candidates with a 50.0% pass rate; May 2025 saw 852 candidates with a 42.6% pass rate (Actuarial Lookup). These are full-population counts with no opt-in filter. For anyone doing market sizing, pipeline depth analysis, or staffing trend work, the aggregate statistics page carries the defensible numbers. The directory is a discovery and networking tool, not a data source.
| Sitting | Candidates | Raw Pass Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Fall 2025 | 847 | 45.2% |
| August 2025 | 446 | 50.0% |
| May 2025 | 852 | 42.6% |
| May 2024 | 932 | 55.3% |
| Effective rate (15 sittings, May 2018–present) | – | 58.6% |
Sources: CAS Exam Statistics (Fall 2025); Actuarial Lookup. Effective pass rate reflects cumulative success across all attempts, not a single-sitting figure.
What Aggregate Statistics Actually Show
The CAS Exam Results and Summary of Exam Statistics page continues to publish pass data at the exam and sitting level, with Excel and PDF files covering every exam from 2011 to the present. For each sitting, the CAS releases candidate counts, passer counts, raw pass ratios, and effective pass ratios. New member lists also continue to be published on a regular cadence, most recently covering May 2026 conferrals.
The aggregate data is more analytically useful than the named lists were for population-level work. A list of candidate names told you which individuals cleared a given sitting but could not tell you whether those candidates had attempted that exam before, what other exams they were carrying simultaneously, or where they sat in the overall pipeline. The aggregate statistics, tracked longitudinally, show volume trends without any of those confounds.
One number the aggregate data reveals that the named lists obscured: the gap between raw and effective pass rates. The MAS-I effective pass rate across 15 sittings since May 2018 is 58.6% (Actuarial Lookup), against a per-sitting average nearer 45%. The 13-point spread reflects a meaningful cohort of repeat-attempt candidates who eventually pass. Named passing lists captured only first-time passers in a given sitting alongside retakers who succeeded; they never made the repeat-attempt pattern visible in any clean way. The effective rate, published in the aggregate statistics, is the more honest representation of what the pipeline ultimately produces.
The PCPA Timing and the Admissions Redesign Context
The privacy shift did not happen in isolation. It falls mid-stream in the CAS Admissions Transformation Plan, which has been reshaping the exam pipeline since 2023. The PCPA requirement, mandatory for ACAS candidates as of January 2026, added a two-hour multiple-choice exam at Pearson VUE at $300 per attempt, plus a 15-day independent modeling project administered through The Institutes at $700 per attempt on a quarterly cycle, with an estimated 20 hours of work per attempt (CAS, PCPA FAQ, updated April 2026). MAS-I and MAS-II moved to four annual sittings in 2026, up from three, and Exams 8 and 9 expanded from once-yearly to twice-yearly availability. New test item types, faster score reporting, and exam breaks also arrived under the transformation plan.
More frequent exam sittings mean more frequent result releases, which would have generated more frequent named-list publications under the old format. The shift to directory-based visibility sidesteps an administrative cycle that was growing busier as the exam calendar expanded. The PCPA project component also introduced a results format that does not fit cleanly into the traditional post-results-day list model: project completions arrive on a quarterly rolling basis, not in the batch format of a traditional exam sitting. A directory profile that updates dynamically as new credentials are conferred handles that pattern more cleanly than a publication that makes sense only at a single moment in time.
Taken together, the admissions redesign was already moving the credentialing process toward a more continuous model. The passing-list format was a relic of a simpler calendar where all candidates for a given exam sat on roughly the same day and results came in one batch. That calendar still exists for most upper-level exams, but the surrounding ecosystem has changed enough that a directory-based approach is more durable across the full portfolio of credential events the CAS now tracks.
What Candidates Should Do Now
First, check CAS Public Directory privacy settings. If you want exam history visible to recruiters doing informal searches or employers conducting initial candidate research, confirm your profile is set to public and that passing windows are displaying correctly for all relevant exams. The directory is the direct replacement for the passive discovery the passing lists provided. A private profile means no passive inbound signal from exam milestones.
Second, understand the verification path for each exam on your record. For recent exam credits within the past two years, the CAS Verify Candidate’s Exam Status tool is the relevant route for an employer inquiry. For older credits, or for anyone who has earned ACAS or FCAS, the member directory and a potential direct CAS inquiry are the verification paths. Know which route applies to your situation before a hiring process surfaces the question.
Third, keep resume documentation independent of directory visibility. Listing exam credits with specific sitting dates on a resume remains valid and does not require any public profile setting. The resume entry is the primary self-reported credential signal; the directory is a secondary discovery tool that enhances but does not replace it.
Fourth, for candidates working through the PCPA requirement: the exam component and the project component generate separate results on different timelines. The exam result comes first, from Pearson VUE, generally within two weeks. The project result follows on the quarterly grading cycle. Confirm how your CAS transcript and profile display both components, particularly if you are approaching an employer conversation before ACAS is formally conferred. A partial PCPA record (exam passed, project in progress) is worth communicating explicitly rather than leaving to a profile search that may not show the in-progress state clearly.
The Hiring Signal Going Forward
The passing-list format was a small, specialized data product that most practitioners never used directly. Its discontinuation is primarily a privacy improvement and a modest inconvenience for a narrow set of recruiters who built outreach workflows around it. The underlying exam data, the per-sitting counts and pass rates that track the health and size of the P&C candidate pipeline, continues to be published through the aggregate statistics page, which remains the authoritative source for any quantitative analysis of CAS exam trends.
Recruiters who want to reach recent passers now need to reach them through direct engagement, referral networks, or the CAS directory search for candidates who have made profiles public. Employers verifying exam credits run through the verify tool for active candidates or the member directory for credentialed professionals. Researchers tracking pipeline depth use aggregate statistics, not directory head counts. None of those adjustments are complicated. The data environment around CAS exam results is somewhat less transparent at the individual level than it was, the default for new passers is now private, and the workflows that depended on publication-day timing need to adapt to an opt-in world.