I took and passed the CAMS exam on Friday. Below is a summary of everything you need to know. If you go to the ACAMS website and download the Candidate Handbook, you can also find most of what I have summarized. I found the experience to be fairly easy and straightforward but I’ve had the benefit of already studying for and taking many similar exams. You definitely can’t just show up and pass it without studying but if you read the book and go through all the other prep materials once and have a little bit of relevant experience, you should be able to succeed.
Eligibility:
Like a lot of other certifications, there is a points system to determine eligibility. To take the exam you need 40 points. Points are earned as follows:
Highest level of education; 10 points for Associate’s, 20 for Bachelor’s, or 30 for a Master’s Degree/PhD/JD or equivalent
10 points for every year of professional experience
10 points for every other relevant certification you have (CPA, CFE, FINRA Series, etc.)
Basically if you have a CPA license and one year of work experience, you’re eligible to take the exam.
Cost:
$1,790 (thankfully paid by my employer) which included one year of membership in ACAMS ($295) and $1,495 for the standard prep course/ exam fee. There is a higher-end prep course that includes live instruction for an additional $385. There is also a discount for government employees ($195 membership + $1,145 prep/exam fee). If you fail the exam, you have to wait 2 months to re-take it and pay a $290 fee ($190 for government employees).
Study Materials:
You can’t pay for the exam by itself unless you’re re-taking it after failing. You must buy a package that includes the exam fee and a prep course. I chose the cheaper package that does not include live instruction. The package I chose includes a textbook (referred to as the Study Guide) which is 435 pages, 11.5 hours of recorded lectures (the textbook being read word-for-word) that you can download to your phone/ other mobile device, 115 flash cards, and a set of 238 online-only interactive PowerPoint-type slides that summarize what’s covered in the textbook. One of the chapters of the book (54 of the 435 pages) is a set of 100 practice questions. After reading the textbook, listening to the lectures, and going through all the slides, I did all of the practice questions and got 90% correct. On the actual exam I got 92% correct. I did have the benefit of recently completing an internal AML compliance audit at work so that helped me pick up a lot of the concepts that were on the exam.
Exam:
The exam consists of 120 multiple choice questions and you have 3.5 hours to complete it. I finished more than an hour early and found I had plenty of time to read each question and possible answer multiple times to make sure I wasn’t missing a word or two that would change the answer. The exam questions were not super easy but not nearly as hard as the CPA exam. I would say the questions were comparable in difficulty to the CFE exam.
Feel free to let me know if you have any other questions.
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