Sitting case on the 4th Nov. Looks a bit trickier than usual - it's about the pawnbroking and jewellery industry. The advance information has provided much less in the way of strategy, supply chain and objectives for the company than usual so it'll be anyone's guess what comes up in the actual exam.
Illusionary - BR is Monday, BC is Tuesday and case is Wednesday. ICAS case... I heard that is an 8 hour exam with an hour lunch break in the middle during which you can share ideas?! Don't know how true that is though! Regardless, hope it goes well.
Gohalath - Agreed, case does look trickier than usual. I don't see many clues in the advance material, but we'll see what Kaplan have made of it. I've got case prep on Wed, Thu and Fri this week.
Case is a pretty interesting industry, alot to talk about with the strategy question! Focusing more on the TI though!
Agreed - if I were to have to resit any of the papers I'd def go for case. Clearly hoping to pass them all, but really want to get through the technical papers once and for all!
Illusionary - BR is Monday, BC is Tuesday and case is Wednesday. ICAS case... I heard that is an 8 hour exam with an hour lunch break in the middle during which you can share ideas?! Don't know how true that is though! Regardless, hope it goes well.
5 hours 30 mins with a lunch break, and yes you can share ideas (I'm not sure that I could cope with 8 hours! ).
They tend to change it all around and give extra and/or more detailed requirements with the afternoon part though, so it's debatable how much any discussion can help. It can be dangerous to try to go back and change work from the morning, and risk running out of time!
5 hours 30 mins with a lunch break, and yes you can share ideas (I'm not sure that I could cope with 8 hours! ).
They tend to change it all around and give extra and/or more detailed requirements with the afternoon part though, so it's debatable how much any discussion can help. It can be dangerous to try to go back and change work from the morning, and risk running out of time!
5 hours 30 mins?! Crikey, I'll stop complaining about my 4 hour case then! What is your case on?
glad that I'm not the only person who thought it was a shocker of an exam. have yet to speak to anyone who felt it went well/ok/not to bad.
Would have been nice for them to ask some stuff which I'd actually been expecting rather than just rehashing huge quantities of professional stage knowledge. The tax question completely threw me for example.
They probably wrote it thinking there's some incorporation relief and remittance basis in there but oops that's not enough marks - lets chuck some taxable/exempt benefits in there for the fun of it and let them calculate the liability.
One of our lot found the exam ok, but at far as accounting geeks go there are few bigger ones out there. With that one exception apart, everyone else I've spoken to found it to be pretty much a car crash of a paper. The tax question in particular - bloody hell. I mean all the days tuition in Kaplan looking at tax at they ended up testing us on professional stage *assumed* knowledge. Cars and CO2 emissions? Are you having a laugh?
Question 4 was dodge as well. A whole question on ethics pretty much save for a small bit of hedge accounting chat. It almost felt like there was a page missing.
Generally, I thought it was more time pressured by a considerable amount than the mocks and practise papers I've sat.
Let's hope for a nice big pension question tomorrow - it hasn't been tested for 3 consecutive TI papers now.
yeah, although for the last question I only had about 30 minutes left so wouldn't have been able to cope with anything else. Was far more time pressured than any of the mocks which is rather annoying.
Not sure about you as well but the one major tax area we had to self study was international aspects of personal tax.
How did you find BC? It was far better received by the guys I was sitting it with today than BR. More like the stuff we'd actually covered in college. A few people didn't like the numbers part of question 1. Again, the exam was quite excessively time pressured, I've not spoken to anyone who attempted every part of every question.
How did you find BC? It was far better received by the guys I was sitting it with today than BR. More like the stuff we'd actually covered in college. A few people didn't like the numbers part of question 1. Again, the exam was quite excessively time pressured, I've not spoken to anyone who attempted every part of every question.
I just about managed to get something down for every requirement. My strategy was to pick up the easy marks where possible when coming to the end of my allocated time.
The paper was a structured better than yesterday but the 40 mark question is always a killer when you open the paper.
Not sure if I'm missing something with BR. The professional stage stuff with the taxation was stuff that could easily be found in Hardman's, and the income tax bands were in our notes - the rest was to be expected (incorp relief and gift relief; bit of dtr, IHT bit was almost a carbon copy of a mock question) - the rest was just auditing and financial reporting?
BC I found very very tricky though... especially the tax in that question! Panicked, and ended up producing a pretty bad loss relief computation (just took post entry losses from their associate, and ignored that other 35% company as I don't think it formed part of that loss group)... and my chat about the sale/purchase of shares was just blagging standard question bank answers without any computations! Don't think they'll be too impressed with that!
Case today I found pretty good going, overall I said - no to Oldham, no to upmarketness.
I thought the case was not bad with the questions asked, just not too sure I answered them in the best way. There seemed to be a lot to write in the time which was expected.
Think I was a bit too generall on the weaknesses and threats for the last requirement, hopefully they will take that to apply to being upmarket.
Really tough to call, hopefully the fact that I finished the exec summary might mean I scrape a pass.
How many appendicies did people do and what were they?
Playing with numbers and cooking the books.
Useful Resources:
ACA Advanced Stage, TI and case
