The Financial Accounting and Reporting (FAR) exam is regarded as one of the hardest exams required to obtain the ACA qualification. It contains a lot of content of varying levels of difficulty and as such, students can struggle to manage their time effectively in exam scenarios. Therefore, students need to learn as many tricks/techniques for passing this exam as possible and one of these is learning how to effectively manage their time in the exam.
Why do you need to manage your time in the ACA FAR exam?
As well as having some of the trickiest content to learn, the ACA FAR exam is also one of the most time-pressured exams within the ACA qualification. This is because there are so many different parts to each question that really try to test students on their knowledge of complex areas.
If you are unable to manage your time well and you spend too long on each question you,you can easily lose a lot of marks and this can lead to you failing the exam
Therefore, it is important that you understand how to balance your time amongst each of the questions and how long to spend attempting each on before moving on to the next.
How long should you spend on each ACA FAR question?
As each question varies in terms the number of marks on offer, it is recommended that you calculate the time per mark in the exam rather than each question.
We can calculate the time allowed per mark by doing the following:
1. Set out the number of marks in the exam and the number of minutes in total: The exam is 180 minutes long and there are 100 marks up for grabs
2. Divide the number of minutes by the number of marks: 180/100 = 1.8 minutes. This tells us that there are 1.8 minutes available for every mark in the ACA FAR exam.
Therefore, if a question is worth 20 marks you should multiply 20 by the 1.8 minutes per mark calculated above ,which gives you 36 minutes. You should not spend anymore than 36 minutes on this question.
What if you don’t finish the question in time?
If you are unable to complete a question in the time-frame calculated using the above method (quite a likely scenario for most people) you should simply move on.
If you start to try and finish the question once you’ve already gone over the time limit, you are now just wasting marks on the following questions because you will have time to complete them.
Realistically once you have spent the allocated amount of time on a question you have already picked up MOST of the marks available to you. Spending a further 5 minutes may not seem like a long time but in reality, given most marks have already been picked up this 5 minutes may only get you another 1 or 2 marks.
Instead, if you spend that 5 minutes on a brand new question you should be getting at least another 2 or 3 of the EASY marks that don’t require much though (e.g. setting out the correct pro-formas and workings).
How important is time management in the ACA FAR Exam?
I am only able to speak from anecdotal experience but I would say that lack of time management is one of the main reasons for failing the FAR exam.
There are so many marks available in FAR from simply laying out workings and therefore, it is the candidates that fail to complete every question that fail to pick up these simple marks.
Candidates who spend too long making questions perfect rather than moving on and picking up the working marks for each are really limiting their ability to accumulate marks on the paper.
Therefore, I would say being able to manage your time in this exam is extremely important.
I hope this quick tip has been useful for your studies and I wish you the best of luck with your exam. Please note, these timings are based on the 2021 and 2022 exams at the time of writing. Please ensure you have checked the time/mark limits available for your sitting as the ACA syllabus is always subject to change.