Forum Replies Created
- Posts
I passed my final exam (woo) and went to apply for ACCA membership through the portal. I put in all my details and submitted the application and it was acknowledge in the next page.
However, I didn’t receive any notification via email so I’m a little curious if this is still ok. I’m sure it is, but it would have been nice to receive an email notification saying that the application for membership has been received and is expected to be dealt with in “x” time.Edit: nvm … The portal has a track the progress. Should have looked there first.
@ikettee said:
pls can u share ur technique, i seem to spend soo much time on que one, espercially on de calculationsYou have to answer the question they set and not what you want them to ask. That’s simple, but important to comprehend and the examiner mentions this in his report in almost every exam.
Time management is paramount. I spent 5 extra minutes on Q2 (1st question I attempted), and I needed around an extra 5 minutes for Q3 (last question I attempted). Even if you haven’t finished a question, once the allotted time is up, you finish your sentence and move on.
Don’t waffle. Waffling is for breakfast.
Use the correct format. If it’s a report, which it normally is, write as a report. The 4 professional marks are EASY marks. I left 4 blank pages so that I could work on the calculations at the end of the question, then I went back to write the report. It is always better to leave too many pages than too few.
It is better to dedicate time to think about what you want to write, and write that, than to just write willy nilly. That won’t get you many marks and you’ll waste a lot of time and hand muscles.
If you are spending too long on Q1 because of writing the report or doing the calculations, then you are going to work in order to improve that time. With more practise, it’ll be easier and you’ll find you understand more.
Hope that helps.
You should do the options that you either:
1) enjoy the most
2) are best atIf that means doing P6 and P7, then do P6 and P7.
From my understanding, some people do P6 and P7 because they don’t like Performance or Financial Management, hence avoid P4 and P5.
I did P4 and P6 because I enjoyed tax, HATED audit and decided P4 was better for me than P5.
@rajah said:
Pass with 61%. One to go.Well done!
Which one is your last?I passed my final exam today.
Received a certificate for completion of the Professional Stage.
No numbers, no levels. Just saying its done and the 6 P exams I sat.@stacky said:
True story. The link theory is crap. Passed with 62. Scoring.was.bad but I will take it as it is. Since I only attempted 82% of paper.I concur. Link theory was total codswallop. Got error messages and was able to purchase practice tests as well. Passed!
Passed with 81%.
Thank God, it was such a reasonable paper.All over for me. Still can’t quite believe it.
@stacky said:
Hi, Are you doing your last paper?
I nearly had an emotional breakdown after seeing the error msgYep. That was the last one.
I think the best thing we can do is to do our best not to think about it.We should play Pokemon Go for the next 59 hours.
@bliss2323 said:
OK the link means nothing though. ..it really doesn’t are you able to see practice tests or exam entries tho?Within the ACCA portal?
I can view the practice test section and can enter for exams. Well, it won’t let me enter because I’ve passed one and sat another option, so can’t do 3.Doesn’t look like anything has changed.
@bliss2323 said:
you got an error as well??Yes. I’ve, thankfully, never failed an exam and have done well in almost all of them.
I felt fine after the exam and was pretty confident of a pass. Now I’m not so sure.Anyway, not going to think about it. Not going to change anything.
I should not have looked at that link!
Now I’m panicky >.<
Also did P4. Felt fine until I looked at that link.
Balls.Gotta get mind off it. Not long now. 2.5 days.
Sat, hopefully, my last exam (P4). Was a good paper and felt very good about it.
Hopefully that positive feeling will show when the results are published!Good luck all.
There is almost no overlap between P6 and any other P unit. However, each P unit will have 4-6 ethics marks involved, which, while covered in their own unit, is extensively covered in P1.
If I remember correctly, when I sat P6, the ethics question was something to do with a client refusing to change their income for their tax return and I had to outline the procedure the tax adviser (i.e me) should do. This is the common ethics question that appears in the P6 exam and there’s not a huge amount of variation, given that P6 is all about tax planning.
Its not essential to have the P1 knowledge for P6, and you can certainly get full marks for the ethics question without studying P1. However, it does help because having P1 knowledge in your head will help you think about ethical implications if the examiner decides to throw you a curveball and asks an obscure ethics question.
You don’t need P2 or P3 knowledge for P6. There’s very little, if any, overlap.
If you want to study P6 straight after F6 because the knowledge is already there and you are genuinely worried you will forget it, then you should go for P6 first. Whilst there’s 4-6 marks for ethics, there’s 92-90 marks for tax (additional 4 marks for quality of presentation) and the VAST majority of content that appears in F6 will appear in P6. P6 is a very large and dense unit and there is a lot of material covered and expanded on.
Good luck!
@latoyah84 said:
P4 may look for likely to you since you just completed F9 and even though i am told there is not much overlap there will be some similarities so sitting it first may be best for you.
