Get grilled till you pass
Skip the S$540 CEI course.
Pass the CEI (KAH) exam on your first attempt.
On your first attempt the course is optional. But fail, and MOM makes it mandatory before you're allowed to re-sit.
Free EARF notes: no signup needed · Unlock: secure Stripe checkout · pass guarantee: fail and we extend your access 60 days free (conditions apply)
80
MCQs
2 hrs
Time limit
56 / 80
Common target (~70%)
56%
Is EARF + EFMA
Do the Math
Is the CEI course worth it?
One Redditor on r/singaporehappenings documented their whole CEI (KAH) journey below. Here are the costs they accumulated in the CEI course-first route.
CEI course-first route — a real Reddit account
They attended all 10 days of the course and still failed the first attempt. Even booking the exam was a struggle. Slots were hard to secure, and the venue changed partway through.
Source: Reddit, r/singaporehappenings — thread “Is this still relevant? Employment Agency – CEI-KAH course?” (poster's own cost breakdown)
The CEI Grill route
Best valueThe course is optional on your first attempt. MOM only makes it mandatory after a fail. Pass first time and you never pay for it.
Skipping prep and testing your luck costs more than it saves. If you fail, MOM makes the S$539.55 course compulsory before you can re-sit, so you end up at S$888 anyway. The only route that avoids that bill is passing on the first attempt, which is what the S$88 is for.
Free · no card required · or unlock everything now
Sources included
Every figure checked against the law
Most CEI prep is a static PDF of numbers you have to trust. Here, we verify every statutory figure against MOM and Singapore Statutes Online. Below are five of the sections we check against, kept current for 2026: the 1 Nov 2025 WICA compensation limits, the 2026 Employment Pass salary bands.
Tap any of these. Each one opens the actual government source. Try getting that from your course notes PDF.
Designed to train your brain for the exact mechanics of the CEI exam.
You get condensed course notes, exam practice questions, and a specialised CEI Exam Cheat Sheet built for high-speed retention in the final 3 to 7 days before your test.
Know exactly what's on the exam
We map the real structure (45 EARF+EFMA, 30 all-topics, 5 case studies) so you see where the marks sit: the EARF + EFMA pair is 56% of the paper.
Built to the official exam format
Every question mirrors the real paper: the same Section A/B/C structure, the same trick questions. You sit a full 80-question mock under a real 2-hour clock, and you work through every case study yourself.
Mnemonics, trick questions and a CEI Exam Cheat Sheet
Re-reading the notes five times won't catch the traps: near-identical numbers, a deadline off by a day, the right rule filed under the wrong Act. Each mnemonic and cheat-sheet entry gives you MOM's reason for the rule, then a real case, an agency or worker this happened to. Understand the intent and picture the consequence, and you stop losing marks to figures that look alike.
We check every figure against the statute
We cross-verify each figure against Singapore Statutes Online. When MOM raised WICA compensation limits on 1 Nov 2025, we caught it and updated the course. We also check that every topic carries its own practice questions, so you don't find the gap on exam day.
Exam structure & study strategy
EARF + EFMA make up Section A: 56% of the whole paper.
Section A alone is 45 of 80 questions, more than half your marks in two topics. Most of Section C's case studies test the same two topics again, so the work pays off twice. Master EARF licensing (demerit points, security deposits, the 3-year validity) and EFMA offences first, then lock in Section B to clear the bar.
- Tested in two sections: EARF, EFMA & the Employment Act each appear twice, the highest-leverage topics.
- Section B spreads across 9 topics: Contract Law, Competition Act, Employment Act, WICA, Immigration Act, CPF Act, TAFEP/FCF, PHTA and PDPA. Thinner coverage each, but 30 questions altogether.
- Case studies (Section C): drawn from EFMA, Employment Act & EARF.
- The pattern: the exam tests exact numbers, and the wrong options are the neighbouring figures.
EARF splits into 3: licensing & personnel, fees & practices, MDW rules · plus EFMA
Contract Law, Competition Act, Employment Act, WICA, Immigration Act, CPF Act, TAFEP / Fair Consideration Framework, PHTA, PDPA
EFMA, Employment Act, EARF
Master Section A first, and it pays off again in Section C.
