ACCA Professional Level papers requires a combination of effective study strategies, time management, and exam-specific tactics. It is this rigorous requirement that the pass rates for professional level exams are fairly low. Therefore in today’s blog we wanted to cover how can you crack the P level exams.
To ensure we get you the best tips we discussed with ACCA Course mentor Zaheer Sayed, ACCA member who has trained over a 1000 students at FPA Edutech. Excerpts from our conversation with Zaheer on ACCA Professional Level tips and how to successfully complete the ACCA Course:
“I am going to talk about working on the complex scenarios that you get in the exam especially at the P level and I’m gonna keep SBL as the base because obviously if you are able to do SBL then the other P level papers where you are now supposed to show professional skills does get covered to a great extent right.
So the first thing that I want you to understand that at P level in the ACCA Course and at ACCA Professional Level The Examiner is looking at whether you are using the scenario as much as possible . And whether you’re regurgitating, that means you’re not doing any kind of rotate learned Concepts or Rote learned lines and being put in just for the sake of it. So when elaborating or extending your answer, you will lose a mark in this case. Therefore while putting stuff in there you should know you may end up losing your professional marks, professional marks are kind of negative marks right.
So if you write your answer and you’ve done everything you should get your marks you including your 20 odd marks professionals. But if you’re not following the requirement let’s say if it’s communication there needs to be the right format there needs to be Clarity there needs to be prioritization of the points you just can’t write the most important point at the end of your report. It needs to be right at the top so if you are doing an sbl paper make sure that your communication skills are exhibiting these anyways coming back to what are we gonna do when we are going to face these scenario based questions very important something that every single report the examiners will call out is that read the requirement.
We unfortunately really have a habit of reading the requirements far too quickly and missing out the most important aspects there. This is one of the key problems through the ACCA Course and especially at the ACCA Professional level exams. So read the requirement fully right try to break the requirement because when you look at the whole requirement at one go and this happens to most of us including my students in the class they will feel a little lost. That how do we go about writing the answer but when you start breaking the answer right that is when you will be able to figure out what should be your strategy. Therefore if there are you know there is a two three line worth of a requirement C what is your first requirement what is your second requirement what is your third requirement and then comes the third part which is your planning of the answer if you know really well the first part of the answer. And if let’s say it is 15 marks right see if you can make sure you can spread five, five, and five but if you think you do not know really the middle part well at least ensure you put six seven points in the first one so that you can maybe you know put only three points in the second one and you know six points in the last one because at the end of the day if it’s 15 marks.
And you know the examiner is looking for 15 good points and now what do we mean by you need to use a model here right now what do we mean by model the model here is. And again I’m quoting the model from you know one of very acclaimed SBL gurus right so it’s not my original is that you have to use the same model which is State, Explain and Apply. Now when I say State and explain it is largely the same thing because you pick up a fact that has been given to you in this scenario let’s say the company is doing extremely well right now you just pick up that fact and you explain what do you mean by doing well. So the company is now in you know 10 countries with 20 000 employees has you know hundreds and thousands of distribution partners and revenues infrastructure Etc. So you’ve explained what do you mean by the company is doing well right so you’ve stated and explained now this is your one point by the way right so you get your one mark. Here the second mark will come by applying this to the scenario because if you keep only stating the facts you will not get the whole two marks assigned to that fact right so make sure that you take the fact you explain the fact and then you apply it to the scenario why do you think that by companies. Global presence is thousands of employees huge distribution Network how will this help the company grow in the in the new in the new country in a new city for a new product.
This is extremely important guys because SBL like most of your ACCA Professional level papers can be super time consuming and you may lose sight of time and you may not be able to complete the paper therefore as long as you’re using the C model you’ve put in the fact explained it got your One mark. Use your conceptual knowledge and apply it to the scenario and you get your next two marks so for a 15 marks right so here comes the exam golden exam tips right because everyone asks how long how much to write for your 15 marks. You are looking at eight very good SEA adopted model paragraphs right now what do I mean a paragraph now there is no limit to how many lines
If you not watched my exam tips video for ACCA Course, I would urge you to do that but please make sure that you are timing your answer so in your time allocated you need to make sure that you are able to bring out these eight very valid points. I usually suggest my students you put something in the start you set the context and then you try and conclude your answers this is a requirement for sure in the communication answers. Especially the report answers where you have to have your introduction you have to have your conclusion like in the case of evaluation they will ask you for recommendation but I would usually suggest that there is no harm in putting some context at the start and concluding your answer so that is how you go about you know figuring out what you write in your long complex questions.”
The above was a detailed discussion with our ACCA Course mentor, do make sure you use them along with generic exam tips around make your conceptual knowledge stronger, ensure you have done enough mocks that also on the ACCA CBE platform and don’t forget to rest and relax your brains before the exam night. ACCA Professional papers are not easy, but with right preparation it can be done comfortably.