This is not exactly true. There is a lot of overlap between the two papers, but P4 does introduce some new material such as option pricing with the Black-Scholes model. There is a lot of expansion on certain models such as DCF / NPV / Valuation / Currency and the treasury function.
There is some content that doesn’t appear in P4, such as market efficiency and certain discussion around managing working capital / capital finance. This may just be because its assumed knowledge and will form some part of a discussion question.
I found F9 to be very broad and P4 to be much more specific. It concentrated mainly on project valuation / option pricing / interest and currency risk and business valuation. Other aspects taught and examined are dividend policy, financial reconstruction, the treasury function and recent developments.
Its a very tough paper, but it wasn’t as hard to study as I thought it would be. I wasn’t particularly great at F9, so I was expecting it to be much more difficult to relearn, but it wasn’t.
In addition, the level of overlap is very different to F6 and P6, where almost EVERYTHING in F6 is examined within P6 to some extent. Specific things such as what is or is not taxable for income tax don’t feature, but almost everything else is examinable.
I started my ACCA journey at 24. I’m now 27 and am awaiting the result for my final exam.
I’m not exactly old, but as people have said above, it is never too late.You can take them in whatever order you like, but there are advantages to taking in a sequence.
I’d say take P1 first, because all other P exams will have ethics in them, and having P1 knowledge, will make those 4-6 ethics marks (which you will get in every exam) relatively straightforward to obtain, and could make the difference between a pass and a fail. You’d be surprised how many people on these forums get 46-49 marks.
You could take P2 or P3 after as there’s little to no overlap between the two and knowledge from one won’t really benefit you with the other.
I’d do the options last. The pass rates suggest that they are more difficult than P1-3, and it might be psychologically better to get those 3 out of the way, should you fail an optional exam. That way you still know there end of the tunnel is still close by.
As someone who sat both P4 and P6, it really makes no difference which one you do first. I did P6 first only because I really enjoyed tax, and after sitting P3 (which I hated), I wanted a unit I enjoyed studying. If I was better at F9 than F6, I’d have done P4 first.
What I would say is if you wanted to do P5 or P7, you should DEFINITELY do P1 and P3 first because there is a lot of overlap between P3 and P5, and between P1 and P7.
Good luck with whatever you decide to do.
@sergeykos said:
I did it differently:
VaR = N (confidence level) x s x square root T
for confidence level 95% the number of standard deviations is 1.645 (from the tables)
s – annual standard deviation of project returns
T – number of years
So VaR = 1.645 x 1.3m x Sq.root 7 = $5.66m, which is potential monetary loss and is below the project’s NPV of 6.5m
So at the given level of confidence the project is worthwhile.They didn’t ask for the loss at 95% confidence. They asked for the confidence level for a break even NPV. So you needed to work out the confidence level with a VaR of $6.5m
6.5m = N * 1.3m *Sqrt(7)
Rearrange to give N = 1.89Looking at the Normal Distribution table, 1.89 gives 0.4706. As its positive, add 0.5 to give 0.9706 = 97%
@killip123 said:
Q2 & 3 in the hybrid were from June 16 and Q1 and 4 were from March 16Yes. I just realised that.
I retract my statement.
My bad.
I was hoping I could delete the post before someone quoted it!@junaid100 said:
can any one suggest me how to manage the time in optional papers…because i only attempted 75% P4 paper even i can further 25% paper but couldn’t due to time off.Hello Junaid,
It seems obvious, but the only real way to manage time is to practise, practise, practise exam questions until you are able to complete them within the 90 / 45 minute limit.
However, if you are completely unable to do that, then my advice is to not go over that time limit. If you can only complete 40-45 marks (of Q1) within 90 minutes, then stop and move on to the other questions. Its better to sacrifice the 10-5 marks and go for the other 50 marks, than to spend even an extra 5 minutes on those 10-5 marks, and potentially lose out on more marks elsewhere because you ran out of time.In the exam on Friday, I overran by just 5 minutes on Q2 (1st question I attempted), and it caught me out at the end, and I was unable to catch up the time and finish Q3.
Hope that helps, and if you took an exam last week, hope you get 50+!
How do the ACCA decide which questions to include in the hybrid paper?!
Of the 4 questions, 3, including Q1, are from the March 2016 paper, and only 1 optional question is included from the June 2016 paper.This is just stupid.
It should be Q1 + 1 option from one paper and 2 options from the other paper. This makes 75 marks from one paper and 50 marks from the other.Ridiculous ACCA.
I got the same for the FRA and Futures (forgot the 0.5% at the beginning for FRA. Only realised when the futures was so much higher!).
