I’m writing this blog just before I receive the results of the exams I took in December. After months of forgetting all about the exams and settling into studying my new subjects, the experience of the exams suddenly is very vivid in my mind again. With only a week to go it’s very hard to think about anything else. In the past I have been reasonably confident that I have done well and have not felt this anxiety before. This is an extra pressure of exams I hadn’t even considered before.
I took paper F4 Corporate & Business Law and F6 Taxation at the December exams. Due to the late printing of the distance learning books and the children’s school holiday, my time to study the subjects was reduced to three months. By the time the exams arrived I did not feel as ready as I would have liked to have been. Five weeks before the exams I suddenly realised I had no choice but to spend every evening revising and practising questions. Plus every other hour I could find in the day. My 9 year old daughter even referred to me as an 'accountantoholic'. At least it made me laugh.
After such an intense revision period I was actually pleased when the day of the first exam arrived. I turned over my tax paper and used the 15 minutes reading time to read all the questions. My heart sank when I saw some of the questions and was very tempted to turn over the paper to check they hadn’t given me the advanced taxation paper! At this point I would have loved to just walk out of the exam and accept that I hadn’t given myself enough time to study the subject. The tax exam was the hardest exam I have ever taken.
To be successful at tax you need to not just to know the rules but to have practiced lots of questions. I did well in my Part 1 exams by doing lots of questions and redoing the questions until I got them right and completed them in the allotted time. I’m a very logical person and taxation is not a very logical subject with the tax rules often having very little logic. It helps therefore to learn the rules well.
It’s certainly my intention to give myself more time to study my present subjects to avoid the last minute panic. It’s also useful to recognise that some subjects will take longer to learn than others. When I saw my postman staggering down the path with a very large parcel, which contained the huge taxation book, I should have realised then that this subject would take more time than the average.
And the result...
I passed getting a good mark. The cramming approach therefore certainly paid off. If you can cope with the stress maybe intense revision is a valid approach to success with exams.
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