Then secure Section B, because Section A alone won't clear the bar.
Section C is the part most prep skips
Practise CEI exam-style case studies
The real paper ends with 5 case-study questions: a prose scenario hiding several breaches across EARF, EFMA and the Employment Act. We built realistic, multi-issue case studies for this section, with each question tied back to the passage.
Case study
An employment agency lodges a Work Permit application for a worker already in Singapore on a Social Visit Pass, without ever verifying how he entered. His contract offers $2,000 a month and 5 days' annual leave. Months in, he's sent to work at a second company, and the salary declared to MOM turns out higher than what he's actually paid…
→ 5 linked questions test whether you spot the unlicensed-agency, illegal-deployment, false-declaration and below-minimum-leave traps, and who's liable for each, the way Section C is set on the real paper.
Four steps to a first-time pass
Learn — course notes, weighted by what's tested
14 topics ranked by real exam share, every statutory fact sourced straight to MOM/SSO. You start with the topics carrying the most marks.
Grill — adaptive MCQ trap simulator
Every question is drawn straight from MOM/SSO statutes and built around the traps the real paper sets. The 280-question bank includes 6 grouped case studies: a shared passage with its own set of questions, mirroring the real exam's Section C format.
Prove — full 2-hour mock exam
80 questions in the real 45/30/5 format, auto-graded and timed like the real thing. You walk into the exam having already sat it once.
Retain — CEI Exam Cheat Sheet
Every must-memorise number, fee cap and clock on one page. Use it in the week before your attempt, when there's no time left to re-read notes.
See how the grilling works
Why each wrong option looks right
A CEI Exam practice question. This is what you get after every answer, in plain English.
A Part IV employee works overtime. What is the minimum overtime pay rate, the maximum overtime hours per month (without exemption), and the deadline to pay overtime?
Why this trips you up
Overtime is paid at least 1.5× the hourly basic rate, capped at 72 hours/month (an exemption is needed for more), and paid within 14 days of the salary period. The 44 in C is the normal weekly-hours figure, not an OT cap. A classic mix-up. B inflates the rate; D removes the cap.
Reference: Employment Act 1968, s 38 — Singapore Statutes Online ↗
CEI Exam Cheat Sheet
The whole syllabus, compressed onto one sheet
We studied how top law students compress a whole syllabus onto one sheet, then applied it to the CEI. Each either/or the exam sets sits side by side, so you see both options at a glance. We put the figure first on every line, so you can cover a column with your hand and self-quiz. The sheet ends with two walls, every deadline and every fine lined up in order, because the exam's favourite trick is swapping one number for its neighbour.
3 years
EA licence validity (not 2!)
3 working days
De-register personnel (not 14!)
$60,000
CL 1st-year security deposit
72 hrs/mo
Max overtime (Employment Act)
14 days
Appeal a licence suspension
$91k–$269k
WICA death compensation range
1 mth / yr
Worker fee cap (max 2 months)
$5,000/worker
Unlicensed agent fine — per worker, not a flat sum
Mnemonics & traps
- CPN-AAPR-TODThe 10 PDPA obligations, in order.
- O-A-CA valid contract: Offer, Acceptance, Consideration.
- 4 → 8 → 12 → 18 → 24The demerit-point ladder. At 12, KAHs re-sit the CEI.
- Act + Means + PurposeAll 3 needed to prove human trafficking. Miss one and it's a lesser, different charge.
- Own car = not liableWICA: company transport is liable, your own commute isn't.
- Phantom workers = caningThe one EFMA offence that can mean caning, not just a fine (6+ charges).
The full sheet
135 numbers memorised exactly, so you don't lose marks mixing up similar ones
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Why I built this
A few people have been curious how I passed the CEI Exam on my first attempt.
This initially started as my own CEI Exam prep.
I hadn't signed up for any course, so I panicked the moment I registered for the CEI (KAH) exam on 29 June 2026.
I had to manually go through every single PDF, and it was a huge headache: PDF after PDF, some so dense there was no way to tell what was worth remembering and what was critical for the exam.
I couldn't even figure out where to start. Every hour I spent working out what to study was an hour I wasn't studying, and the exam date wasn't moving.
