EXAMINATION TECHNIQUE (Specially Accounting)

1. Suggestions to students working on their own

a) Skill will come only with practice, after careful reading, study with pencil in hand working and reworking problem.

b) Concentrate on understanding the principles involved; most mistakes are made because basic principles are forgotten. It is essential to revise constantly.

c) Neatness and presentation of work in a suitable form are essential in examinations, and nearer to the time of the examination test your ability to work out set problems within a time limit.

d) Read the questions carefully to make quite sure that you know exactly what you are required to submit.

e) Do not discouraged if a question takes you longer to complete than you expect, but do come back to the question and rework it.

2. Examination preparation

In preparing for examinations it is essential that:

a) You check through the syllabus to ensure that you have covered the topics laid down by the examining body;

b) Having covered the syllabus, you work through a number of recent papers set by the body concerned. It cannot be emphasised too strongly that really through work on past papers, if combined with confidence that the whole syllabus has been covered, pays dividends on examination day. The student who discovers that he/she can answer all the questions asked is in a very happy position.

3. Approach

When working through past papers, and in the examination itself:

a) Read through the paper carefully to get a general idea of the scope of the paper. Move on to the next question when you have sized-up the previous one – for example ‘Oh, it’s a flow of funds question for a limited company!’

b) Start by tackling the short questions which from your general survey of the paper appear to present you with the least amount of difficulty;

NOTE:

i. This is important, since one question successfully completed in good time, gives confidence to tackle the rest of the paper.

ii. From working past papers you should have a good idea of how long you take to complete a question.

c) Before working a question read it through carefully to get the sense of the question and to ensure that you give the answer asked for;

NOTE:

This again is important – many able candidates can so easily do more work than is necessary or leave out part of the information asked for the question

d) Avoid spending too much time on one answer, thus leaving other incomplete. In the examination itself it is always useful to divide the total time allowed, allocation it in parts to the questions on the paper, e.g. four questions on a 2 ½ hour paper might be allocated 20, 30, 35 and 65 minutes respectively. Remember especially that if you do get hopelessly bogged-down on a question, it is better to abandon it and do the other questions, returning to it if time allows at the end.

4. Pre-examination revision

The most useful form of the revision is the working of the past examination papers, and to build confidence in one’s ability to tackle papers the following steps are suggested.

Step I. Practice by working the paper in rough, tackling it simply as an arithmetical exercise purely for the purpose of obtaining the ‘answer’ in the shortest possible time, at the same time taking care to avoid ‘silly’ mistakes.

This tends to build confidence in those students who doubt their ability to obtain the answer.

Step II. Confident that you can work the questions, you must now concentrate on working them within the time allowed for the examination, at the same time setting out the work neatly and in detail on the type of paper normally provided at examinations in Accounts.

5. Reworking

By all means come back to a paper and rework it – without reference to your previous effort – until you have completed it, when you can compare results.