hey, I cleared SP7 and SP8 from the UK and IAI.
I'd like to thank all the help I received from this thread...
what worked for me:
For IAI:
1. Practice - I practiced close to 10 years of papers for SP7. By the time I come to 2018/2019, I was very well aware of the accounts question which helped enormously because this year the IAI accounts question was a monster question
For UK (Sp7 and SP8):
1. The comments here on older papers definitely helped... I started with 2010 (instead of my usual 2014 that I used to begin with)
2. I did an analysis of my previous years papers to actually do a credibility weighted exercsise (lol) on my answers - for instance, I did a trend analysis on how my marks for describe answers have changed over the past 5 attempts, etc. This helped for some cases (for instance, I noticed that the marks I recieved for suggest type questions had gone down over the years. I realized that during the earlier years I used to write more concise answers scoring more for suggest and less for describe - which resulted in a sort of inversion)
So this kind of helped me plan how to approach certain types of questions... though not all types of questions.
3. Checklist - This i would say helped enormously - Though you need to ensure you dont spent too much time on this during the exam. Just quick points on items that you may have missed (for instance, i had policy terms and conditions for "policy related" items... just somethign that helps you
4. A single sheet of paper with the word "TAX" written on it plastered to my front wall (i think the credit to this goes to @Ian Senator ) - This i would say helped me with at least 1.5 to 2 marks (which is very crucial in SP level papers). You often forget tax as one of the points to the describe/discuss/sugges/comment/list questions... tax and tax regime related points is an easy 0,5 marks... and it adds up across the paper. I literally did a check before submitting my paper on all questions to see if tax was applicable and if I had answered them adequately well enough.... not saying this led to my passing... but i'd say this is up there.
Last but not the least, lack of fluster (i think this is the single biggest contributor). I just stopped bothering about the exam results and went with a positive mindset. I stopped studying the day before the exam... i didn't bother doing any revisions on the day of and I just watched a couple of funny movie clippings and went with the most comfortable mindset possible.
I have to say that for SP8 at least, I had a little bit of luck riding my side (i was borderline).
Last edited: Dec 13, 2021