Interview with Leo, June 2015 P5 Genius Hunt Winner, who scored 74%

Please tell us in which country you live, and what work do you do.

I live in England and work as an analyst at a Bank although my main focus is on insurance.

How much time each week did you spend studying, on average?

On average about 10-15 hours per week starting 2 months before the exam although this was mostly weighted to the last few weeks leading up to the exam.

Which study resources did you use?

I used as many resources as possible including: part-time evening tuition, revision course, question day, the practice and revision kit, technical articles, videos on YouTube about how to answer P5 exam questions and of course opentuition.

Did you get support from your firm?

Yes, I had 5 days of study leave for revision, and used my holiday to take extra time off before the exam.

What was your approach to your studying?

Studying was generally attending evening classes, watching opentuition lectures and completing the two practice exams during the tuition phase of the course. For me the revision phase is where it counts and where I feel get the most marks per hour spent studying. I would split revision into different slots of activities, although was quite fluid around timings. I would read through the technical articles related to the exam two or three at a time, highlighting useful bits which might get me a mark. I would then do a couple of past paper questions (largely in a note form) and review the answer after each one making sure I knew the main points with key words as triggers. I would then go through the revision booklet and take notes on a chapter and try and replay the key points back to myself at the end. This process would repeat up until the exam although I would largely be focusing on exam questions by the end.

What would you say was the most important factor that helped you to achieve such a high mark?

Definitely luck. Hard work, perseverance and strict time management in the exam will get you through eventually, but you do need a healthy dose of luck on the day. I could easily have failed this exam and was not confident I had even passed until I got my result. My one word of warning would be not to underestimate the difficulty of the exam it seems easy in terms of content and theory but in application it can be challenging and requires practising as many exam questions as early as possible, especially the longer part A questions. Although i generally only answered a few Part A questions in full before the exam. Normally I would spend 7.5 mins reading time and then a maximum of half an hour answering each Part A question in note form before going through the answer and identifying points I had missed or where I’d simply not answered the right question. I found this approach a much more productive use of my time.

How did you find out about OpenTuition, and which of our resources did you use?

This time around I typed “ACCA P5 help” into safari and open tuition came back as the top search result. My favourite open tuition resource are the flash cards and wished there were more of them for some of the other exams such as P4.