At twenty to eight on a Saturday evening in Al Barsha, Kenji turns his laptop slowly around the room so a proctor he'll never meet can see it.
The laundry rack is in the hallway. A note on the door asks his daughters, in capital letters, not to knock. He's been studying for this evening for six weeks.
The first section goes well. Then, with nineteen minutes left on the clock in the corner of the screen, he reaches a question about a client who wants her coach to tell her what to do. He knows this one. He reads it. He reads it again. By the third reading his heart is going fast, and the four answers have started to look alike.
He recognises the feeling, and it isn't from school. It's the same tightening he gets in sessions when a client looks up and says, "Just tell me what you'd do."
He answers and moves on. But on Sunday morning, the question he keeps turning over isn't one from the exam.
What is the ICF credentialing exam?
It's the test you sit near the end of an ICF credential application. ACC candidates take the ACC exam: 60 knowledge-based multiple-choice questions in 90 minutes. PCC and MCC candidates take a longer exam built around coaching scenarios. Both test the Core Competencies, the Code of Ethics, and what coaching is and isn't.
Every ICF figure here comes from coachingfederation.org, checked on 19 October 2026. The PCC and MCC exam changes on 10 November 2026, so check the source before you book.
How is the ACC exam different from the PCC and MCC exam?
The ACC exam. 60 multiple-choice questions, four options each, one correct answer. 90 minutes in total, including an optional 10-minute break, in two sections of 30 questions. ICF weights it at 30% coaching ethics, 30% the definition and boundaries of coaching, and 40% coaching competencies, strategies and techniques. Wrong answers aren't penalised.
The PCC and MCC exam, today. The current ICF Credentialing Exam has 78 situational judgement items. Each is a coaching scenario, and for each one you choose both the best and the worst action from four options. It runs 180 minutes, including an optional 10-minute break.
The PCC and MCC exam, from 10 November 2026. ICF's new PCC-MCC Exam has 80 items, 44 situational judgement questions and 36 knowledge-based questions, in 150 minutes. From 10 November 2026 you may take either exam, and ICF gives 31 March 2027 as the final date to sit the current one.
The ACC exam and the current PCC and MCC exam both report scaled scores from 200 to 600, with 460 needed to pass, and both can be sat in person at a Pearson VUE test centre or online through Pearson's OnVUE platform, in English and 15 other languages, Arabic among them.
ICF's exam pages say the ACC exam and the current PCC and MCC exam are based on the 2019 Core Competencies and the 2020 Code of Ethics, although both documents were updated in 2025. ICF says the new PCC-MCC Exam incorporates the most recent updates. Study the edition your exam is built on.
For the whole route around the exam, see our guides to ICF ACC requirements and ICF PCC in Dubai.
If your exam date is set and part of you is already bracing for it, say so to Sara, our veteran RS Method Master Coach. On a free Zoom she'll ask what you're studying, and probably, before long, what you're afraid a result would say about you. Set up the call through our apply page. Or read on.
How do situational judgement questions work?
Each one gives you a realistic coaching moment and four possible responses, and you pick the most effective and the least effective. ICF's own guidance on the format makes three points worth taking seriously. Choose the best and worst responses, not what you'd personally do. Don't add details the scenario doesn't give you. And work out which competency the scenario is testing.
Here's our own illustration, not an ICF item.
A client in her fourth session says she's been offered a promotion and asks you directly whether she should take it. The options might be to give your opinion, to ask what's drawing her toward each answer, to tell her it's not your place to decide, and to suggest she lists the pros and cons.
Giving your opinion pulls the decision across the table to you, so it's a likely worst. Asking what draws her toward each answer keeps the decision hers and goes looking for her own thinking, so it's a likely best. The other two sit somewhere between: one a little cold, the other a little mechanical.
Working that out on paper isn't hard. What's hard is doing it with nineteen minutes on the clock, when the scenario sounds like a client you once struggled to stay with.
How should you study the competencies and the Code of Ethics?
- Use the right edition. For the ACC exam and the current PCC and MCC exam, that's the 2019 Core Competencies and the 2020 Code of Ethics. Our guide to the ICF Core Competencies explains the 2025 version, and most of the underlying ideas carry across, but check the wording against the edition you'll be tested on.
- Start with ICF's free material. ICF points candidates to its candidate guides, the free Pearson VUE exam tutorial and sample questions.
