BITING your nails and crossing your mangled fingers is one way to get through your ICAEW advanced stage exams. However, there are a few more tried and tested exam techniques to help to make passing those professional tests a little less painful:
Get a grown-up mindset. “At university, you get a choice of questions (in exams) and you can get away with not knowing some things. That’s not the case with accountancy exams,” says Neil Calder, an audit assistant at KPMG who passed his professional exams with flying colours. Calder is now studying hard for his advanced stage exams. “There is so much to get through.”
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Work consistently over time. “You must not underestimate the amount of work involved,” says David Blondel, the student development leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers. “There is no miracle cure to ensure that you are going to pass other than your own hard work.”
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Don’t forget your commercial savvy. How you apply what you have experienced and practised at work is what’s being tested in the advanced stage exams, says Shaun Robertson, the head of learning at the ICAEW. Nine-to-five learning is just as important as textbook revision because real-life experience teaches you how to communicate with clients and understand the needs of different organisations. “If you have a student who has failed, they have to realise that to (be able to) take it forward,” he says. “These exams are technically rigorous but they get behind regurgitating facts. You’ve got to play the role of qualified partner.”
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Study past papers. “It will give you an idea of the way in which the examiner likes to ask questions,” Blondel says. “You need to understand the pressures that the examiner is going to put on you . . . (and) the ways that the examiner will try to catch you out.”
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Timing is everything. Work out how many minutes you have to earn each mark, Blondel says: “Good exam technique is that you get into the room and attempt everything.”