Anyone done the ACA accountancy exams? DS2 doing them and is struggling

[Munichfam5]

Not sure how I can help him , I know the ACA exams are notoriously hard ,,,

I just wondered if anyone has any advice?

DS2 has failed his last 2x exams and is retaking in a couple of weeks

Hi, yes. Does you son live at home?

what stage of his exams is he at and how close has he been to passing? What’s the support like from his employer (is he likely to be sacked from his training contract if he fails the resit)?

My best advice is to practice timed questions and then audit the answers. If he gets an answer badly wrong then back to the teaching materials to review (online materials could help). If he has attended a revision course the college tutor may reply to emails or even offer to mark a question or two. The revision tutors will also coach intensively on exam technique and question spotting and your dc must follow this advice carefully. You can pick up lots of marks with a well-laid out answer script as it will “encourage ticking” for example.

if he lives at home the best way you can help is probably to make life easy - simple small healthy meals, reduce distractions, etc

When I did my exams I was working 50+ hours a week plus commuting, and still found time to manage my own life living in a shared house, go to they gym three times or four times a week and date my boyfriend. But you do have to make sacrifices (sleep; socialising etc) and you do have to dedicate time to serious study in the evenings and weekends.

It’s really worth it. Hard work!

The key to passing is exam technique. You need to make sure you are getting all the easy marks. They are tough. Which ones is it he is retaking?

Watching with interest, my daughter is about to start, thank you for the answers so far

@PigsyChibsy if you are starting out, one thing to hold onto is you do NOT need a good pass. I stopped working when I was easily hitting 70% in my practice questions. My tutors used to say a pass above 60% means you wasted effort - you should allow a bit for margin of error/bad luck with questions and I’m cautious so I aimed for a 70% pass. It is nothing like your formal education where you’re aiming for the best mark possible.

That’s the best way to cope with the other demands in my our life in my opinion - it can feel overwhelming when you want to be having fun and you’re under pressure at work (if you’re good, you’ll be advanced to more difficult work rapidly and that is good for your career progression but makes everything else harder).

Happily I don’t think the expectation of a long hours culture is the same as it was when I did my training - but in the other hand, if you work 60 hours a week, you’ve got 50% more real-life experience than someone who only works 40. The rigours of a training contract do support your exam study - you learn a lot by being immersed in your work and in my experience you’re rewarded for that in a virtuous circle: if you are highly productive at work, your managers will invest effort in explaining things to you and giving you new opportunities to do more challenging assignments - which helps you learn and supports the study piece. If you’re just there to collect the exam certificates
and the payslip, then you won’t get the full value of that training.

They are difficult. As a PP said, he really needs to make sure he dedicates enough time to study - certainly I needed more than I had at school or uni.

Ask him to reach out to qualified people at work - I am always happy to carve out time to help the junior members of my team, and I wouldn’t look kindly on people who wouldn’t. We all benefit from them getting on.

Is he doing 2 at a time? He needs to get his head down, but also reach out for support from his manager, college, peers. There are quite a few chat boards you can ask questions on too, I think (it’s a long time since I qualified).

Remind him it’s better to get there slowly and pass than go too fast (can he reduce the number of exams at a time?).

best of luck to him!

It’s all about exam technique- I did mine over 20 years ago and still have 1.8minutes per mark in my brain!

calculate at the start of the question how long you have for it for the allocated marks, go as quickly as you can, and be brutal about moving on when time is up.

I took ACA. I failed some modules & had to resit, it's never affected my career, it is not the end of the world.

Its very demanding. Is he doing his training contract at a bigger firm where he gets good college & study leave or trying to cram it in on the side?

The pass rates hide a bit of an inequality - most at larger firms get lots of leave, in person tuition and time to study, smaller firms might expect you to do it via online courses with far less time off work, its really hard doing that.

Lots and lots of revision and practise questions. If the teaching materials from his course are not to his liking he might prefer official ICAEW ones which you can usually download. He should have a training manager at work who can provide advice.

Thank you for your responses , that advice is really helpful

yes, he is still living at home, and he is on roughly his 6th & 7th exams - so still got a long way to go

he gets 3 attempts at each exam , and then if no pass, I think that his training contract is ended with his firm .

he’s bright, I am just not sure that he is dedicating enough time to the exam revision at the weekends?

We’ve had a chat about it all and I also
found this website which looks helpful

www.caba.org.uk/career/aca-student-support.html

How did he get on with his exam OP ? My son was sitting ACA exams today he was so stressed and throwing up this morning. There is pressure on him to pass as it is his second year grad role depends on it . I feel so helpless watching him struggle thank you for sharing the link I have forwarded it to my son .He gets the result in a month.

Oh God, I had PTSD for several years after passing my ACA. I used to wake up in a blind panic thinking I had exams that day and hadn't done enough revision.

1. Exam technique: know how to answer the questions, what they are looking for. If the question says "write a report" then there are marks for setting out your answer in the correct format. Know when to use bullet points and when to write prose. Read the question carefully to identify the hidden traps, for example in one of my exams there was a huge wodge of information and then - right at the bottom - there was an "oh, yeah, your client has just told you x,y,z" which rendered much of what you had read irrelevant.
2. Timing: be brutal with your timing. There isn't enough time in the exam. So work out how many minutes you have per mark and spend no more than that time on a question before moving on to the next one. It's much harder to get the final few marks on a question than it is to get the first few marks on the next one. As somebody replied earlier (and as my ACA tutors told me back in the day) "anything over 60% is a waste of effort, none of you will win the subject prize".
3. Make sure you attempt all of the questions. I had some (ACCA - but similar vibe) trainees who would routinely only answer three of the four required questions in a paper. I'm sure they got good marks on those questions, but you're making things very difficult for yourself unnecessarily.
4. Question practice. Sorry to say this, but lots of unpleasant, boring drudgery doing question after question after question and calculation after calculation after calcualtion until you can do them quickly and accurately, because you don't have time in the exam to go anything other than full speed.

Good luck!

I did ICAS but it’s all very similar - although back in the day we sat all 4 professional papers in the same week, Tuesday to Friday with a morning and afternoon paper. That was certainly an experience!

I’ve started marking papers now and the key things for a pass:

Get the easy marks! Even if you’re unsure or going wrong, please tell your son to get all his workings down and even provide the journal entry headings with the debit and credit and no figures as there’s always marks available for this.

I marked a paper that had marks available for taking your part a answer (even if wrong) and simply knowing to add across to get to the final position.

In the same idea, some papers have theory questions where the answer will be in the material you can take in to the exam I.e accounting standards. Do these questions first as they are quick and easy marks. A lot of students miss out as they spend too long on calculations and there’s diminishing returns - the first marks of each question are much easier/quicker than the final marks of each question.

Practice. Past papers need to become his friend. He’ll spot the types of questions that are asked and can use the marking schedules to see where the marks are gained.