CA Foundation Test Series and Mentorship

The Gradehunt CA Foundation test series is for students preparing for the next attempt in January 2027, most of whom are sitting a professional exam for the first time. You get question papers on all four subjects, answer sheets checked by practising Chartered Accountants, and comments detailed enough to tell you what you are actually doing wrong. If you registered after your Class 12 exams and are still waiting on results, you can start writing tests now — your preparation does not have to wait for a mark sheet.

Foundation is where most candidates discover that knowing the material and being able to produce it in three hours are two separate skills. This page explains how the test series closes that gap.

What is different about your first exam

Nobody has marked your work the way ICAI will. School and coaching tests are marked generously, by people who know you and want you to do well. An ICAI examiner has a stack of scripts, a marking scheme and no context about you at all.

That is the gap a test series fills. Every paper you write here is read by a CA with 7 or more years of experience and marked stepwise against a published scheme, rather than on general impression. You find out in September what you would otherwise have found out in January.

The four papers, and how they differ

CA Foundation has four papers of 100 marks each. Two are descriptive and two are objective, and they need different preparation.

Paper 1: Accounting. Three hours, written answers. Journal entries, ledgers, final accounts, partnership and company accounts. Presentation carries real weight: formats, working notes, and totals that agree.

Paper 2: Business Laws. Three hours, written answers. The Indian Contract Act, Sale of Goods, Partnership and the Companies Act. Answers score when they state the provision, apply it to the facts given, and conclude. Writing only the conclusion is the most common way students lose marks here.

Paper 3: Quantitative Aptitude. Two hours, objective. Business mathematics, logical reasoning and statistics, answered as multiple choice questions.

Paper 4: Business Economics. Two hours, objective. Also multiple choice.

Papers 3 and 4 carry negative marking: 0.25 marks are deducted for each wrong answer. This is widely reported and consistent across coaching sources, but please confirm it on ICAI's own exam notification for January 2027 before you build a strategy around it. There is no negative marking on Papers 1 and 2.

Why negative marking changes how you practise

If a wrong answer costs you a quarter mark, blind guessing across 20 uncertain questions is roughly break-even at best and usually worse. What works is eliminating options: if you can rule out two of four, the odds turn in your favour and the guess is worth making.

You cannot learn that judgement from a textbook. You learn it by attempting MCQ papers under a two-hour clock, seeing how many of your guesses were right, and adjusting. The subject-wise MCQs included with the series are there for exactly this, and the objective papers in the test series are timed to match.

CA Foundation test series formats: which to choose

Availability varies by subject and attempt, so check which batches are open on this page.

• One Chapter One Test — one chapter-wise paper for each chapter of a subject. The best starting point for a first attempt. You write a short paper immediately after finishing a chapter, while the material is fresh, and find out straight away whether you understood it.
• 2 Full Syllabus Test Series — two full-length mocks per subject. Add this in December even if you have taken another format. Nobody should walk into their first professional exam having never written a complete paper.
• Mentorship Program and combos — the same papers, plus a mentor who sets the schedule and checks that you are keeping to it.

What the evaluation tells you

Answer sheets come back in under 48 hours, with comments on each part of every question rather than a mark in the margin. Alongside the corrected script you receive the suggested answers with their stepwise marking scheme, so you can see how a 5-mark question was meant to break into five earnable steps.

Presentation is scored separately from content. Our evaluators put it at 10 to 12 marks per paper, and at Foundation level the losses are almost always basic: no working notes under an account, questions answered out of order, sub-parts merged into one paragraph, no ruled format for a final account. These are habits, and habits are easiest to change at the start of the course rather than after three years of writing badly.

You also get an All India rank for each test, which is the first honest comparison most Foundation students have against the wider candidate pool, and the topper's answer sheet for that test. Reading somebody else's full-mark script for a question you half-answered is usually the fastest correction available. And if a comment on your script does not make sense, ask a doubt on that test — you will have an answer within 24 hours.

Once you move up a level, ICAI's own past answers become a major study resource, and our guide to CA Inter suggested answers explains how to use them.

A study plan to January 2027

ICAI had not published the January 2027 time table when this page was written. Plan against early January and adjust when the official notice appears.

Late September to October: build the habit. Cover Accounting and Business Laws chapter by chapter, and write a chapter-wise test within a few days of finishing each chapter. In parallel, start Quantitative Aptitude — it is the paper most students underestimate and it needs sustained practice rather than a last-month push. Two tests a week is enough at this stage.

November: get through the syllabus. Finish the chapter-wise round on all four papers. Keep an eye on the exam form window, which is expected in November; the form is your own responsibility and missing it costs you the attempt. If your Class 12 results affect your registration status, sort that out now rather than in December.

December: write full papers. One full-length attempt per subject, in a single sitting, at the real duration — three hours for Papers 1 and 2, two hours for Papers 3 and 4. Read every evaluation properly. Then write a second round for whichever papers went worst.

Late December into January: consolidate. Revise from your own evaluated scripts and the topper's sheets, not from new material. Work through subject-wise MCQs for Papers 3 and 4 daily. Stop writing fresh tests about four days before the exam and spend the time on formats, provisions and formulae.

If you are preparing while waiting on board results, protect the same two or three hours each day. Consistency over 14 weeks does more than intensity over three.

Mentorship for first-time candidates

The mentorship programme is one-to-one interaction with an expert Chartered Accountant through your preparation. For Foundation students the value is usually in the ordinary questions that nobody has answered yet: how much to attempt, whether to skip a chapter, how to split hours across four papers, what the registration and form deadlines mean. The mentor builds a personalised schedule and follows up on it. The test papers themselves are the same as the chapter-wise series.

It is offered on its own or bundled with chapter-wise tests.

How to enrol

Pick your subjects and format on the CA test series hub. You get the question papers and the upload portal immediately, and each script comes back evaluated within 48 hours.

You can start with a single subject if you want to see how the evaluation works before committing to all four. Once you clear Foundation, the CA Inter test series runs on the same model, and the CA Final test series is there at the end of the road.

The one thing that does not work is buying a series in December and leaving the papers unwritten. Write the first test this week, even if you feel underprepared — being underprepared is precisely the information you need.