RICS APC Ethics

No. This is an independent study platform producing original practice material. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or operated by RICS, and it does not reproduce any official question bank. Always treat RICS's own published guidance as the authoritative source for assessment requirements.

Expect questions on professional standards and conduct: honesty and integrity, conflicts of interest, confidentiality, competence and due care, and how you would respond to pressure from a client or employer. The emphasis is on applied judgement in realistic scenarios rather than reciting rule numbers.

Start with the standards and guidance that govern professional conduct, since these underpin everything else. Then move to scenario practice, where you explain your reasoning out loud. Finish with timed mock answers so you can produce a clear, structured response under pressure rather than a list of memorised points.

There is no single correct timeline; it depends on your experience and route. A practical approach is to spread preparation over several months, linking study to live project work so your evidence is genuine and current. Confirm the actual assessment windows and deadlines with RICS before planning.

Candidates most often fail on depth rather than knowledge: vague answers, no worked example, inability to explain why a course of action was right, and weak handling of ethical dilemmas where a conflict of interest is present. Answering in generalities instead of referencing your own experience is a frequent weakness.

Identify the duty owed and to whom, state the risk, then set out the action you would take and why. Name the people you would escalate to and what you would record. Close by explaining how you would prevent recurrence. Structure and justification score better than a single-word conclusion.

RICS sets and administers its own retake and reassessment rules, and those rules can change. This page does not state a retake policy because the underlying source did not provide one. Check the current candidate guidance on the RICS website for the position that applies to you.

Fees, duration and format are set by RICS and are not stated in the source used for this page, so no figures are given here. Quoting an out-of-date fee would be misleading. Confirm current fees, format and timing directly with RICS before you budget or book.

Use them to test recall and structure, not to memorise wording. Answer aloud or in writing first, then compare against the reasoning you would expect from a competent surveyor. Where a question depends on a figure or rule, verify it against current RICS guidance rather than trusting any third-party summary.