CA2 September 2018

How did everyone find the CA2 exam this sitting?
I thought paper 1 had me really stuck for time and paper 2 was okish..

 

I thought time was too short to produce high quality written papers and models. I wonder what did people do to fit everything within the time scales.

 

I thought it was way tougher than recent past years.. and with the time pressure, boom!

 

It was certainly more time consuming than last year! I just skipped scenario 3 and concentrated instead on audit trail.

 

Maybe this is the best strategy for CA2 - skip part of the excel model and concentrate on audit trail and summary report where most marks are allocated.

 

I found Paper 1 to be fair on the modelling part but I couldnt finish working on the audit trail because of time. Paper 2 had too much to read, I also was pressed of time in that paper

 

I also found Paper 1 very time consuming so after modelling the first and second scenario I decided to leave the third one and add as many checks (mostly basic ones) as I could and after that focused on documenting what I did until the end. Paper 2 again ran into time pressure (but not as extreme as Paper 1!) so decided to concentrate on putting down as many next steps as I could and just rushed through commentary of results

 

So what is a better strategy for this exam:
- skip part of the excel model i.e. 1 scenario but prepare very good documentation
OR
- complete all modelling for all scenarios but rush through the documentation and produce an imperfect work due to lack of time

 

My method for passing paper 1 in CA2 was to break the exam down into smaller sections and try and stick to these set times.

Broadly the splits were:
90 mins model
20 mins intro pupose and summary
20 mins on data
45 mins on audit trail
5 mins to check

I tried to stick semi rigidly to these times and I passed even though my model was poor (April 18)

 

Thanks for sharing

 

Did you finish all parts of model?

 

No i didn’t

I just didn’t panic and focussed on maximising the score I could get.

I did an SAR and got about 55 in the first paper and 80 in the second paper

 

Wow, that's impressive to get 80 marks on paper 2!!! What was your strategy there?

 

Again similar strategy.

30 mins on scenarios
20 mins on intro/ purpose / data
20 mins on methodology
90 mins on results
20 mins on next step

 

For paper 2 did you finish the model and all requested graphs/ tables etc ?

 

Yes.

In the results I aimed for an introduction to results , the graph o table, and then 3 explanation points of the results and finally 1reasonableness result/ check on scenario. For example the result is lower cause the costs are higher

 

This paper 1 did not include any data. What did people do in terms of splitting data from parameters? Or maybe included all in one worksheet calling it data? No examiner's reports yet.