STANDARD OF THE PAPER The standard of the paper was generally good and well-structured with improvement in precision and clarity levels of the questions, which significantly impacted candidates' understanding of the questions that attracted good answers from the candidates. The distribution of questions across the syllabus was good and also saw some level of improvement. Additionally, the distribution of the sub-questions was well done, which offered candidates the opportunity to at least be able to answer each question or part of the question satisfactorily. The quantitative aspect covered about 62%, whilst the theory or essay aspect covered about 38%, which had more essays this time than the previous sitting of 70% quantitative and 30% essay. This development also partially contributed to the high pass rate. This was a further shift from previous sittings, which were over 75% quantitative. The questions generally appeared unambiguous for candidates to understand and answer. There were no noted sub-standard questions in the paper. However, question two had background information that required a lot of reading and concentration to pick the relevant portions needed to answer the questions. The marks allocations were also considered good, and adjustments made where there was the need at the coordination stage.

PERFORMANCE OF CANDIDATES The performance of the candidates was excellent and showed a historic improvement in the pass rate and one of the best sittings in recent memory. The overall pass rate improved significantly to 44.53% compared to 22.76% and 12.73% in the last two sittings, respectively. The excellent performance was attributable to:  Improvement in the quality and clarity of the questions with little or no ambiguity.  Noticed improvement in the quality and standard of the candidates who sat for the paper as well as  Improvement in the quality of teaching and preparations by the candidates which reflected in the quality of answers produced by the candidates The excellent performance was generally across all centres. The varying degrees of answers and responses to questions in both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the questions by the different candidates did not suggest any copying.