Best ACCA exams to self study

Which 2 papers out of F6 - Tax, F7 - Financial reporting, F8 - Audit and F9 - financial management would be best to self study? My employer will only pay for 2 exams per year and I want to do 4 so planning to self study for 2.

I found F6 and F8 easier than F7 and F9. Not sure if this helps. F7 and F9 have lots of difficult calculations to learn whereas F6 and F8 is lots of theory and writing. Good luck!

It will depend with your experience, background and the time you have to prepare. Whereas, Sharron927 found F8 easier than F9; my experience was opposite - I found F9 much easier than F8. In fact F8 has the lowest pass rates among the Foundation level papers - 38% pass rate for the December 2018 sitting. This is because it is mainly a technical paper. F6 has a higher pass rate at 51% but it can take you a while to prepare on your own. The tax code is dotted with some nuggets that are exemptions to the general rules which you need to be comfortable with.

My advice is that, you could chose any papers you wish to pursue provided you will dedicate enough time to prepare for them. You also have to weigh on the effect of taking on extra papers would have on the performance of the 2 papers paid by the employer. The worst case scenario would be to spread yourself too thin resulting in marginal fails for all papers. Also, if you are planning to pursue the Oxford Brookes University degree, you ought to be mindful of the percentage score you will achieve for those papers, as the average score will be used to determine the class of your degree. Hope this helps.