The dreadful essay type answers in ACCA

The fear is common in all the students that sit for Skill and Professional level papers for the essay type  Constructive Response answers. For many, the essay type questions is like a black hole, don’t know what you put in will ever come back i.e. if the answers you give will ever result in any marks.

So today with the help of some of the experts that are empanelled on the ACCA Club India, we have tried to decode how to crack the constructive response questions.

Check the requirement clearly: One of the senior faculties Zaheer Sayed says that a lot of students suffer from GIGO, Garbage In Garbage Out! As harsh as it may sound, the students have often done this mistake and lost lot of marks. For e.g. if the question asks you to analyse implication of changes made by the management on the financial statement, the students need to focus on only writing the points that are relevant to the changes and not the overall financial statements performance. Since the examiner wanted your analysis only on the changes implemented, any explanation given beyond these changes will result in NO marks.

Allocate the time to the marks: Though this is something which almost every professor and student know, however there’s still a huge number of students who continue to lose easy marks because they have not completed the paper. For e.g. If you spent too much time in trying to figure out a difficult adjustment relating to Leases or Deferred Tax in consolidation, you have quite easily lost the marks that could have been gained by just putting in the easy numbers in the format like revenue, admin expenses, current year tax, current assets, liabilities, equities etc. These numbers put in would still get you a half a mark each which in certain scenarios can make all the difference between 49 and 50. Therefore 1.8 minutes is what you allocate to each mark, therefore 20 marks should only get 36 minutes. Please use a timer to improve time allocation.

Calculation is not what examiner is looking for: Many students enjoy calculating the numbers, however building on the previous point of allocating marks, ensure that you stick to the marks allocation. If the examiner has given 7 marks for the ratios, please ensure that you don’t do more than 7 i.e. total of 14 ratios, 7 of each year. If you put in more ratios than the marks awarded, the examiner is obviously not going to give you more marks. Also by doing the extra ratios, you have missed the time that was required for the analysis. Therefore the examiner wanted to understand in detail what’s causing the numbers to go up and down and not merely the sales has gone up because of promotions. You have to provide details on how the promotions has resulted in increase in sales, are there any other reasons, is that increase worth the spend, what differently the company could have done. Therefore please stop wasting time on doing extra calculations, spend that time analyzing.

OFR – The blessing: The OFR aka Own Figure Rule is nothing less than a blessing for people sitting the ACCA exams. The students continue to make a mistake that if they do not understand any adjustments they want to run away from the question. The OFR means that in a question of consolidation, if the student makes a mistake at the Cost of Goods Sold calculation, the examiner is only going to deduct the marks for that incorrect calculation i.e. if the Income Statement preparation had 10 marks allocated, the student would only lose a mark or 2, basis whatever the adjustments were. The examiner is not going to reduce the marks for all the subsequent incorrect numbers, as you have only made one mistake, therefore only lose marks once. Similarly if you don’t know the adjustment, just assume a number and put that in, and move on. You only will lose one or 2 marks, but the rest of the field is all yours.

By following the above simple steps, the dreaded section will be a lot more doable and getting the marks won’t be such a horrendous task. With the exam time just around the corner, we wish all the students the very best of luck! Do your best, take some rest and enjoy the fest called life! Special thanks to our member and also a known faculty at FPA, Zaheer Sayed for contributing his valuable inputs and giving back to the community.