CISI Revision Express: what it is, and what is in it

Revision Express is CISI's own online question tool. If you have booked a CISI exam you have probably seen it offered next to the workbook and wondered whether it is the official mock paper. It is not, and CISI says so itself. This page sets out what it actually contains, where to find it, and what it is and is not useful for.

Where to find it, and why there is no separate login

A lot of the searching around Revision Express is people looking for a login page. There is not one. You reach it through your ordinary CISI account: sign in at cisi.org, open MyCISI, then My Study, then Before your exam, and Revision Express sits in there. Same email, same password, no second account to create.

Once you are in, it opens on a list of the workbook chapters. Each chapter has a summary and its own set of questions, so you can work through it chapter by chapter alongside your reading rather than sitting anything full length.

How many questions each edition holds

CISI does not put a question count on the product page, which is part of why it is hard to judge before buying. The numbers are published, though, in the e-learning editions chart. These are the three Capital Markets Programme papers, current at 14 August 2026.

Set those against the paper you are sitting. Securities and Derivatives are 100-question exams, so 381 and 338 questions give you roughly three and a half papers' worth of material if you never repeated a question. UK Financial Regulation is 75 questions, so 302 gives you about four. In practice you will see questions again, because a chapter-by-chapter tool is built for repetition rather than for fresh sittings.

What CISI says Revision Express is not

This is the part worth reading before you spend anything. CISI describes Revision Express as an online study tool designed to be used alongside CISI workbooks, containing questions that aid learning by reaffirming understanding of the subject. It also includes a Sample Exam Standard Test, which CISI says is compiled to reflect as closely as possible the standard you will experience in your exam.

Then CISI adds the caveat in its own words: the questions in Revision Express should not be viewed as sample exam questions. That is a meaningful distinction. The tool is there to check that you understood the chapter you just read. It is not a rehearsal of the paper, and treating a strong Revision Express score as evidence you are ready is how people walk into the real exam surprised.

The edition trap

Revision Express is versioned to a workbook edition, and each edition has a window in which it is examined. Buy against the wrong one and you are revising a syllabus you will not sit.

Two ways that bites. If you buy late in an edition's life, fail, and then rebook, the edition can expire before your resit. And if your exam date falls the other side of a changeover, you sit the new version of the paper while your material describes the old one. Check the date on CISI's editions chart against the date you intend to book, not against the date you are buying.

Is it included with your exam, or extra?

It depends where you are sitting. CISI states that international exam bookings include a workbook and access to Revision Express where available. In the UK it is not included: the mandatory workbook policy requires the current workbook when you book, but Revision Express is a separate purchase.

The UK route to it is CISI's saver package, which bundles the exam, the workbook and Revision Express, and which CISI says has to be ordered by contacting them rather than through the online basket. The published saver prices make the arithmetic unusually clear. On the 2026 to 2027 UK list, UK Financial Regulation is £247.00 for the exam and £105.00 for the workbook, and the saver is £367.00. Securities and Derivatives are £286.00 and £105.00, with a saver of £406.00.

In other words Revision Express costs you £15.00 inside the saver on all three papers, and you cannot get it at that price any other way. Whether £15.00 is worth it is a much easier question than whether Revision Express is worth it in the abstract, and for most people revising properly the answer is yes.

What it does well, and where it runs out

It is good at the thing it says it is good at. Read a chapter, answer that chapter's questions, find out whether you actually absorbed it. That loop is worth having, and the chapter summaries are a fair recap.

Where it runs out is everything after that. It is organised by chapter rather than weighted like the paper, so it will not tell you that Conduct of Business and Client Assets carries 35 of the 75 marks on UK Financial Regulation while Complaints and Redress carries 9. It is a fixed bank, so once you have been round it your score measures recall of those questions rather than knowledge of the syllabus. And it does not sit you down for a weighted paper against the clock, which is the rehearsal that actually predicts anything.

The sensible read is that Revision Express is a comprehension check to use while you are still reading, and that you need something else for the timed, correctly weighted practice afterwards. Our guide to what CISI past papers actually exist covers the official options in full, and every paper we support has a free full mock exam you can sit without an account.