I could have ground through it page by page and hoped I picked up the right things, but that's not how I study, and I was too lazy to spend weeks sorting it all out myself.
Instead, I did what I do when something feels unmanageable: I built a system to make it manageable.
The problem with studying from the course notes directly
The notes are organised by chapter. Exam weighting has nothing to do with chapter order.
The real distribution looks like this:
- Section A (EARF and EFMA): 56% of the marks
- Section B (nine other topics): 38% of the marks
- Section C (case studies): 6% of the marks
If you study chapter by chapter, you're leaving your mark allocation to chance. A topic worth 2% of the paper gets the same attention as one worth 20%, because they happen to be the same length in the notes.
CEI Grill reorganises everything around the real exam weightings. Each topic gets attention in proportion to what it's worth on the paper.
Some pages on the course notes also contain errors.
In the system I had built, I ran every statutory figure against official MOM sources and Singapore Statutes Online. That caught errors like outdated WICA compensation limits, incorrect fee calculations, and one error serious enough to flag on its own.
For example, the notes listed three licence tiers: Comprehensive, Select, and Basic. The actual MOM framework only recognises two: Comprehensive and Select. "Basic" doesn't exist. If you'd taken the material at face value, which is what you do when you're studying under time pressure, it would have shaped how you answered real questions on the exam.
I rebuilt the mock so no topic can disappear
Standard random selection can skip a short topic from a mock by chance. I rewrote the sampling so every topic present in a section is guaranteed to appear at least once. You won't finish a mock and realise you never saw a question on a topic that shows up on the real paper.
What's included
- Full notes broken down and de-jargoned into digestible pieces, organised by exam weightings
- Mnemonic devices and real case scenarios that explain the consequence, not just the rule
- A cheat sheet built for last-minute revision
- A full mock exam with guaranteed topic coverage
- Every statutory figure verified against MOM and Singapore Statutes Online
How I used it
I didn't purchase the course. I spent 4 days on CEI Grill's notes. 5th day on the Grill questions and one mock exam. Sat the real exam on 13 July 2026.
The results came in.
60 out of 80. First attempt.
Five days, and 14 hours of study.
I was too lazy to sort through PDFs for weeks, so I built something that did the hard work once and got it right.
14 hrs
Total hours of study
5 days
Start to exam-ready
60/80 (75%)
Scored on the real exam
One real result, not a guarantee. Results vary. Full breakdown of the hours below.
Time investment
How long this takes
The 60 days of access is your safety buffer, because exam dates slip. Studying itself takes far less.
total, typically spread over 4–7 days
One real result, not a guarantee, and results vary: 4 days of course notes at 3 hours a day, then Grill and one mock exam on a 5th day. That is 5 days and about 14 hours total, scored 60/80 (75%) on the CEI (KAH) exam. (Grill that day took about 1.5 hrs on an earlier, smaller question bank. The bank has grown since, so budget a bit more today.)
Everything, unlocked for 60 days
- Learn — course notes: 14 topics weighted by exam share, every statutory fact sourcedS$89
- Grill — 280 exam-style trap questions, each with a plain-English breakdown; wrong answers auto-return until you beat themS$189
- Prove — full 2-hour mock: 80 Qs in the real 45/30/5 format, auto-gradedS$129
- Retain — CEI Exam Cheat Sheet: 135 must-memorise numbers + mnemonicsS$49
Pass first time and you never pay the S$539.55 CEI course fee.
One-time S$88 · Secure Stripe checkout · No auto-renewal · Pass guarantee: fail and we extend your access 60 days (conditions apply)
Not ready? Try the free 15-question grill first
Frequently asked questions
The Certificate of Employment Intermediaries exam for Key Appointment Holders. It's 80 MCQs over 2 hours: 45 on EARF+EFMA, 30 across all topics, 5 case studies. MOM doesn't publish a fixed pass mark, but ~70% (56 out of 80) is the widely-cited target. Treat it as a floor and aim higher.
Try a few of our questions
Start the free 15-question diagnostic and see the exact traps that catch most candidates. No card required.
Start the free grill →Study content derived from the CEI KAH study guide. Verify all statutory figures against current MOM sources.