Who has passed?

1. Syllabus isn’t that big really – lot of knowledge can be done through mnemonics especially syllabus A.
OpenTuitions notes are great – I will repeat after Tutor – read them, read them again, and again untill you are totally sick of it, and then repeat once again. They are relatively short and its all you need to know in terms of “theory”.

2. Question practice (under time pressure!) – that’s obvious – but learn from mistakes by comparing your answers to examiners answer. If you wonder why people fail some questions – please read Examiners report just to get a feel about ‘do’s’ and ‘dont’s’.

3. Time management – from my perspective the most crucial thing for success is to answer each an every question – do not leave unanswered marks behind (not even 1 mark)

4. Practice writing precise sentences – it is better to write little and precise about many different parts of syllabus than overstating about same thing.

5. Answer structure – be neat and clean. And make sure you get those 4 professionals marks which are really a gift from Examiner.

P1 has opinion of being easy and perhaps sometimes being underestimated by students.

June 2014 was very time pressured – I don’t know exact poll numbers but i think most of the students only managed to attempt like 80% of paper – leaving 20% blank.

this means 50/80 = 63% pass rate

To wrap it up. Time management is my tip for success for this and every exam. I hope that now you are positive about exam and gain confidence of what to do.

Hi Michael,

I passed on my second attempt (Dec 13) and up to this point I had passed all other exams on the first attempt. I only just passed in Dec 13 too – 52 marks.

I think what catches people out on P1 is that it is the first, “big wordy” exam that they have to tackle.

There is no number crunching, and it is just a complete “read read read and read again” learning cycle.

The way I studied, In addition to Opentuition notes, I downloaded exams from the last 3 or 4 sittings, and downloaded all technical articles from ACCA, then summarised these into bullet-point revision notes. (This technique also worked well for me in P3 too).

You may also have a bit of an advantage if you work in Accounts Practice, as some of the areas of the syllabus you will cover in your everyday work.

Very best of luck
Marky