Tennessee Insurance Exam: What's on It, Passing Score and Format

How the Tennessee Insurance Exam Is Set Up

The Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance licenses producers, and Pearson VUE delivers the exams in person and online. Every major line has its own exam:

• The national half tests insurance as a discipline: how products work, what policies contain, and the concepts every agent in America has to know. It is the bigger share of the exam, with 50 scored questions.
• The Tennessee half tests the state's insurance code as enforced by the Department of Commerce and Insurance: licensing rules, agent conduct, and the regulations that make Tennessee practice different. It has 18 scored questions.

Both halves roll up into one scaled score for that line, so you cannot lean on strong general knowledge and ignore Tennessee law. You can take some lines together in one session, such as Life with Accident and Health, but each line is still its own exam with its own score. The Tennessee content outlineDam VUE Vue En Documents Publications 124301.pdf Content lists every topic.

What's on the Life and Health Exam?

• Life products and riders: the heaviest block, built on telling term, whole, universal and variable products apart by their one distinguishing feature each.
• Annuities: immediate versus deferred, fixed versus variable, and how the accumulation and payout phases differ.
• Health coverage: plan structures, disability income concepts like elimination and benefit periods, and long term care basics.
• Taxation: which premiums, cash values and benefits are taxable, the exact knowledge topic candidates most often skim.
• Underwriting and policy delivery: insurable interest, applications, and the sequence from application to coverage in force.

What's on the Property and Casualty Exam?

• Policy structure: declarations, insuring agreements, conditions and exclusions, and how the four interact when a claim happens. Drill: explain each part's job out loud for any policy type.
• Homeowners and personal auto: the biggest question block, covering what each form protects and what people wrongly assume it protects. Drill: for each form, name one covered loss and one commonly assumed loss that is excluded.
• Commercial basics and workers compensation: concept level coverage of business policies and who workers compensation does and does not cover.
• The calculations: coinsurance, deductibles and loss settlement math. Drill: rerun the formulas with fresh numbers until each takes under a minute.
• Liability concepts: negligence, damages, and the difference between bodily injury, property damage and personal injury.

The Tennessee Law Half: What the State Section Actually Asks

The state law section is written from Tennessee's insurance code and the rules the Department of Commerce and Insurance enforces. The themes are consistent: who needs a license and how licenses are maintained, what counts as prohibited conduct in selling and advertising, how agents must handle client money and records, and the powers the state holds over licensees. None of it is difficult. All of it is specific, and every question in this half is unanswerable from national material alone.

Passing Score and Timing

• Passing score: a scaled score of 70 on each line.
• It is a scaled score, not a percentage. Your raw score is converted to a 0 to 100 scale, so aim well above the line instead of counting how many you can miss.
• Time: 1 hour and 45 minutes per major line exam, a little over a minute per question.
• Results: you get your pass or fail result the moment you finish.

What Happens if You Don't Pass?

Because each line is scored on its own, passing one line and missing another means you only retest the line you missed. Schedule your next attempt through Pearson VUE, and each attempt carries its own exam fee.

Before you retest, sort what went wrong into national concepts versus Tennessee law, then study those buckets instead of starting over.