Where to Find the Official IIQE Paper 3 Study Materials — Free Downloads, and How to Read a Paper With No Weak Spot

Last updated 2026-08-10

When preparing for Paper 3 (Long Term Insurance), the first question is often not "how do I study" but "what do I study from". The answer is simpler than many people expect: the official materials are free.

Where to get the official materials

Under Handbook clauses 2.1.4 and 14.1, the syllabus and Study Notes for each paper are freely downloadable from the PEAK website and the Insurance Authority website — no purchase required; they are provided officially.

Before you download, two things are worth being clear about:

• Questions and answers are not published officially (Handbook clause 12.6: the

examination centre does not release scores, questions or correct answers). Since nothing is published, no "past papers" leaked from official channels exist either.

• Questions are set **in Traditional Chinese and English side by side — there is no

Simplified Chinese version** (Handbook clause 2.2.2). The wording you read in the official materials is the wording you will meet in the examination hall — so studying from the materials doubles as getting used to how the questions themselves are phrased.

Why you cannot cherry-pick chapters in Paper 3

Using real answering data from 9 candidates to compute expected lost marks (method and full table in the chapter-by-chapter data for Paper 3), the distribution in Paper 3 is strikingly even: apart from Chapter 1, the four main chapters each account for 22%–24% — Chapter 4 at 24%, Chapter 3 at 24%, Chapter 5 at 22%, Chapter 2 at 22%, all within a percentage point or two of one another.

This is the exact opposite of Paper 1, where two chapters account for 56% of expected lost marks: with Paper 1 you can attack the heavyweight chapters first; Paper 3 offers no such leverage. Read two chapters closely and skim the rest, and each chapter you skipped will cost you twenty-something per cent of the expected lost marks.

So the right way to use the Paper 3 materials is to read them cover to cover: all four main chapters, none skipped, each read until you can close the book and retell its main structure from memory. The only chapter you can go easy on is Chapter 1 — a 67.0% accuracy rate and only 8% of expected lost marks; a quick pass is enough.

When the reading gets heavy: pair each chapter with a primer

Reading slowly on the first pass is normal. When you get stuck, you can start with our knowledge articles — reorganised chapter by chapter — to get the concepts in place first, then return to the official materials and check them against the official wording. For example, Chapter 2 (types of life insurance and annuities) maps to types of life insurance and annuities, and Chapter 3 (supplementary benefits and other products) maps to what riders are; the entry paths for all chapters are listed in full in how to prepare for Paper 3, so they are not repeated here.

Mind the direction: the knowledge articles are primers, not substitutes — for the official wording of any concept, the official materials govern.

The reading-and-drilling loop

The recommended rhythm is "read a chapter, drill a chapter":

1. Read one chapter of the official materials through;
2. Go to Paper 3 practice and drill that chapter, noting your **first-attempt

accuracy rate** — it exposes the places where you thought you understood but fall into the trap the moment an option is reworded, which is exactly what reading alone cannot reveal;

1. Take your wrong answers back to the corresponding passages and re-read those, rather than

starting the whole book over again.

The reason this loop matters: accuracy rates across the four main chapters of Paper 3 sit uniformly at 55%–60% (Chapter 2 at 55.0%, the lowest in the paper) — an "every chapter feels passable, no chapter feels solid" distribution that a single read-through cannot clear. You need the chapter-by-chapter first-attempt accuracy to aim the second read at the right spots. As for how to split your time across the four chapters, how to prepare for Paper 3 goes into more detail.

⚠️ The accuracy rates mentioned on this page are practice accuracy rates, not pass rates; the two are not convertible. The sample is 9 candidates and 7,914 answers in total (3,295 on Paper 3) — still a small sample.

Sources and currency

The free download channels for the study materials come from Handbook clauses 2.1.4 and 14.1; "questions and answers are not published" from Handbook clause 12.6; the side-by-side Traditional Chinese and English format from Handbook clause 2.2.2 (all from the version applicable from 2025-09-01 — check against the latest official version before relying on them). We have not verified the Study Notes page by page; this article does not describe their internal structure, and for the content of the materials the official version governs in all respects. Chapter weightings are taken from the publicly available syllabus and the Study Notes' contents pages; answering statistics as at 2026-08-09. The suggestions on how to use the materials are organised and written by Mange — they are not quotations from official materials or legislation.

Mange does not own, and does not claim to own, copyright in any official examination material; the content on this page is written by Mange. Nothing on this page is a promise about any examination outcome, nor does it constitute legal advice.