Exam Approach

So the key to speeding up while answering the questions is PRACTICE.

Yes, you should surely be thorough with the concepts but Practising as many questions as you can should be a key factor in your preparation.

When you are doing the questions try doing the following (an approach I would take personally) :

-Remove everything and anything that could create a distraction (may be your mobile phone!)…

-Do the question under exam conditions…

-Time yourself… Might as well use a timer

-Keep focused and try to create slight pressure in your head (that you need to complete this question on time and you will have to get more 50% marks – same feeling that you would get in exam)

-Once the time gets over… Immediately stop…

-Dont try to sneek at the answer at the back while you do the question! (this is to be done after you completed the questions… Check your answers… See what and why did you get it wrong…)

-And MOST Importantly… Dont immediately start off with the question!
First Read The Requirements of the Question then go to the case study…
What many students do is they first they read the case study then they come to the requirements… Then again they read the case study since they initially didn’t know what is required and what to look for. This takes up time.
So avoid doing this and save time by reading the requirements first.

-Then Don’t JUST start off answering the questions… After reading the requirements and the scenario MAKE A ROUGH PLAN. Just take 5 mins to jot down ROUGH points. This will surely keep you well organised with your answers.. You won’t be blank and will reduce thinking time too.

Surely initially you may not be able to complete on time or get the answer right… But if you continue practicing under time conditions you will certainly see great outcome in the end and hopefully in the exam too!

Hope this helps.

Truth be told, I disagree with perhaps some of the most common advice, in NEEDING to practice under exam conditions. You subconsciously are aware of the clear difference in the pressure of a real exam and faux one. You cannot self create that experience.

That being said, if you are worried about the timing that you what you need to improve on is fairly straight forward, and this type of analysis only comes with practice.

What you really need to do is garner the ability to read a question scenario VERY quickly and be able to extract information. For exams like APM and what was previously p3, key words like kpi’s, measures, goals, environmental conditions should immediately jump out at you. The same could be said about AFM when it comes to mentioning aspects such as risk and capital etc.

So what your aim here is to not necessarily read faster (Would be great if you can do this too!) but rather read more efficiently.

Another pertinent points comes down to how you answer the question. I didn’t do advance tax or audit so I can speak on those, but for other papers you need to become accustomed to the nuances and the way the examiner expects answers. Avoid fluff, be straight to the point, DO NOT information dump in expectation of gaining marks (especially for APM)

I wasn’t going to make a point on this, but its implicit that you read the requirement properly and break down what is being asked, pay attention to words like AND connection requirements. After you have done this, its IMPERATIVE to look for the answers to these questions while reading the scenario for the first time and making relevant notations as you go along. If you do have to do a later in depth anayslis, this process will evidently be much easier the second time around.