It is crucial that you understand the new challenges you will face when starting operational and management levels. Martin Taylor, chief executive of BPP Business School, explains how to maximise your chances of passing and minimise any exam pain.
You’re ready to start studying the operational level of CIMA. You may have been exempt from some or all of the five certificate level papers, or you may have successfully passed all five. This article will provide some practical tips on how best to overcome the common challenges.
What’s so different from certificate level?
It is important to recognise that the operational and management level exams have significant differences from certificate level papers.
Gone is the two hour computer based assessment made up of lots of low mark questions. Instead, you will be given approximately 30 sheets of blank paper in the exam, and have a full 200 minutes (180 exam minutes plus 20 minutes’ reading time) to demonstrate to the examiner that you are a budding chartered management accountant who knows what they are doing.
No longer do you have to select the most appropriate explanation from a list; now you have to write your own. Or you have to explain something and then discuss its relative merits.
Even trickier, you have to do all of that and then apply your thinking to a real life situation you may not have encountered before. Your whole answer needs to flow together to gain as many of the 25 marks as possible.
The fact that each of these questions offers a higher number of marks means you need to answer all of them well. In the compulsory sections you cannot simply leave one and hope to catch up all the marks on the next one.
Dealing with the biggest problems
Challenge 1 – understanding the syllabus:
The different nature of the exams at this level means you need a much deeper understanding of the syllabus to be successful. You must be able to process an exam question quickly and construct an answer that fits the exact wording of the requirement and the marks on offer.
This is bad news for crammers whose tendency is to leave the bulk of their work until the last minute. If you do not genuinely understand a topic, you will get found out in the exam. This applies equally to narrative and calculation questions.
The key is to start studying early, and maintain a sensible and consistent level throughout the three months leading up to the exams.
An hour spent studying three months before the exam has three times as much value as an hour spent right at the end. Why? Because getting that information into your brain at an early stage means the brain has much longer to digest it. Then it can relate it to things you learn later, reflect on it, build on it, break it down into smaller parts or apply it to new situations. True understanding takes time.
Challenge 2 – having the key skills to pass:
Knowledge of the syllabus is not enough though. Like driving a car, knowing the theory is one part, having the skills ‘on the road‘ is the other.
This means knowing and then developing the key exam skills that will serve you so very well on the exam day. They include:
- managing your time
- interpreting the requirements accurately
- structuring your answer appropriately
- knowing how to cope when you get stuck
- using simple, standard layouts whenever possible.
The best way to do this is by working through past paper questions and mock exams, thereby testing your syllabus understanding and exam skills at the same time.
This is often the make or break phase of studying for CIMA exams and the quicker you get to this phase the better. However, you need to have a decent understanding of the syllabus for it to be fruitful. Otherwise you will be unable to attempt any questions properly without referring back to your detailed notes.
To some extent, these exam skills are the most difficult to pin down. However, once mastered they will be the single largest boost to your CIMA success, as they can then be carried with you throughout the rest of your qualification.
What’s the best order to tackle the papers?
Most students nowadays attempt exams two at a time in the run up to strategic level. While there is no set order in which you must tackle the papers, we find that, for many students, a good order to follow is: E1 and F1, then P1 and F2, then P2 and E2.
This gives you maximum progression benefits as you study F2 shortly after F1 (which will help with consolidated accounts), P2 shortly after P1 (useful with variances), and E2 just before strategic level (useful for E3).
Some students start with one paper only, to test the water. This is understandable, but in terms of getting through the whole qualification, it's better to do two at a time from the start (a) so that it doesn’t take forever and (b) so that the impact of doing all three strategic papers at once doesn’t come as a shock!
Advice in one sentence
Start early and always include question practice in your study sessions. It is better to fail many times in practice and learn from them to improve than fail once in the real exam.