Now Reading: CA Final November 2026: MCQ pattern changed in five subjects
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CA Final November 2026: MCQ pattern changed in five subjects
The Story in Brief
The November 2026 CA Final examination saw significant changes in question patterns, with five papers adopting a new MCQ distribution. Financial Reporting, Advanced Financial Management, Audit, Direct Tax and Indirect Tax each carried 23 MCQs for 30 marks, 16 one-mark and seven two-mark questions, compared with 15 two-mark MCQs in the May 2026 attempt.
The Direct Tax paper was the last based on the Income-tax Act, 1961, from May 2027, Paper 4 will follow the Income-tax Act, 2025. The analysis by CA education platform GradeHunt found 61 per cent of the Direct Tax paper involved calculations, up from 52.5 per cent in May 2026. In Audit, ethics accounted for 25.4 per cent of printed marks, while application-based questions in Part II dropped to 26 marks from 52.
In IBS, Financial Reporting appeared only in the MCQ section for 10 marks, versus 2 marks in MCQs and 14 in descriptive questions in May. The findings are based on student-shared question papers, ICAI’s official papers and suggested answers had not been published.
Indian Opinion Analysis
The shift from 15 two-mark MCQs to a mix of one-mark and two-mark questions forces students to manage time differently across five papers, the same 30 marks now require answering 23 questions instead of 15. The rise in calculation weightage in Direct Tax, from 52.5 per cent to 61 per cent, suggests ICAI is testing computational fluency more heavily in the final attempt under the old Act. The Audit paper’s reduced application component, from 52 marks to 26, signals a narrower emphasis on case-based reasoning. These pattern changes, based on student-shared copies, may not fully reflect the official papers until ICAI releases them.
Source: indiatoday.in
This brief was synthesised by AI from the source linked above. Methodology and corrections.
