Applied knowledge level

@raniaslim said:
hi everyone
I would like to ask about the applied knowledge level. Is it necessary to start with it? and is there online courses and online exams for this level? Also, do you guys have any pieces of advice for newbies?
Thank you

Hey mate,

Regarding your question, there are three Applied Knowledge exams:

Accountant in Business
Management Accounting
Financial Accounting

Now, you can’t move on to the applied skills exams if you haven’t finished these 3 first. The same applies to the Professional levels; you can’t move on to the Professional level until you have passed all the Applied Skills Exams.

However, if you have an Accounting (Finance or Business Administration/Management degree in some cases) you may be eligible for exemptions. Especially in the UK, most university degrees in Accounting will give you exemptions from all Applied Knowledge and Skills exams (9 papers in total) and start from the P-level. I have included the link for the exemptions calculator below:

https://www.accaglobal.com/gb/en/help/exemptions-calculator.html

As for the advice, the points below are my personal opinion and come from my experience while studying for ACCA exams (someone else might have a different way of studying or preparing for the exams to which my advice below might not apply). They are a bit general as you are just starting your ACCA journey:

1) Know what you are getting yourself into. As an ACCA student, you must be prepared to sacrifice a lot of time from your social and personal life in order to prepare for the ACCA exams (you might have to study even after work). You will have to say no to that Friday night out with your friends, or turn off your PS4 for the night so that you can study. There’s no other way to do this.

2) Don’t rush. You have 4 exam sittings each year, and you can sit up to 3-4 papers per sitting. You can sit one exam per sitting (that’s what most people do, including me) and you will be a finalist in 3-4 years. If you rush, the pressure might damage you.

3) Ignore the pass rates. Pass rates are irrelevant. The first paper I sat was FM and at my sitting, it had the second-lowest pass rate (after PM) and I still passed it. If you put in the proper hours and right amount of work, you will pass; that’s a universal law. I tend to sometimes check the pass rates but only because I am curious, however, I have never said “oh this paper has a 40% pass rate, it must be tougher than other exams”

4) Make a schedule/pattern (the most important in my opinion). Try and look at this from a bodybuilder’s point of view. You will not see any gains in muscle if you don’t go to the gym and eat properly for 4-5 days a week for 1-2 hrs a day. The same thing applies to ACCA but it can be more flexible when it comes to the days and the hours but you need to maintain a pattern from which you can see results (if you manage to make it into a habit, you are good to go). You have to allocate some hours to study almost every day (weekends can work too but that depends on your study style and current situation such as employment) if you want to pass these exams.

Best of luck with your journey mate, and feel free to ask me anything else you want.

@raniaslim said:
thank you so much. Can you also tell me the name of your learning provider for the knowledge exams?

If you refer to external tuition, I am not very knowledgeable of them. I do know that Kaplan and BPP offer tuition courses but there are definitely other schools as well however, I don’t know how good they are.

For books, ACCA has 3 approved content providers: Kaplan, BPP, and Becker with Kaplan and BPP being the most popular ones. Personally, I use the study text from Kaplan cause it is more simplified and easier to read in my opinion in contrast to BPP. For the revision kit though, I use BPP. Although I am 99% sure that in both kits the questions (Section C at least) are just past exam questions amended to reflect the current changes in the syllabus.