Can't believe the Admin. Review

Alick, I can’t believe that you wasted your money paying for an administrative review!

With a score of just 25 awarded on your official notification and knowing that an administrative review is just a check to ensure that the marks are added correctly and that all pages have been assessed it would have taken an earthquake to turn that 25 into a pass

Should you face a similar decision in the future (hopefully this will not be the case) then save your money and get on with preparing for a resit

Now, the question of what to do

Firstly, there’s no way of finding out the cause of your low marks

Next thought that springs to my mind is that you have failed to answer the question requirement. There’s a huge difference between “State what evidence you should expect to find on the audit file” when compared with “State what further procedures could be carried out …” yet, whenever I have taught P7 courses, trying to get this across to students was unbelievably difficult

Next, you can write and write and write … but, if you’re missing the target, it doesn’t matter how many booklets you fill! If it’s irrelevant, it scores zero

There’s an exam technique article that I wrote on this site that is well worth a read and includes the story of a student’s tax script that I marked in the days when I was an ACCA marker

There was an 11 mark question on the soon-to-be-introduced self-assessment system in the UK. This particular student was well on top of the subject. I mean WELL on top of it

On page 1 of his answer he had scored 7 marks and he scored 2 more in the first 5 lines of page 2. Page 3 scored no more marks but he did collect another 1 3/4 of the way down page 4. But there were no more on page 5 nor any on the remainder of his answer – another 3/4 page on page 6

10 marks out of 11 = 91% and that’s prize-winning stuff. But at what price? He scored in the entire exam exactly 35% and I have no doubt at all that he was saying to himself “How can this be? I wrote a brilliant answer for question 8”

Another point … you can write and write and write … but, if you write more than one sentence when making a point, then you’re wasting time

And if you write more than 3 lines in any sentence, then you’re wasting time

And if you memorise ISA titles and numbers, then you’re wasting time (same goes for IASs and IFRSs)

It sounds to me like it would be well worth your while to read that exam technique article that I referred to – you’ll find it either on the P7 or the P1 home page

Read that and then come back to me if you have further questions

You’re welcome – and I’m always here if you need any further guidance