Mitigating Circumstances

Long post, apologies in advance! To make it easier, I’ve summarised my question at the beginning.

I was hoping that you might be able to help with something please? In your experience, if the ACCA were to accept the mitigating circumstances below, how would that impact my results? Presumably they can’t just award extra marks if they aren’t there? I’d be super grateful for your insight. If I had to guess, I estimate my result to be in the 45% region.

I have learning difficulties, and accordingly, I am awarded extra time during my exams. I am awarded an additional 15 minutes per hour, and therefore for the four-hour strategic business reporting exam, this would amount to an additional hour. This additional time was not granted to me, and I was not made aware of this until I booked the exam. In fact, I did not know that this was the case until the exam started. I did raise this with the invigilator, but there was nothing they could do.

The key impact that this had on my exam is that it ruined my exam strategy and exam technique. I have read various examiners commentary’s in past papers, and one of the comments that frequently comes up is that “students perform better if they attempt all questions”. In order to attempt all the questions I had to effectively partially answer questions – if a question asked for the position at 2 different dates for example I found that I simply had to take a view to only answer at one point in time, because, with my learning difficulties I simply couldn’t have covered all the questions.

I was so happy when I saw that part of question one related to cash flow statements. I spent a significant amount of time practising those, and they were one of my preferred topics. However, because I was keen to “attempt all questions”, I decided to keep going with the exam and come back once I had attempted the other parts of the exam. By the time I came back to that at the beginning I had literally forgotten half the information in the scenario – and so it was a fruitless exercise. I appreciate with hindsight that this was perhaps not the best approach, however I was not made aware that I had effectively lost an hour until the exam started. There is no way I would have taken the exam without the additional time – however if I had decided to, I would have worked out an approach in advance.

Another impact was that I simply didn’t have time to read all of the scenarios relating to questions. I am a slow reader, and simply have to read things at least twice – it takes me longer to read and so I have to read them again as by the time I’ve got to the end I have often forgotten what the start of the information said. I just didn’t have time to do this in the exam, and I am well aware that I would have missed relatively straight forward marks because of this.

I completely appreciate that the ACCA are doing everything they can during these strange times to keep exams going, and I am grateful for their effort. I also appreciate that a fundamental change such as running remote exams is unlikely to proceed perfectly, and that mistakes will be made. That said, I obviously don’t want any mistake to be to my detriment.
I have never failed an ACCA exam, and have scored in excess if 70% in three of the exams.