Forums › Ask CIMA Tutor Forums › Ask CIMA P3 Tutor Forums › How to Pass P3
- This topic has 9 replies, 5 voices, and was last updated 2 years ago by Ken Garrett.
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- September 28, 2017 at 7:07 pm #408917
Hi I have just sat P3 for the second time today and failed again. I don’t know my score as yet but the previous time I got 98.
I felt sure I had the studied the knowledge in great depth and have done 100s of practice questions and Mock Exams through Kaplan and BPP Exam kit and scored well. Today I found I could not understand what half of the questions were asking. I seem to struggle interpreting the questions. I knew before I came out of the exam room that I had failed it went so badly. I really do not know how to move forward with this paper and would appreciate any advice.
I am a conscientious & organised Studier and have put hours of time into this paper and was so frustrated and annoyed with myself today
Many Thanks
September 29, 2017 at 4:10 pm #409005Sorry to hear about your difficulty with P3. You seem to have done all the right things by practising questions and doing mock exams. I am not sure why the real questions seem so much harder.
All I can suggest is further practice. First make sure you cover, rub out or mask all replies,you made previously to questions. Then select at,random, not whole topics at a time. This better simulates the exam. If you get one right, tick it and do not revisit. If wrong, analyse why: carelessness, lack of knowledge, not carefully considering all options etc. Resolve not to repeat the error. Do not tick it.
Gradually work and rework questions umtil all are ticked.
Hope that is of some help.
March 1, 2020 at 4:54 am #563600Hi,
The same problem I faced and still not able to understand why I am not able to pass. One thing I analyzed after the 2nd attempt was few questions have multiple choice answers specifically in areas like Corporate Governance, Audit, Internal Control, Risk Management which creates a doubt on which ones are right answer e.g. usually 2 choices I was able to make correctly but 3 or 4 choice creates confusion. The other thing is should the doubtful questions be left unanswered ?
Regards,
Anurag.March 1, 2020 at 3:49 pm #563649Always answer doubtdul questions. The re is nothing ro lose.
With regards to questions where you have to choose an unspecified number of responses, these are always difficult. It can sometimes help if you ‘turn a question around’. So of a,question asks something like ‘Which of the following are committees under the UK code?’ Then choose your two or three options. Then ask yourself ‘ which of the following are NOT committees under the UK code’. Your choices from the two questionsmshould not overlap. Any which do require some more thought.
June 23, 2020 at 4:38 pm #574556I am absolutely frustrated with this P3 exam. 3rd time I have now failed it! I’ve done Kaplan exam kit questions, BPP exam kit questions, Practice Test Academy mock exams x 3 + their 500 Q’s bank.
And’s another fail. I don’t know whether to call it quits with CIMA or just keep going. I note Ken’s comments about P3 being more judgement based than knowledge based but my 3 mock exams scored decent (65% – 75%) so I figured I had done enough to be ready for the exam. Clearly not.
I feel with some of the questions you could be lucky and get it right or wrong!! rant over….
I guess i’ll just pay out for yet another overpriced exam. I hope this is worth it in the end.
June 24, 2020 at 9:34 am #574590Sorry to hear about your P3 problems. I agree with you about an element of luck on getting a question correct and I think that too much subjectivity can come into some of the supposedly objective questions.
I don;t know you approach when in the exam. However, many of the questions do have clear right wrong answers so I suggest you go through the exam and do those first. Then return to the ones you feel are more ambiguous and take your time over them. For example, if you are given six possible options and asked to choose all those which apply correctly to the question, read all the options and choose the ones which you think are right. Let’s say you choose two of the six options. Check again that you think those are still OK then look at the other four options and think carefully if you were right to reject all of those.
In other words go at the question from both ends: positive reasons for choosing one or more answers and positive reasons for rejecting the others.
July 7, 2020 at 5:27 pm #576269Thank you Ken for your tips. I finally got P3 done. What an absolute relief. To be fair my recent attempt i found to be the hardest!!! Yet it’s the exam I passed and again it was so subjective in my opinion.
For many of the dreaded “Select All that Apply” questions I took your advice and instead picked out the answers I thought were definitely “wrong” and picked the right answers based on that. So attacking the question from a different perspective helped in answering questions where I thought it was too ambiguous.
July 8, 2020 at 8:03 am #576300Fantastic news! Thanks for letting me know.
Glad the technique worked out.
October 14, 2022 at 7:55 pm #668642AnonymousInactive- Topics: 0
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I guess i’ll just pay out for yet another overpriced exam
October 14, 2022 at 10:47 pm #668657I’m not sure there’s a question there. But I hope my post, above, of 24 June 2020 might be useful.
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