ICAN Professional Exams 2026: The 2.37x Pass-Rate Gap Between Accounting and Sustainability & Ethics

The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria runs its professional qualification through the Accounting Technicians Scheme (ATSWA, the foundation level, examined in March and September across three sections of four subjects each) and the Professional Level (Skills and Professional stages) above it, with a uniform 50% pass mark applied per paper. ICAN does not publish an official overall pass rate per diet the way some other accounting bodies do -- but cumulative first-attempt pass rates for papers sat between January and July 2026 are available per module, and they reveal a pattern a flat "50% to pass" framing completely hides.

1. The real spread between papers. Across the papers reported for the 2026 diets, first-attempt pass rates ranged from 42.1% in Accounting to 99.66% in Sustainability and Ethics -- with a Grand Total pass rate of 89.5% once every module is combined. Computing the ratio directly: 99.66 / 42.1 is approximately 2.37. A first-time candidate is, on this data, roughly 2.4 times more likely to pass Sustainability and Ethics than to pass Accounting.

2. Why a flat "it's 50% either way" framing misleads candidates. Every ICAN paper shares the identical 50% pass mark and counts equally toward completing that level -- nothing in the qualification structure itself signals that Accounting is a fundamentally harder barrier to clear than Sustainability and Ethics. A candidate allocating study time evenly across all papers in a sitting, on the (reasonable-looking) assumption that equal pass marks imply roughly equal difficulty, is working against real historical evidence that one specific paper is disproportionately where first attempts fail.

3. What this means for a multi-paper sitting strategy. Since ICAN lets candidates register for multiple papers within a level per diet, and since study time is the scarce resource, the pass-rate gap argues for deliberately uneven time allocation -- weighting preparation toward the 42.1%-pass-rate paper specifically, rather than distributing hours in proportion to each paper's credit weight or page count in the syllabus, which is how most candidates default to planning.

4. A caveat the numbers themselves don't resolve. A low first-attempt pass rate can reflect genuine subject difficulty, but it can also reflect how a paper is taught, how recently its syllabus changed, or self-selection in who attempts it early versus late in their qualification journey. The 2.37x gap is a real, computed fact from ICAN's own published first-attempt data -- but it's a signal to budget more preparation time for Accounting specifically, not proof that the subject is "2.37 times harder" in some absolute sense.

Camino Prep's ICAN-aligned practice content is organized around the real papers and pass-mark structure described above. Check the exam calendar for the next diet's registration dates.