OpenTuition – How I Passed ATX with 87% (TX Exemption)

Hi everyone,

I sat my ATX exam in September 2023 and passed with 87%. I had an exemption from TX so it was the first time I did a tax paper with ACCA. I just want to share my experience and hope that someone will find it useful for their study and revision.

Since OpenTuition does not have a revision guide for the ATX-UK variant, I used BPP’s ATX-UK workbook (i.e. textbook) and BPP’s Practice & Revision Kit, along with OpenTuition’s TX-UK notes.

I cannot comment on Kaplan’s materials as I have not used them before. BPP’s textbooks are well structured but some technical explanations can be hard to digest, so occasionally I had to skim the theories and try to solve the examples and exercises, which seemed to work for me.

OpenTuition’s notes and lectures were crucial in rapidly providing me with a foundation on the basic tax laws before I dug into more advanced topics required by ATX. Since BPP’s ATX workbook was written on the assumption that the learner is familiar with the rules examined in TX, relying solely on that workbook means you might miss out on some nuances that are only discussed in detail when you do TX. In fact, a third of what I was asked in the ATX was knowledge from TX, so it cannot hurt to go through the TX topics alongside ATX topics during your revision.

In terms of the timescale, three months could be a bit of a rush, especially if you have other commitments such as family or a full-time job. I was able to do it in three months partly due to my existing knowledge of the UK tax system from teaching/tutoring. If you learn the ATX paper from scratch (i.e. because you have TX exemption), I would recommend spreading the revision across 6 months. Pay attention to the timing, however, since ACCA changes the examinable documents every year (e.g. one set for Jun 2023 – Mar 2024, a new set for Jun 2024 – Mar 2025). Consider either speeding up the revision so you can sit the exam before new documents are examined, or be prepared for the changes after March each year.

These are what I did which I think really helped:
1. Learn the structure of the test. Question 1 is worth 50 marks, and almost always puts you in the position of a tax advisor, who needs to draft a document (e.g. an email, or memo) addressing several different taxes for a number of clients (keyword: several). Ten (10) of the 50 marks in question 1 are for professional skills, so presenting the documents logically, using clear language, analysing the details soundly and demonstrating scepticism (by casting doubt on certain assumptions/details given in the question) could earn you a substantial portion of those 10 marks.

2. Attempt all parts in questions. Even if you put down one sentence for one part, you could be giving the marker a reason to give you 1 or 2 marks, which could be the difference between 49 and 50. This means you need to have an overview of all the different taxes in the syllabus so whatever topic the question throws at you, there is always something you might be able to give as an answer (hence the emphasis on “several” in the previous point).

3. Read the questions carefully, especially the “verbs”. They tell you what to do and in some cases what not to do, which you can use to infer what the focus of the question is. For example, “state” means you only need to say something brief and to the point without having to explain too much, “calculate” means show the calculations in a logical manner without having to offer detailed explanations; “calculate with explanations” means the calculations themselves are worth some marks but you will not gain all the marks without explaining which rules or concepts or facts you are applying; and “explain with supporting calculations” means the explanations are more important, and where necessary some calculations should be provided to illustrate the explanations.

4. Be mindful of dates. All questions tell you which date to assume the calculations/memos should be prepared based on. You might lose a professional mark for putting the wrong date in the memo, or some analysis marks for calculating the wrong reliefs because you missed out one month. I always put “Date” in cell A1 of the spreadsheet and the date in the question in cell B1, for every question. This way I can always glance at the corner of the spreadsheet to tell which date I should use for my discussions and computations.

5. Prepare for the ethics question. This is the only part of the syllabus that is certain to be on the exam. After doing about 10 of these questions, you should have a pretty good idea of which fundamental principles are most commonly being threatened, and what typical courses of actions are available to the tax adviser in question 1.

