important subjects

Hi Ugras

Did I mock your English? I hope I didn’t cause offence. But let me say this, the quality of the English in this post is exemplary. I hope that my “mocking” served its purpose.

Many congratulations on passing P2 and P3 – I hope that I played some small ( Little? ) part in that success.

P6? I know nothing about it! Let me say that “Tax” is not my favourite three letter word ending in “x”. I prefer “box”, “fox” and “Sox” ( Sarbanes-Oxley to you non-auditors )

P7? Here we go! I ALWAYS recommend that students should prepare a plan to any written question ( read two articles on the ACCA website, P3 technical articles from Student Accountant magazine, I believe from April 2011, by two separate members of the P3 marking team. They sing the same song as I do but they count the 15 minutes “reading and planning time” into the overall time for the exam whereas I work on just the 3 hours )

Read, think, plan, re-read, re-think, extend your plan, read again to ensure that your planned answer correctly pays attention to the verbs in the question and uses all the information ( Lisa doesn’t put unnecessary detail into questions – it’s there to be used ), structure your plan to make it logical and persuasive.

Use headings.

Count your points – you shouldn’t have started before the end of your planning time (number of marks per part question divided by 2 is the planning time you should work to for each part question) if you haven’t got 15 points for a 15 mark question within the 7.5 minutes planning time. This exam requires perception, persuasion, clarity, technical ability, creativity, imagination – there are 4 professional marks here – it would be a shame to waste them.

If you have used your “reading and planning” time correctly, you now have only 1.3 minutes to write each mark-earning sentence! Wow! How much can you write in 1.3 minutes? ( the P3 marker guys work to 1.5 minutes per mark-earning sentence )

I guess “not much”

So don’t laboriously go on and on about just 1 point.

Make it

and move on

When you’re preparing, I would suggest that, given the quality of your vastly improved capabilities in English :), you should maybe just be planning answers and then reading the printed solution. That solution reading is to check that you were barking up the right tree and to pick up any points which you may have missed.

Be careful with the audit question which asks “State what evidence you should expect to find on the audit file” ( for instance, you would not expect to find “telephone any non-replies” ). You could expect to find “Evidence that follow up procedures have been taken” or “A record of telephone conversations with companies which didn’t reply to our confirmation requests” )

Beware, Lisa also sometimes asks in that question “State the audit procedures you should expect to be followed …” so this is NOT asking you for “evidence” rather it’s asking you for “procedures”

I’ve not taught P7 yet this season so I’ve not yet bent my mind to what’s likely and therefore tipable. But you can get a good feel for the type of question she asks by looking at past papers since December 2007.

Good luck, and keep up with the good English;)

And you, and good luck in December – I’ve already got everything crossed for a few other students, so I’ll add your name onto the plaster cast which is on both my legs at the moment!