NISM Series XV is the only one of the common NISM certifications with case studies in the exam. V-A, VIII and XII are 100 standalone multiple-choice questions. XV is 80 standalone questions plus 5 case studies of 4 questions each — 20 of the 100 marks.
That is a fifth of the paper in a format most candidates never practise.
Why they carry more risk than their weight suggests
A case study is a passage — a company's financials, an investor's situation, a market scenario — followed by four questions on it.
The risk is concentration. Misread a standalone question and you lose one mark. Misread the passage and you can lose all four, because every question rests on the same facts. One wrong assumption about whether a figure is annual or quarterly, or whether a dividend has already been paid, propagates through the set.
With 25% negative marking, four wrong answers also cost you an extra mark in deductions. A single misread passage can therefore swing five marks.
What the cases actually look like
In our bank the XV case studies run to 5 questions each and follow the patterns the exam uses:
- A company's financials, with questions on ratios, valuation multiples and what they imply.
- A dividend or growth scenario, with questions applying the dividend discount model.
- An investor's situation, with questions on suitability, risk and the analyst's obligations.
- A corporate action, with questions on its effect on price, EPS and the shareholder.
The questions within a case usually escalate: the first is a direct read from the passage, the later ones require a calculation or a judgement built on the earlier answer.
How to answer them
1. Read the passage twice before looking at any question. Once for the story, once for the numbers. The second read is where you catch "annual", "per quarter", "already paid", "before tax".
2. Write down the given figures. Face value, number of shares, price, growth rate, payout ratio — whatever is there. The passage is repeated on every question, but hunting through it four times wastes minutes you will want later.
3. Answer the easy question first, whichever it is. The questions are not always in ascending difficulty, and an early anchor often supplies a number the others need.
4. If a later question depends on an earlier answer, check the earlier one again. This is where the concentration risk bites — an error at step one is silently carried forward.
5. Do not spend more than about six minutes on a whole case. Four marks is four marks. If a calculation is not coming, take the ones you can, flag it and move on.
Timing
The paper is 100 questions in 120 minutes. If you give the 80 standalone questions roughly 70 seconds each, that is about 93 minutes, leaving around 25 minutes for the five cases and a few to spare.
That is five minutes per case — tight, which is exactly why reading the passage efficiently matters more than knowing an extra formula.
How to practise
Practising standalone questions does not prepare you for this format. You need to sit cases as cases.
ScoreSetu's XV bank includes 10 case studies, 50 questions, in the same passage-plus-questions structure as the exam, with the passage carried on every question so you practise the real reading load. Case Study 1 is free in full — a partial preview of a case teaches nothing, so we open one completely rather than three questions of each.
Practise the case studies free — they are listed under "Case studies" on the practice page — then sit a full-length timed mock.
The short version
- 20 marks, five cases, four questions each.
- Read the passage twice before any question.
- Note the figures once, not four times.
- Six minutes maximum per case.
- Practise in the format, because it is the only part of the paper that is structurally different.
For the rest of the paper, see how to pass NISM XV in 30 days and the chapter weightages.