6. Set aside time and set a target per day (or per week) for your revision. Personally, I tried to do 50 marks worth of revision questions per day. Everyone has their own mock exam strategies. I didn’t necessarily write out all the answers, sometimes just the main structure in the word processor (preferably including the main points I would discuss) and how all the workings in the spreadsheet.

7. In the couple of weeks leading to the exam, I would recommend doing at least 1-2 mock papers under exam conditions. This will help you identify the main issues, whether it’s difficulty typing quickly, or a gap in a topic, or how to organise the sections in the word processor or workings in the spreadsheet. This will help you focus on what you are weak at. The more planning you do, the more efficient you will be on the day of the test. I wouldn’t go so far as to recommend planning exactly where on the screen you would position each window that you open, but that does show how much planning you could do if you really went for it.

8. Learn the structure and format of the tax tables, and how to open it up during the exam. It would be nice if you could memorise all the rates and thresholds, but that would be unrealistic. However, it would also be equally unrealistic to assume that you could just open up the tax tables and quicky find the section on National Insurance rates in an instance (it’s at the end of page 4 if you are wondering). Practice using the tax tables whenever you forget a rate and it will reduce the amount of time you will have to spend digging through the pages during the test.

9. Learn how to use the CBE word processor and the spreadsheet functionalities. Copying and pasting can save you a lot of time, so is using excel instead of a calculator to calculate things and link answers from one step to the next. I would say not using these tools well could cost you at least 30 minutes in the exam. Also, note that the tools in the exam resemble MS Word and MS Excel a little bit, but not quite. Although many functions are the same (SUM, MIN, MAX…), there are only a limited number of functions you can use. Copying and pasting is not the same as using Microsoft Office. You can’t add rows or columns, and there are no hints as to which parameters are required by each function. On a personal note, I find the actual exam tools slightly more user-friendly than the practice platform tools, but nowhere near as friendly as the real Office tools.

10. Lastly, be ready for things to change in the future. New tax rules will take effect, new ACCA exam policies will be introduced. Familiarise yourself with the set of tax laws the exam will be testing you on, as well as the latest details on the format/structure of the test. You wouldn’t want to show up with pen and paper for a computer-based exam, would you?

Some extra things that I did:
– On the day of the exam, plan ahead and get to the venue in plenty of time. This sounds rather obvious, but leaving early really saved me that day. My exam was meant to start at 9am, and ACCA recommends arriving one hour before the start time. It normally took me an hour to drive to the venue, so I left home at 7am. Little did I know, it was so foggy that day that on my way I had to drive past 3 motorway accidents, resulting me arriving at 8.40am (40 minutes “late”). Thankfully I was admitted and I only had 5 minutes before everyone was reminded of the rules in preparation for commencement.

– On the blank piece of paper that the invigilator gives me for making notes, I vertically write the names of the months twice. This really helps when I need to figure out how many months there are between, say Oct 2023 and Feb 2024).

– Consider doing question 2 or 3 before doing question 1. I actually did this for most of my exams. Many students think they should focus on 1 because it carries a lot of marks, but spending too much time on that means you could lose out on some easy marks that question 2 and 3 have to offer. Also, if you get stuck in 2 or 3, you might feel a bit less nervous because your brain might think “Oh it’s at most 25 marks”, whereas if you get stuck on question 1, you could get really nervous thinking “I am throwing away 50 marks, I can’t pass”. Anecdotally, in my exam, question 1 had a huge section on residency and domiciles for IHT purposes. My mind went blank and after a minute I decided to do question 2 first, which turned out to be much easier. I eventually recalled some things I could say for that IHT section, but not everything (hence the 87% instead of something in the 90s).

– Navigation shortcuts, such as those used to jump between cells in the spreadsheet, work the same way in the CBE as in MS Office. Utilising formatting shortcuts like Bold, Italics, and Underline can also be beneficial. You could probably shave off 5 minutes if you can utilise these shortcuts well.

Best of luck everyone! Drop me a message or reply here if you have some question.

H.D.