I just like find out from everybody (including Acted tutors) would recommend physically writing out a skeleton plan before writing out final answers in a SA exam ? When I do this I am more satisfied with the structure of my final answer than if I did not. But at the same time I find it slows me down and is time consuming. I'm sure everybody at least does some mental outline of their answer. So I am curious how others approach this. Thanks.
I haven't done this til now but will definitely for this one. In fairness its probably the best thing to do in the 15 minutes as you know yourself there won't be much course work directly asked bar maybe a small 10 or 15 mark section - the rest of the paper will be 2 questions which is going to mean general principles applying in some wide context. The nature of the questions are going to involve "wider-scale" thinking so its going to be important to show you can think at this level - part of this will involve showing you can compartmentalise issues as part of a bigger picture. The more I study this subject the more I see it has less to do with the notes and more to do with "can we give him/her a "big issue" and will he/she be able to look at it out from the "top-down"". Makes for depressing study - could easily work our socks off learning the course and get a question on a merger/new market and another on asset shares that could've passed back in Sept after studying ST2. I'm hoping that showing a structured thought process will be looked upon favourably - I think we'll all know the answers (or at least we'll all have the same level of knowledge more or less) but some if us will be better at expressing them and some of us will be better at structuring them. These are the boys and girls that will pass. If you did ST2 in Sept you might remember a question on withdrawals and another on underwriting - we all know what these are but how we express and stucture our knowledge is whats going to separate the pass/fails. Definitely structure your answer and don't take my word for it I've been strongly advised as such by those that have qualified. Good luck
This should really help as you will avoid scatter brain approach and miss out on a lot of marks. I think you can do this during the 15 minutes reading time on the rough paper supplied BUT not on the answer booklet. Maybe concentrating on one question during this time can give you a good start....or a quick read through for all the questions and plan when tackling each after reading time is up. Really depends on your preferred approach.
