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I haven’t – but consider this. If they only value it at that price level the ‘value’ is dubious. OpenTuition’s materials appear to me to be of good quality and they’re free…
The problem you;re all going to have right now is just down to the economy – I havent had ‘permanent’ work since January 2012, I’ve bounced along between contracts – mostly cleaning up firms accounting systems, producing year end accounts, doing system re-implementations etc
Mostly paying between 28 and 33k – the first one I got after leaving my perm job in 2012 was paying 30k and that was before I finished my AAT course
Since 2012 the number of jobs available has massively increased and salaries have gone upwards as well but its still a bit sparse, and the main problem I’ve faced – which has effectively prevented me getting decent perm work – is that perm jobs paying over 30k are jumped on by fully-qualified accountants who’ve been made redundant elsewhere
The job market is STRONGLY seasonal – January is dead time – i spent most of it having long lie-ins, playing Spelltower on my tablet PC, polishing the old Volvo and worrying about the December exam results. February is improving fast, My experience from 2012 and 2013 is that the best time to be looking for work is between March & October. The very peak is probably mid June.
So hang in there for now – and consider if you have any friends in the south you can flat-share with, louibee….
You may find when you resign that they make you an offer you cant refuse – but this isnt the time of year to try that trick unless you already have a better offer.
I have nearly finished compiling my revision list of all the relevant UK case-law for The Law of Obligations (Contract law & Torts)
Unless the management of this board have any objection, I will post it here as a link for other F4 UK students to be able to access. I believe nothing in my compiled document breaches any copyright restrictions, being based on court reports and commentary upon them in relevant online sources but phrased in my own words and in no place using the text of commercial publications
the order in which the cases are addressed matches the order of mention in a well known commercial textbook but the data is derived and checked from elsewhere. It may contain errors either of my phrasing or from the sources used and I will accept no liability for any such….
I’m AAT qualified, ACCA PQ, in S/E England. 15 years accounting experience although not all of it counted for much
Last salary £33K – currently unemployed! (last job was for Blockbuster video at their head office and we all know what happened to them..)
If you;re ACCA qualified as well you’d earn more than me on a level playing field – AAT is a respected qualification but it doesn’t pay as well. Working in the Northwest would bring it down though. Perhaps same level? If you were in the south you’d probably get £37K-£45K with recent ACCA qual, more after time….
Got 3 – I am AAT Qualified and a Member of the AAT
Did it on applying to join ACCA by attaching a scanned copy of my AAT Membership certificate and final exam results list to the attachment form. A week later I got an email saying I had been awarded exemptions (F1,F2,F3)haha! Its face-paint actually, I was at a pretty wild party (hence the hat as well – I dont wear a fedora for professional purposes)
I’m an accountant. I have a very ordinary everyday life. I drive a volvo, read the guardian and drink tea. 😉
Essem – I’m sorry you feel that more learning is a bad or wasteful thing. I disagree. Knowledge is power, even if it won’t specifically help me pass the exam.
I’m only a quarter of the way through the syllabus and I already feel better-informed when I read the news and new legal cases are mentioned, just for knowing what the terms mean – things like repudiation, injunction, terms, conditions and warranties have meaning now when before they were just lawyer-waffle
Thanks – I will certainly view your lectures as well (currently making notes off the book, reached ch6 of 23 in total)
I will concentrate on the principles although the exercise I was doing yesterday – taking a list of all the cases referenced under contract law and looking them up in law sites – proved very useful as it gave alternative explanations of the same facts, which throws a much clearer light on not only the facts of the case (still learning to interpret legal terms) but also the context
I had not realised you’d conflated two cases there! By the time I got to the Les Affreteurs case my mind was a bit cooked from too much lawyer-waffle
I did it using an online wordprocessing portal (Google Drive, in my case, although Microsoft also have a similar website for sharing microsoft office documents)
All my notes were typed up in Google Drive documents through my PC’s web browser – one per chapter of the textbook. Whenever I had any spare time I would open my notes on my phone and re-read them and make sure I understood them. Was also able to access them thru the web browser on my office computer, from work
If you use Google Drive for this and have an Android phone the application they offer for access makes it very easy and fast to access your notes.
Basically whenever i had some spare wasted time i got my phone out and got into my revision notes. By the time i got to the exam i was really familiar with the materials.
