OIIAQ exam of 12 December 2026: what to do with the weeks left

The OIIAQ holds four professional exam sittings a year. The next one is on **12 December 2026**, and if you became eligible between 1 July and 30 September, it is the one you will be convoked to. There are about eleven weeks left. Here is what the exam actually measures, and what those weeks are best spent on.

Three dates, not one

The exam date is the one everybody writes down. The two that catch people out come earlier. **Around 13 October** — your official convocation is emailed to you. The OIIAQ sends it at least 60 days before the sitting, with the documents you will need to present. **Around 12 November** — registration closes. You must be registered at least 30 days before the exam, and the fee is non-refundable. **12 December** — the sitting itself. If your convocation has not arrived by the end of October, contact the Order rather than waiting. A convocation that went to an old address is a problem you can still fix in November and cannot fix in December.

What the exam is

It is computerised, made entirely of multiple-choice questions, and you have **a maximum of four hours** to finish it. The Order publishes a *Plan directeur de l'examen professionnel*, which sets out how the expected competencies are assessed and in what proportion. Two weightings are published outright: **Pharmacotherapy: 15 to 20 % of the questions.** **Infection prevention: 8 to 12 % of the questions.** Those two alone account for roughly a quarter of the exam. A competency that carries more questions weighs more on your result — which is the whole reason to read the plan before deciding what to revise.

The rule to know before you register

The overall pass rate has been **89.84 %** since the exam was introduced in March 2016. Most candidates pass. But you are allowed **a maximum of two retakes**. A third failure closes your file automatically, and so does exceeding the time limit the regulations allow. That is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to sit the exam when you are ready rather than when the calendar says so, and to treat a first attempt as the attempt rather than a rehearsal.

Eleven weeks, spent in order

**Weeks 1 to 2 — measure, do not revise.** Do a full set of clinical situations before opening a single set of notes. Revising without measuring means spending time on what you already know, because that is the part that feels good. What you want is the list of what does not hold. **Weeks 3 to 7 — the two heavy competencies first.** Pharmacotherapy and infection prevention are a quarter of the paper and they are learnable. Drug classes, what each one is monitored for, the signs that something is going wrong. Chains of transmission, additional precautions, when they are lifted. **Weeks 8 to 10 — clinical judgement, not recall.** This is where candidates lose marks they did not expect to lose. The exam asks which intervention comes first, not which fact you remember. Read our pieces on prioritisation questions and on rephrasing the question before eliminating options. **Week 11 — consolidate, add nothing.** Redo your mistakes, not your successes: a question you already got right teaches nothing on a second pass, it only reassures. Stop new material around 5 December.

What costs the most marks

**Revising by reading.** Re-reading notes produces the feeling of knowing without the ability to justify. Explaining a choice out loud to someone exposes in thirty seconds what an hour of reading hides. **Leaving assessment for later.** A wrong assessment invalidates every intervention that follows it. Work assessment before intervention, always. **Treating the four hours as a constraint.** Most candidates finish. Time pressure costs fewer marks than fatigue: do not sit up the night before.

Preparing on NursEduc

NursEduc carries **53 clinical situations written for the OIIAQ**, each mapped to the competencies the exam assesses, plus reference sheets and dose calculation exercises. You can also study with other candidates sitting the same December exam. Start with one full clinical situation and see where you stand. Fifteen minutes is enough to find out, and it is that measurement — not a feeling — that should decide what the next eleven weeks look like. Good luck. You are closer than you think.