University-Earned Credit now runs at 29 Center of Actuarial Excellence programs across seven countries after the Society of Actuaries approved five more on September 3, 2026 (SOA, September 2026). The eligible exam list is FM, SRM, FAM, ALTAM and ASTAM. A student at one of those campuses can therefore reach the ASA having sat only Exam P and Exam PA at a test centre.

The five additions are the University of California at Santa Barbara, Bayes Business School at City St George's, University of London, the University of Michigan, Ohio State University and Simon Fraser University. Bayes is the first UEC route inside the United Kingdom, which is the home market of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and its own long-running exemption scheme. Ohio State described the designation as recognising programs whose students can "earn credit toward SOA professional exams by demonstrating mastery of the course material" (OSU Department of Mathematics, 2026).

Key Takeaways

  • 29 programs in seven countries now hold UEC status, up from 24 when the SOA added the University of International Business and Economics and Towson University in 2025. Australia, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, the UK and the US are represented.
  • Four of the six ASA exams can be cleared without a test centre: FM, SRM, FAM, and whichever of ALTAM or ASTAM the candidate elects. Exam P and Exam PA remain sat exams for everyone.
  • 80% of grading points in a UEC course must come from proctored examinations, and the cumulative final must carry at least 50% of the grade. Bonus points cannot be added in.
  • 1,116 candidates sat ALTAM in April 2026 at a 45.8% raw pass rate. That is the population UEC removes its highest-scoring students from before they ever register.
  • No US coursework earns CAS exam credit. The CAS waiver route converts only IFoA, ASSA, IAI and Actuaries Institute subjects, at $50 per waiver on transcripts no more than five years old.

What the Five Approvals Cover

The UEC program requirements cap how many courses may be bundled behind each exam: one course for FM, three for SRM, and two each for FAM, ALTAM and ASTAM. Where an exam takes more than one course, the student has to meet or exceed the mark in every one of them at the same CAE university, inside a two-year period, while enrolled in a degree.

The single-university rule stops a candidate assembling one credit from a course here and a course there, which makes UEC a program-level statement rather than a transcript-level one. Applications must be filed within two years of the term in which the last required course ended.

Exam P sits outside the scheme. Probability is usually taught by a statistics or mathematics department, outside the actuarial faculty the accreditation machinery covers, so credit by coursework starts one step into the track. Exam PA is excluded too. Against the ASA requirements, which call for P, FM, FAM, SRM, PA and one of ALTAM or ASTAM, four exams become substitutable and two stay sat.

ExamUEC course maximumMost recent sittingCandidatesRaw pass rate
FM1April 20261,65048.8%
SRM3January 20261,21871.2%
FAM2February 20261,30460.6%
ALTAM2April 20261,11645.8%
ASTAM2April 202663950.9%
P (not eligible)–March 20262,11746.2%
PA (not eligible)–April 20261,96565.0%

Sitting figures are drawn from published SOA results as compiled in this site's exam pass-rate explorer, which carries every recorded sitting of 74 CAS and SOA exams.

The Sitting Population Loses Its Top Slice

The UEC FAQs state that a participating university has to set a mark that "meets or exceeds that of an exam-passing candidate" and that the mark is consistently applied across universities. Take that at face value and the arithmetic follows: every student who clears the mark is a student who would have passed, and who now never appears in a sitting.

Removal from the top of a distribution is not the same as a smaller sample. The candidates leaving the FAM and ALTAM registers are the ones a program judged at or above passing standard, so the residual population sitting those exams is weaker on average than the population that sat them before UEC scaled. Reported pass rates on the five eligible exams will drift downward for reasons that have nothing to do with the papers getting harder, and the drift will be largest where UEC coverage is densest.

Exam P and Exam PA keep unfiltered denominators, which is what makes the table above worth reading across. March 2026 Exam P passed 46.2% of 2,117 candidates and April 2026 ALTAM passed 45.8% of 1,116. Those two numbers currently look alike, and as UEC coverage deepens they will stop measuring the same thing: one is a pass rate across everyone attempting the material, the other is a pass rate across everyone who did not get it in class.

The same erosion runs through the screen employers actually use. A recruiter reading four exams on a resume has historically been reading four graded sittings, and the count is used that way throughout exam-linked pay scales and hiring bands. UEC credit records as exam credit, so the count no longer distinguishes a candidate who sat four papers from one who sat two and took a term of accredited coursework for the rest.

The two North American bodies have now split on this point. The CAS International University Credit policy grants no waiver for United States coursework at all; it converts only IFoA, ASSA, IAI and Actuaries Institute subjects, charging $50 per waiver and requiring transcripts under five years old. CS1 maps to Exam 1, CM1 to Exam 2, CS1 and CS2 together to MAS-I. An employer comparing a CAS candidate's exam count against an SOA candidate's is comparing two measurements with different definitions, which is a live consideration for anyone weighing the two tracks.

Comparability Rests on Process Review

How the SOA holds 29 programs to one standard is an audit design. Each university runs an External Examiner, an SOA member without conflicts, alongside a faculty Accreditation Actuary who must hold the ASA or FSA. Between them they review syllabi and examination papers, universities face a full re-evaluation every five years, and interim compliance reviews run in between.

What that structure does not include is a common assessment. No paper is sat across all 29 programs, no equating study is published, and the mark itself is not disclosed. The SOA's position, in the FAQs, is that "the UEC evaluation process is thorough and intensive with oversight from the CAE Evaluation Committee and the UEC Oversight Committee." That is an assurance about procedure, and it is the only comparability evidence available to anyone outside the committees.

The consequence lands on the people who have to act on the credential. A hiring manager cannot check whether the FAM standard at Bayes sits where the FAM standard at Michigan sits, because neither figure exists in public. The United Kingdom addition sharpens that: British students now choose between two exemption schemes, the SOA's and the IFoA's accredited-degree route, whose exemptions carry a five-year window from the date of the awarding degree and whose standards have never been calibrated against each other.

The measurement gap is self-sealing. A student who takes a UEC course and misses the mark generates no public record, because the failure is a course grade and the exam record never sees it, and the student may then sit the paper and appear in the statistics as an ordinary candidate. So the sitting data cannot recover what the coursework channel is doing, in either direction: the pass rates shrink and skew, and the figures that would explain why are held by 29 universities and two SOA committees.

Further Reading

Sources