I am a long way behind you (so far I have just 6 modules attained) but the way I do it is in the top section of my CV, under my personal statement and contact details, a section like this
(this is my one – and its been really helpful with recruiters and potential employers)
ACCA Qualification: Progress
F1,F2,F3 Exempted (AAT)
F5,F6,F9 Passed
F4 Currently Studying
F7,F8 Not Yet Attempted
Professional Stage – Not Yet AttemptedYou could do this
ACCA Qualification: Progress
Fundamentals
F1-F9 All Passed
Professional Level
P1,P2,P3 etc – All Passed
Optional Papers
P4 Passed
P7 Passed at Resit or simply ‘Passed’Personally I would phrase it as ‘Passed’ and if they ask, admit to failing it but state that all others were first time passes. Failing a P-level paper is nothing to be shamed of but there’s no point rushing to shout it out….
to be fair, and to correct some inaccurate comments above;
during February 2013 a senior ACCA member, Director of Education Clare Minchington, did put on the record during an interview that ACCA intended to have 4 sittings a year from 2014 onwards. Clearly this has been dropped or delayed, unfortunately.
53%. I spent the past 2 months convinced I’d failed (I was made redundant a few weeks before the exam and used all the time I had mentally allocated for revision on job-hunting instead. Didn’t really revise at all apart from 3 hour panic cramming on the morning of the exam…)
Very pleased and releived
I wasnt in a good place mentally at the time and couldnt focus on revising properly. went in, sure that I would fail. Passed with 50% !!! Cant quite believe it. The narrowest of narrow margins
the whole point of writing the notes was that doing so forced me to remember the content. There is no easy shortcut to this – and they wouldnt help you anyway, for two reasons
1) they are in exactly the same structure as the BPP textbook, just re-written in my own words to make sense to me
2) not all of the tax rates are really applicable to 2013 anyway – you will be tested on the current Finance Act“If you do the AAT, you get a few exemptions when starting the ACCA, but you still have to pay for them! ”
Used to be true, not any more. 2012 and onwards, AAT exemptions are free, I have confirmation of this in an email from ACCA and have personally been exempted without paying a charge.
I took AAT Foundation and Intermediate in the 90s and have worked in accountancy ever since. I completed AAT in 2012 and am now doing ACCA. Since I did not go to University, AAT guaranteed I could get into ACCA, A-levels are not enough it seems.
AAT + ACCA is a slower way to a qualification BUT – it leaves you with more letters after your name, and more expertise. When you sit ACCA papers F4 through to F9 you will in every case be sitting an exam on a subject you’ve already sat an AAT exam on. This means you have an automatic head start on your study and a better chance of getting the pass you want.
Regards
C D Emery MAATGenerally I would agree – practice literally forges paths in your brain so every question becomes easier than the last one – its always been the best way for humans to learn, as the brains’ learned responses tend to last and to be brought freshly to mind by a question thats recognised as similar.
But don’t write off reading and short-term memory. I took AAT Level 3 (Intermediate) at a bad time in my life and for one exam,nothing was sinking in and I knew I couldnt pass it based on revision. Instead I turned up 3 hours early at the test centre and read the textbook from cover to cover, finishing moments before the exam doors opened, walked in, and sat the exam
I’d forgotten most of it by the time I got home – but I’d passed.
I did it alone, using the BPP textbook and OpenTuition’s course notes and videos. I made an extensive set of my own notes (about 85 A4 pages when printed) from both the book and the OpenTuition notes, anything that didnt make sense I wrote about and read about, then rewrote, until I had an explanation in my own words that made sense
I spent the last few weeks before the exam doing test questions and re-reading my own notes, not the book, to get hints on how to do them as my notes were written the way I think.
I knew it would be hard to memorise the lot so I didn’t even try – I did not study penalties or investigations and I only studied the basics of inheritance tax (then forgot to revise them – oops). My strategy was to get as many as possible of the points from questions 1 and 2 as the exam could be passed on just those two, although its essential to attempt every question or you’ll be failed for not trying. and spend as little time as possible on the remaining questions once I’d written enough to fairly say that I had attempted them. I did put in effort to learn VAT as it seemed that was a good way to guarantee I had enough points to get a pass.
My main reasoning was having completed AAT in June 2012 I had recently taken the AAT business tax exam on the same finance act and a lot of the knowledge was already in my head, so I focussed on perfecting that knowledge (AAT doesnt include IHT or VAT) then concentrated on learning VAT fairly well
Some would call this irresponsible and / or negligent. To them I would point out that I passed it with 76%
I was utterly convinced I’d failed – had to scribble-out two pages of calculations I’d got wrong and then nearly ran out of time (finished the last one with about 2 minutes to spare)
Somehow got 76%. Baffled but happy. Mostly done using the Opentuition course notes (UK exam) as I found BPP’s book far too complicated in its explanations and occasionally contradictory. May have been helped by the fact I took and passed AAT BTX (Business Tax) in June 2012 on the same finance act…. (although BTX doesn’t include VAT or IHT)