- Learn the ethics as situations, not clauses. For each part of the Code, write one realistic moment where it would matter: a sponsor asking what a client said, a friend who wants coaching, a client you also know socially.
- Use your mentor coaching. ICF lists peer coaching and mentor coaching feedback among its preparation resources for the PCC and MCC exam. A mentor who has heard your sessions can tell you which competency you drift from under pressure.
- Know your pace. On the ACC exam, 30 questions in each 39-minute section works out at 78 seconds a question.
Why do exam nerves so often feel like a hard session?
Because, in our experience, they often come from the same place.
Kenji didn't lack knowledge. What happened with nineteen minutes left was older than this exam. Years ago he failed an accountancy paper by two marks and told no one, and he's over-prepared for every test since.
The RS Method reads that tightening in a particular way. Kenji took a verdict away from the failed paper, something close to "a wrong answer will show them who I really am". When he's calm, he can see the verdict is unfair. Seeing it doesn't touch the fear stuck to it. That fear is quicker than six weeks of revision, and it reaches him before the question does, in the testing chair or when a client asks him for an answer. The method works on that stuck fear rather than on the idea. When the fear lifts, the failed paper is simply something that happened once, and a question with nineteen minutes left is simply a question.
That's the link to presence. Staying present, in ICF's terms, includes managing your own emotions so you can stay with the client. The tightening Kenji felt in front of the proctor's camera is the same one that pulls a coach out of the room, which we explore in our guide to coaching presence.
It's also why RSCI trains in the order it does: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained. Your own fear of being judged is found and worked on while you're learning the competencies, rather than after you've watched them desert you under pressure.
If the testing-room tightness sounds like one you know from sessions, it's worth saying out loud to Sara. The conversation is free, and she won't quiz you on the competencies. Book it here.
And if exam nerves are affecting your sleep, your eating or your daily life, talk to your doctor or a qualified professional. Nothing here replaces that.
How can you practise scenario questions without memorising answers?
Try the covered-options drill. It takes about fifteen minutes per scenario, a sample question and a sheet of paper.
- Take one sample scenario and cover the options. ICF's sample questions and the Pearson VUE tutorial are good sources.
- Read the scenario once, slowly. Then write, in five words or fewer, what the client in it needs.
- Name the competency or ethics point in play. One line.
- Notice which way you lean. Before you look at any options, write down the response you'd be most tempted to give.
- Uncover the options and choose the best and the worst, using only what the scenario states.
- Compare your choice with your temptation. Where they differ, ask whose need the tempting answer would have served.
- Keep the page. After ten scenarios, read back through your step 6 notes only, and take what you find to your next mentor coaching session.
Step 5 is exam technique. Step 6 is coaching, and over ten scenarios it shows you a pattern that's yours, not the exam's.
Who is RSCI's route to the ICF exam right for?
It's right for you if three things are true.
- You want exam preparation built into your education. Our training page puts it in one line: "We provide the accredited education pathway and prepare you for the credential." Each programme includes the relevant mentor coaching, assessment and credential preparation components. The exam itself stays yours: the same page is clear that you meet ICF's requirements, the examination among them, independently.
- You'd rather steady the coach than only cram for the test. The inner work runs alongside the competencies, not after them.
- You want a route that fits the exam you're heading for. RS Method Coach includes ICF Level 1 education toward the ACC. RS Method Complete includes ICF Level 2 education, leading to the ACC or the PCC, with a route to the ACC first.
The fees, with ICF education included: AED 18,000 for RS Method Coach and AED 35,000 for RS Method Complete. The ICF-accredited education inside our programmes is designed, delivered and certified by the Institute of Coaching and Mentoring (IICM), an ICF-accredited organisation. The ACC and PCC credentials are awarded only by the ICF. Our students' passing rate on the ICF ACC exam so far is 100%. That's a fact of record, not a promise.
The exam measures what a coach knows. Our razor names what a coach does with it. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
A pass mark is a number. What people say about the work underneath it rarely is. Mais Mohammed, looking back on her own experience of the work, said this on camera: "The best decision I took for myself in my entire life." She was speaking for herself alone, and it says nothing about your score or your exam day.
The full route, from education to exam, is set out on our ICF certification in Dubai page.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. Before your next study evening, spend ten minutes on our ICF certification in Dubai page and see where the exam sits in the whole route. It's one step of several.