ACA Exams

Hi everyone,

Hope everyone it's well.

I'm due to start my apprenticeship and I graduated in Accounting and Finance.

The firm that I'll be working in doesn't allow resits- meaning I have to do all the exams from scratch.

The firing policy it's quite rigid too. You are not allowed to fail. On top of that I'll start with certificate, complete the first 2 certificate level and jump straight to professional level.Quite odd.

I am a bit stressed on the fact that I'm not allowed to fail. If anyone has any advice or tips that they would like share, I d be happy to hear and collect them.

The way I was used to revise in uni was that i used to make my own notes, go over the notes by making sure I understand them and do as many questions as possible.

Would you guys reccomend making your own notes or it's too time consuming at this stage? Any advice ill be more than happy to hear.

I worked for a similar company with the same firing policy for exam failures. The way to pass the exams is to do and redo the question banks, over and over again. You’ll probably get blocks of study leave between your client obligations. So after a day at college, go over any questions you haven’t understood and then practice, practice and practice again. To be honest you don’t actually need to understand to pass, you need to know the method and recognise what to use and when. Things actually start making more sense when you use what you have learnt for the exams at your clients, and this is often quite a while after the exams.

I did my exams a long time ago under the old system, but during the periods of block leave I worked HARD!! Much harder than for my economics degree! Not because the content was difficult, just because there was a huge quantity to get through. So from Monday to Friday I probably did at least 3 hours every night plus 2 half days at the weekend, and upped the hours towards the exams. I probably did more than my fellow graduate trainees, as I didn’t find it easy. But at the end I knew the question banks inside out and back to front. I knew exactly what method and formula to use for each question before I’d finished reading them.
I didn’t really make notes and just used the packs given by the course provider. My office used BPP, but it was a LONG time ago.

I think I'll use a similar approach.

Also, would you reccomend to revise all the units everyday or space them out ? E.g revise Assurance on Monday, Accounting on Tuesday etc.....

Tbh I can’t remember what I did exactly, but I probably followed the course program and revisited the topics treated that day with the questions given to be worked on and then did those in the question banks. I probably then did 2 units a day ( morning/ afternoon) closer to the exams, maybe adding a third for the evening if I was starting to “panic”

Hi does anyone know roughly when you sit your first exams after starting an ACA graduate scheme in Sept?