The New York life insurance exam, Series 17-51

One hundred questions on one product family

Series 17-51 licenses you to sell life insurance and annuities in New York. It runs 100 questions in 2 hours, and you need 70% to pass. The state's outline divides it into topics and gives each one a share of the paper, so some areas count for far more than others.

The kinds of question it asks

Most questions are about what a policy does. Expect to tell term coverage from permanent coverage, to know which policies build cash value and how that value can be used, and to follow what happens when a premium is missed. Policy provisions are a large part of it: grace periods, reinstatement, the incontestable clause, beneficiary designations and the ways a death benefit can be paid out.

Annuities are their own block. You need the difference between the accumulation and payout phases, and between fixed and variable products.

The rest is about the agent: what you may and may not say to a customer, how a sale must be documented, and what counts as replacing an existing policy.

Principles beat memorized figures

Life insurance law is full of dollar limits and deadlines, and the law changes. A question that turns on a figure you memorized from an old book can be marked wrong against you. Our practice questions test the rule behind the number instead, so the answer stays right. Learn why a provision exists and you can usually reason to the answer even when the wording is unfamiliar.

Where candidates lose marks

• Mixing up who owns the policy, who is insured and who receives the benefit. Read every question for which of the three it is asking about.
• Treating two similar provisions as the same. A missed premium and a lapsed policy lead to different answers.
• Answering from how things work in another state.

Pacing

At 72 seconds a question, there is time to read each one twice. Use it on the long scenario questions. The definitions should take you a few seconds each.