Forums › Ask ACCA Tutor Forums › Ask the Tutor ACCA PM Exams › What makes F5 exam hard
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John Moffat.
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- October 25, 2021 at 9:49 pm #639101
Dear John, I have been able to pass all exams all because of Opentuition, In F2 and F4. I didn’t even practically touched the studytexts. and I scored fine so far. I heard from alot of people who gave up on Acca because of P5. I am hearing such thing from friends and family.
I am giving exam in december and i Have completed the syllabus till budgeting (chapter 12 out of 17) and i have only studied through opentuition.I want to know what makes people fail at F5. Is it the syllabus which is hard because quite frankly i found syllabus more enjoyable and quite easy till now ( i am at chapter 12 ).
is it the Theory which people pay less attention too ?
or is it the new interface/format of exam which is quite complicated ( i mean the Word processor and spreadsheet )
or is it just the Varinces that makes people think it very hard exam.
or is it the different type of question in the exam or does it have to do it with very long exam ( 3 hour and 10 minutes exam , I haven’t sit that long exam in 3 years )
You are an experinced Teacher/Professor who know about all of that, Perheps no one could answer that question better than you. Is there any tip i should remember.
October 26, 2021 at 9:16 am #639125Paper PM (it is not called F5 any more) is one of the Applied Skills exams and all of the Applied Skills exams are of a similar level of difficulty (which is greater than the level of difficulty of the Applied Knowledge exams i.e. the first four exams). Obviously some people find some exams harder than others but Paper PM is not any more difficult.
One of the biggest reasons for people failing is that for many it is their first ACCA exam (because of exemptions) and they assume that having been to university that ACCA exams will be easier than university and therefore do not study enough. That is not the case – the exams are university level. Those who were exempt from the earlier exams should have covered all the topics at university but often have not. At university the people teaching know what will be in the exam, but that is not the case for the ACCA exams.
For all the advanced ACCA exams there is no ‘quick’ way of passing. It means studying all of the topics properly (and our lectures are a complete free course covering everything needed to be able to pass the exam well) and then practicing past exam (and other exam standard) questions by buying a Revision Kit from one of the ACCA Approved Publishers and attempting every question. Far too many people leave studying until the last minute, and only practice a few past exam questions, which is not enough.
Only about 50% of the questions in the exam require calculations – the rest are theory/discussion. The exam is testing that you understand the topics and have not simply learned ‘rules’.
The word processor and spreadsheet should not present a problem provided that you practice using the resources on the ACCA website (and the last chapter in our free lecture notes discusses this and has links to the relevant resources).
Obviously different people find different topics easy or difficult. Variances are important and are more advanced that in Paper MA, but again although students who were exempt from Paper MA should have studied basic variances at university, many have not which therefore makes it harder for them.
All the exams after the first four are of the same duration and I am afraid that is just something that one has to accept.
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