Syllabus, articleship, exam pattern and IT training are all inside the questionnaire. ICAI has invited students by name, and the window at cretfeedback.icai.org shuts on 18 August 2026. This is the rare moment when the people sitting the exam get a say in how it's designed.
On 1 August 2026, ICAI's Board of Studies (Academic) published an announcement inviting stakeholder feedback on a comprehensive review of the CA Scheme of Education and Training. The work is being run by the Committee for Review of Education and Training (CRET), and responses go through a single online questionnaire.
| Detail | What ICAI has said |
|---|---|
| Who is running it | Group on Academics of CRET, via Board of Studies (Academic). CRET is chaired by the ICAI President, CA. Subodh Kumar Agarwal. |
| Who can respond | Members, students, industry professionals, academicians and other interested stakeholders |
| Where | The official form at cretfeedback.icai.org — one submission per respondent |
| Last date | 18 August 2026 |
| Changes announced so far | None. This is a consultation, not a notification of amendment. |
The portal describes the form as a seven-step flow and names six sections up front. Between them they cover essentially every part of the CA course a student experiences.
Name, email, mobile number, optional organisation, and your stakeholder category. All mandatory except organisation.
The syllabus and study material side of the course: what's taught at Foundation, Intermediate and Final, and how it's delivered.
Articleship. If you have a view on training quality, stipend, rotation across verticals, or leave rules, this is the section where it belongs.
The assessment side: paper structure, the descriptive-and-MCQ mix, marking approach and how application-based the questions are.
ICITSS and AICITSS — the integrated IT and orientation courses students complete before and during articleship.
Free text. This is where a specific, well-argued point from someone who has actually sat the papers is likely to carry the most weight.
Two housekeeping rules the portal states plainly: each respondent may submit only once, and questions marked with an asterisk are mandatory. There's no save-and-resume promised anywhere on the landing page, so it's worth drafting your open-ended answers before you start rather than composing them in the form.
ICAI's announcement invites students generally. But the Stakeholder Category dropdown on step 1 of the questionnaire offers only one student-specific option: CA Final Student. The full list of categories is CA in Practice, CA in Industry, CA Final Student, Academician, Faculty Member, Regulator / Policy Maker, Industrialist / Corporate Leader, and Others.
If you're at Foundation or Intermediate level and want your feedback counted, the only category that fits is Others. ICAI has not published any clarification on whether Foundation and Intermediate students are meant to respond under that option or were simply not the intended audience for this round. If that distinction matters to you, CRET lists a contact address — cretfeedback@icai.in — on the form itself, and asking before you submit costs nothing given you only get one submission.
We're flagging this because it's an observable detail of the live form rather than something ICAI has commented on, and it's the sort of thing that quietly determines whose voice ends up in the dataset.
A consultation is not an amendment. ICAI has announced no change to the syllabus, the paper pattern, the marking scheme, articleship duration or the passing criteria as a result of this review. The announcement's stated aim is to keep the CA course "contemporary, globally benchmarked, professionally relevant and future-ready" — that's a direction of travel, not a notification.
If you're sitting CA Foundation or CA Intermediate in September 2026, or CA Final in November 2026, the current scheme applies to you exactly as it did last week. Nothing in your preparation should change because of this. The one already-notified change worth keeping on your radar is separate and unrelated: ICAI announced in December 2025 that the Income-tax Act, 2025 becomes applicable from the May 2027 exams onwards.
What a review of this scope can eventually change — if ICAI acts on it — is the shape of the course for students registering after any amendment is notified. The last full overhaul, the New Scheme of Education and Training, took effect from 1 July 2023 and reshaped paper counts, the articleship duration and the MCQ weighting. There is no published timeline for what happens after 18 August, and we'd treat any specific claim about "the new scheme from year X" circulating on social media as unverified until ICAI says it.
Current paper structure by level: CA Foundation, CA Intermediate, CA Final. See also our breakdown of which papers are MCQ and which are descriptive — useful background if you plan to answer Part C.
Consultations of this kind get a lot of "syllabus is too vast" and very little that a committee can act on. A few things that tend to travel further, particularly in Part E:
And a practical note: you get one submission, and the deadline is 18 August. Draft it in a document first.
Sourced from the Board of Studies (Academic) announcement "Invitation for Stakeholder Feedback on the Review of the Chartered Accountancy Scheme of Education and Training" issued by the Group on Academics of CRET, from ICAI's Committee for Review of Education and Training (CRET) committee page on icai.org, and from the consultation portal itself at cretfeedback.icai.org — where the 18 August 2026 last date, the section list, the one-submission rule and the Stakeholder Category options were read directly off the live form on 7 August 2026. Cross-checked against CAclubindia's 1 August 2026 report carrying the full text of the announcement. The Income-tax Act, 2025 applicability date comes from ICAI's BoS announcement dated 8 December 2025. CA Grader is not affiliated with ICAI — verify the deadline and the form's contents against icai.org and cretfeedback.icai.org before relying on this, since ICAI can extend, amend or close the window by circular at any time.
Practise against the pattern that's actually in force — real ICAI MCQs with instant scoring, or a full descriptive answer with ICAI step-marked AI feedback.