P5 retake in June

I have exactly the same problem and had the same with P3 which took me 4 attempts for the very same reason. 🙁 On top of this, English is my second language and I find it hard to:

1) remember/think of as many clever thoughts as possible during the exam and

2) to put my thoughts into short, straight-to-the-point, concise paragraphs – I tend to waffle too long 🙁 wasting my time and I have never been good at writing essays (I will never be the author of a book, that’s for sure and so I am better with numerical exams)

When I practise past papers, most things do make sense when I read the model answers and a lot of it is common sense, yet when it comes to having to answer by myself I struggle, like my memory stops working completely though I have already learnt a lot from both P5 and P3 and often I have clever thoughts popping into my mind when I read a business article, hear something in the news re companies going into administration and all sorts.

On one hand I think this paper is an easy one in terms of theory etc, on the other hand I feel silly to not have many clever points popping into my brain that I could write about in a logical, analytical way.

Thank you very much, Sir.

Hi Ken,

Sorry just saw your question. It took me 4 attempts with P3, I was absolutely devastated, I kept failing. I sat the exam every 3 months and kept revising and practising. At my last attempt, I was made redundant from my job 10 days before my P3 December 2016 exam and I did my best to push all the stress and worry of redundancy and joblessness out of my mind to focus. I am a single mother with no help and my family lives abroad. So what I did was I took my little one to school in the morning and picked up her from the after school club in the evening and I was jobless for those 10days running up to the exam I made the most of my time so I was studying all day every single day. After I sorted her for bed (8pm), I sat down and studied for 2-3 more hours until 10-11pm.

In terms of exam technique, I read all the articles, went through the whole syllabus ( I have already known most of it inside and out but of course there were still areas to improve on so I tried to focus on the topics that didn’t quite go down well/I found difficult to understand for some reason) , I watched all the opentuition videos and read the opentuition P3 notes. I tried to understand the big picture and see how the different chapters/topics fit into the big picture.

Other than these I was also practising how to write my answers with as big letters as physically possible on the lines of my note pad. 🙂 ( I write with very small letters and my handwriting is tidy when I am calm but when I am stressing, under time pressure my handwriting is “ugly” so by writing bigger letters my handwriting was very tidy and easy to read. 🙂 I think this is very important, if the examiner can’t read what we write then we will get a low mark if not zero mark. 🙂 And of course I practised some questions under time pressure, probably 15 of them. The rest I read through many times over the one year in which I attempted the exam 4 times.

My marks were as follows:

December 2015 sitting: 43%

March 2016 sitting: 37%

June 2015 sitting: I only realised 2 days before the exam that the reason why I didn’t have an exam docket is because I actually forgot to register for the exam, I was so busy studying for it 🙂 haha , it wasn’t funny back then!

September 2016 sitting: 46%

December 2016 sitting: 54% 🙂

Hope this helps. 🙂

One more: I was studying in my lunchbreak at work, on the bus/tube when going to work, when going home. I even read my notes sometimes when I was walking to pick up my girl from childcare. I wrote the P3 opentuition flashcards on to hard copy flashcards and kept reading them on the train, on the go etc. These also helped me. All in all, it was a combination of all the above over the 1 year period that I used.

(I stopped reading the P3 Kaplan text book after my first 2months of studying for my first attempt with P3 because it was way too long winded and with a job and a child, I needed something straight to the point. Shame I didn’t know about opentuition when I did my P1 and F6 exams, my life would have been much easier. I will definitely donate to opentuition once I finish my exams. This website and all the teaching team are amazing.)