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I 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 prize-winner is a first!
I recall the time when I received my results and discovered I had won a prize. I was called into the partner's 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 wasn't sure which result he was more impressed by! It would be a real art to know exactly how much to study to 'just pass', wouldn't 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.
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 it's 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.
Quantity and quality
Another common query is how many hours you should be studying a week. This will vary according to your experience and how recently you have studied for your previous examinations, but the main thing is that you DO study EVERY week. I recommend setting aside at least two evenings a week and either one whole day or both mornings at the weekend as your regular study slots.
You should aim to cover the material from a few chapters in the weekday evenings and then do question practice at the weekend to consolidate. Question practice is undoubtedly the key to passing these examinations.
It really is of no benefit at all just reading chapters of your manuals or listening to lectures from your CD ROMs and nodding wisely, saying to yourself 'This is fine, I can follow all of this, I know this topic'. You must put yourself to the test. In the examination you are not asked to regurgitate chunks of study material. Indeed the CTA examiners (particularly on Paper III) often criticise candidates for doing exactly that. The exam is not about 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 haven't 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.
Question technique
Resist the temptation to 'audit' the answer as you go along. You won't 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. It's not rocket science. It's 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. Don't simply look at the mark when you get the script back and file the exam away. Go through the script; re-read your answers 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 don't 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 don't repeat them.
Planning your study time
You need to plan your time carefully, working out how much time you have from the start of your studies until the examinations, allowing time for attending a revision course if possible. Your correspondence course should set out suggested due dates for your practice examinations. This gives you a starting point. You should work out how many weeks you have for each area of tax and set yourself an action plan for what you are going to study and when.
You must resist the temptation to over-study the areas you know well already. We all like to practice things we can do, but it is a waste of time churning out share pooling calculations over and over again if you know this is something you have cracked. You must force yourself to study the new areas you haven't seen before.
You need to be an all-rounder to succeed in the CTA examinations. You must cover all areas of tax within your syllabus, not just those that you see in the office. It is also vital not to neglect your law and ethics studies. From May 2006 the new style Paper IV will test these two areas exclusively. Don't leave these areas until the end of your studies when you will inevitably be more pushed for time. 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 don't just read these areas 'passively'. The better candidates have a 'system' for learning ethics and law. Some do it by summarising points on index-cards 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 …
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 doesn't technically merit.
Read your answers
A final tip for success is to read through your answer when you have finished writing it and build in time for this. I used to find that, simply because of rushing, I had often missed out a vital word such as 'not' (quite an important little word!). Frequently I thought of another point or two to add while reading my answer. I found that this approach increased my marks on that question more effectively than carrying on with the point I was making at the end of the time allocation.
When I encourage students to read their answers, many admit that their answer didn't sound as good as they had thought it would. If you find you do not phrase things as well as you would like under exam pressure, try to slow down. Form the sentence in your head before putting pen to paper. This can be an especially effective approach in the ethics questions where quality, not quantity, counts.
Also (if you can cope with the embarrassment), give your answer to somebody else to read; even a non-tax person. If he or she can understand the point you are trying to make, your communication skills are good. Remember that you are writing letters/memos, etc. to someone else, so look at your work from the viewpoint of the reader.
Hopefully you will remember some of my advice in the exam hall and this will lead to you seeing your name on the pass list, possibly even with that elusive asterisk indicating that you were awarded a prize!
Sophie Hill is a taxation tutor with LexisNexis Tolley Tax Training in London where she lectures on their CTA and ATT training courses. Sophie can be contacted at sophie.hill@lexisnexis.co.uk.