For the options, the rate increase war something like 4.9% with an exercised option. For the rate decrease it was the borrowing rate + the option premium, so something like 4.4%.It meant that forward > future at either case.
forward > option when rates go up (by around 0.2%)
option > forward when rates go down (by around 0.3%).For some reason, this seemed wrong when I did it.
I’m feeling much better now that other people got it. Lets hope we aren’t all systematically wrong.As with everyone above, this was a paper that was technically, quite straight forward, but was VERY time pressured. There was nothing in it that required specific knowledge (Islamic Finance / current developments / the “Greeks” etc ….), which was pleasing!
I did Q2 then Q1 and Q3.
Q2 was ridiculously easy, but i really messed up with the calculations for some reason. The answers I got just didn’t seem to make sense, however, when looking at the example in BPP, it seems to be correct. I spent too much time thinking “WTF am I doing wrong?” and actually lost 5 minutes, which meant I didn’t quite finish the very last question I did (3c).The actual calculations in Q1, and the technical knowledge required was very straightforward. There was nothing that required much thought, but because of the vast amount of figures, and factoring in conversions and inflation, it was VERY easy to a) go off track, b) mess up the structure, c) completely miss a calculation d) over run. However, I think this is the case with most Q1s of the P papers, especially P2.
For example, when doing the APV bit for the tax shield / subsidy benefit, I forgot to convert back to dollars, and only realised when doing the discussion in part ii. Oops, but got there in the end. Discussions and Part b were relatively straightforward, although I’m sure I missed some easy marks there.Q3 was a bit of a mind f**k in some respects. It was either ridiculously easy like Q2 was meant to be, where the calculations were quite basic and didn’t require a lot of thought, or it was MUCH more difficult than I imagined, which means I lost the best part of 25 marks! All I did was add the figures together, and adjust for cash, and gain/loss in cash deposits, and adjust for debt finance and factor in the loan required. Take away tax, add back syngergies and thats PAT. After, I took the number of shares to work out the EPS. Gearing was worked out by multiplying the PE of 14 by earnings, to get the market value of shares and dividing the debt by that figure. It seemed very basic, so I’m nervous about the method.
quynhh – for the difference in tax, this was the way I did it:
I took the proportional increase in tax, so 75% (35/20 – 1 = 0.75), and multiplied that by the actual tax paid in dinar. Then I divided by the exchange rate. This was the simplest way of doing it, in my eyes as you are going to pay 35% of profits in tax. Therefore, if you paid 20%, you owe an additional 15%, which is 75% of what you already paid.stacky – I got 97% as well!
Overall, I think for the average person, this should have been a really good exam to sit considering the lack of intricate calculations required, and the lack of specific knowledge, and forex hedging. This exam appeared to be the opposite of yesterday’s P6 exam, which from the equivalent thread was an absolute nightmare.
It seems that the vast majority of people did Qs 2 and 3 as well!
Anyways, well done to everyone and hope we all get 50.
Hi Sarah,
I plan on starting with a quick intro (as femitej pointed out), then leaving the rest of that page, plus another 2 to 3 pages, depending on the length of the question, then working on the appendices. After that’s all done, I’ll go back to the first page and start my discussion.
To be fair, its probably better to leave too many pages, than too few. At the very worst, if you leave too many, you can strike a line through a blank page. I highly doubt the examiner will dock a mark off the layout for that. However, if you don’t leave enough, you’ll have text before and after the appendices, which goes against what a report / briefing note should look like.
Good luck and lets hope we don’t have a paper like those that sat P6 today did!! If you don’t follow, look at the reviews of the people that sat it. It sounded like a nightmare scenario for most.
My study pattern is neither conventional, nor structured.
This was the first unit I self-studied, with BPP. I started studying around late December doing a couple of nights a week for around 2 hours or so. I also studied on Sunday, but even then, not every Sunday for the first few weeks.I went through the course material and online lectures and with around 4 weeks till the exam, I went through the BPP P&R kit, doing a few questions every day using the notes.
I actually don’t answer the questions under exam conditions, even the mock exams / past exam papers. I never have. On the last few days, I’d do the mock exams and past papers and revisit any areas that are detailed and require remembering, e.g. rules for controlled foreign companies, which was actually examined in March.For this paper, really one needs to have a strong knowledge of F6. Whilst they don’t test the nitty gritty aspects of tax in great detail, it is expected that one knows how to produce the pro formas, and is comfortable with the fundamentals of all tax areas studied at F6. I found VAT toughest to get my head around, so I went back to my F6 notes and re-visted it, which helped. To be honest, if you find any area of tax tricky, its best to revisit it at F6 level, because they expect you to know it at P6.
Like all units, tax is all about practice, practice, practice. The more questions you do, the more knowledge you retain and the more comfortable you get in answering the P6 style questions.
I don’t really know what I can say to help, that doesn’t apply to all units, because tax was a unit I was good at and enjoyed studying the most.