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AM OFTEN asked for guidance about exam technique to help candidates tackle their CTA examinations, but being asked to write an article on how to be a prizewinner is a first! I recall the time when I received my results and discovered I had won a prize. I was called into the partners office to be congratulated and found one of my friends from the revision course in there too she had passed each paper by just 1%, and the partner said he wasnt sure which result he was more impressed by! It would be a real art to know exactly how much to study to just pass, wouldnt it! Anyway, I will try to impart some tips for exam success here, and I hope they help you achieve your goal be it a straightforward pass or a prize or distinction.
your ability to copy out paragraphs from the legislation. If it was, everyone would win prizes. I have seen too many candidates arrive on revision courses assuring me that they have thoroughly studied all of the course material, only to then admit that they havent yet done any practice questions or submitted any correspondence course examinations for marking. It is vital to test yourself regularly throughout your studies, not only to see what you have learned but also to check that you are interpreting questions in the right way and giving the examiner what he wants. If you are short of time (and most of us are), I suggest that you simply open the question banks and have a go at the questions. When you get stuck, then go to the study material to revise that area before attempting the question again. If you are trying to preserve some sort of social life (and you want to see your friends and significant other now and again), then the quality of your studies must be high and maximising question practice will increase the quality of the work you do.
Commitment
The first thing you must do is to commit to passing the exams and be prepared to give up certain luxuries such as weekend lie-ins and some of your social life. I know that the word commit the dreaded C word! strikes fear into the hearts of many (it took my husband a good few years to propose to me!), but if you say to yourself I am definitely taking these exams next May so life will be tough between now and then, but I will enjoy next summer when its all over, then that is the first step on the ladder to success. The next step is to do it, of course. Mere good intentions are not enough.
Question technique
Resist the temptation to audit the answer as you go along. You wont be able to do this on the day! It is all too easy (lazy?) to read the answer to a letter question, nod sagely and convince yourself that you would have made all those points had you bothered to write the answer out yourself. It is not until you actually sit down and try to reproduce a decent answer that you will realise how often you forget to mention points that you knew well and which would have scored marks. Prize-winners win prizes because they get more marks than the people sitting around them.These include the easy marks as well as the hard ones. Its not rocket science. Its called question practice and exam technique.
On your courses, your tutors will bang on about securing the easy marks and not getting distracted by the harder bits of the question.This is valuable advice. In order to pass, you need to maximise marks on the easy parts of the question and have a common-sense stab at some of harder parts. If you can tackle most of the harder parts with a reasonable degree of competence, then you could be in the running for a prize or distinction.
Practice exams
The opportunity to have experienced markers look at your practice examination scripts is invaluable. Dont simply look at the mark when you get the script back and file the exam away. Go through the script; re-read your answers 501
Examination technique
and look at what you did score marks for and what was a waste of effort and scored nothing. Look at the mistakes you made were they just silly errors, or had you misunderstood something? Think about how you are going to ensure you dont make the same errors again, and learn from the feedback given with your script. Each practice exam should take you forward.A marginal fail where you have learned from your mistakes is more productive than a marginal pass which you gratefully file away. All candidates make mistakes, even the best ones. We are not computers. The better students learn from their mistakes and dont repeat them.
There are marks specifically allocated for good presentation, so achieve those.A mark is a mark, and every one takes you a step closer to passing. It is all very well saying I will be neat on the day but seriously will real exam day honestly be the first time you manage to present everything beautifully? The marker only has a small time-window to mark your script before the moderation process, so he will not thank you for needing to spend ages translating your script from hieroglyphics into English. Marking can be a depressing job, so cheer the poor chap up by giving him a script he can read without giving himself a headache. If he smiles, he ticks. Make it easy for the markers to give you marks, and they will. The better candidates do this and may even sometimes get one or two extra marks that perhaps their script doesnt technically merit.
Marking can be a depressing job, so cheer the poor chap up by giving him a script he can read without giving himself a headache.
Get into the habit of studying them little and often 10 or 15 minutes of ethics or law reading every day will make a massive difference. And dont just read these areas passively.The better candidates have a system for learning ethics and law. Some do it by summarising points on indexcards or flow-diagrams. Others relate what they read to a practical scenario (this is a practical exam after all). If it goes in one ear and straight out the other side, then it is 15 minutes wasted.
Presentation
Those of you who have been taught by me will know that I constantly nag students about their presentation.You were probably too polite (or scared?) to tell me, but I do nag. For good reason 502