How certification works

How does a course run?

Courses are taught in cohorts. A cohort opens when its seats are filled, and every enrolled student receives the start date by email as soon as the last seat is taken. Each paid course is a 12-month license from the cohort start. The two Diplomas and the Fellowship carry a longer license, stated on their pages, so that every course, exam and the capstone fit inside it. Within the license, study is self-paced.

What does every course contain?

Every paid course comes with the first seven and the certificate, whichever level it sits at. The proctored exam and the credential come when the course is taken as part of a Certificate, Diploma or Fellowship.

1. Workbooks written to train the thinking patterns and the important concepts of the course, with worked problems and the reasoning behind each answer.
2. An audio edition: focused, well-presented recordings with explainers and examples of the material, made to be interesting, relevant and entertaining.
3. Notes, pre-produced, with every fact the course relies on written out in full.
4. A cheat sheet with every important learning concept of the course on one sheet.
5. Named sources for every fact in the notes, for anyone who wants to dig in further.
6. Explainer films, in the style of the sample films, that walk through the most difficult concepts with visual explanations of a high standard.
7. A transcript of every film and every audio recording.
8. A proctored multiple-choice exam at the end of the course, with three retakes included, when the course is taken as part of a Certificate, Diploma or Fellowship. A course taken on its own has no exam.
9. A verifiable certificate of completion, which any third party can check with the credentials office.
10. The credential of the program: the Certificate, Diploma or Fellowship of the program, track or path the course belongs to, awarded when every course in it is passed.

What kinds of certificate are there?

Open courses award no certificate. Open courses are free and have no exam, so they award no certificate of any kind. A certificate comes only with a paid course.

Course certificate. A Foundation, Practitioner or Researcher course taken on its own is passed on its coursework; taken as part of a credential program, it also ends in a proctored exam. A pass earns a certificate naming the course, its code, its study hours and the date of award.

Credential. A credential program is a fixed set of courses plus, for most programs, a capstone. When every course exam and the capstone are passed, the named credential is awarded, such as the Certificate in Algorithmic Trading or the Fellowship in Computational Finance.

How are exams run?

Every course taken as part of a Certificate, Diploma or Fellowship ends in a proctored online exam with a pass mark of 60%. A course taken on its own has no exam. The course fee includes three retakes. Each attempt after the third retake carries a reduced proctored exam fee, stated before you book it. A student who holds a scholarship or financial aid award on one of the two Diplomas or the Fellowship keeps one included retake per course; the award itself is the larger saving.

What else is assessed?

• Foundation: graded quizzes in each module and one graded problem set.
• Practitioner: a project on market data, submitted as code with a short written report. Strategy projects are judged on data held out from development, with transaction costs charged. FRM Exam Preparation is assessed by timed practice sets and a full mock exam.
• Researcher: a written, paper-style assignment: derivations, estimation on data and a discussion of the method’s limits.
• Capstones: a larger project or dissertation set by the program, assessed against published criteria.

Coursework is assessed by the faculty against written criteria and returned with written feedback. Feedback is given in writing.

How is a certificate verified?

Each certificate carries a unique verification code. Send the code and the holder’s name to the credentials office and it will confirm the award, the date and the course or program.

What do the certificates record?

They record what you passed, the coursework of a course or the proctored exams of a credential program, with the date and the result. The Institute was originally founded by three Carnegie Mellon University faculty members; the certificates are issued by the Institute, not by the university.