September 20 exam

Hi all - sadly I failed my exam. I thought the paper was reasonable but I got 40 marks. I am still in disbelief on how poorly I have done as I thought I would have scored more highly. I studied really hard for this exam and now I am lost and confused on how to approach the exam in April.

I will be applying for counselling and also getting my marks breakdown to understand further. Saying that I have no idea how to approach the exam. Please need some help!

 

Hi Rave

I also failed (3rd attempt) with a score of 51. My previous two attempts were low 40s. I did exam counselling on the 2nd attempt and thought I factored in the comments/areas for improvement pretty well. Don't know if it was this that caused a jump in my mark or if the exam was just slightly easier. I had actually scored myself around 60-65 as I also thought the exam was reasonable and I felt like I had given a good shot at it.

Really struggling to understand what is required in this exam, as it's the only one that has given me this much sorrow! I'll just wait for the examiner's report and have requested for the SAR.

I think I will do exam counselling once again to see what comes up this time around.

 

Hi Nqpa92

Sorry to hear that you failed and I feel your pain.

Exactly i did exam counselling for last September exam and incorporated that for the April 20 exam. I failed that by 2 marks. Saying that I know the exam was harder.

Like you I thought I got around 60+ and so I have no idea why I did so badly. You are right I have no idea what they are expecting for this exam.

 

The April 20 exam was definitely much harder so the drop in your mark is making little sense to me too!

It would be great to hear tips from any successful resitters out there and what they did differently to pass.

 

So I just had a look at the mark scheme. Pass mark was 55. I remarked myself and scored 60.5! I ended up on 51.5 by the end of the 2nd question, so I'm definitely going to wait for the mark breakdown to see what's going on. I've actually hit most of the marking scheme where I thought I would!

 

Hi, I resat SA4 this time and passed with 62, so per Nqpa92's comment I thought I'd chip in. Looong comment, sorry.

First thing to say is a disclaimer that I might not be the best person for this - without going into detail, I sat SA4 once before and failed it by not very much due to circumstances that were somewhat beyond my control. Not making excuses, because SA4's a hard exam and there's no shame in failing it - I'm just pretty sure I would have passed that particular paper in more normal circumstances, so it wasn't necessarily a case of changing my study habits for this second sitting. However:

I found tutorials really helpful in getting into the right mindset. In SA4 it's hard to guess what the examiner wants you to focus on, and honestly I think it's a bit of a guessing game even for the best candidates, but I found the tutorials really helpful in giving a bit more insight into why some reasonable-seeming answers wouldn't score highly and why others would. Mostly my mistake was to go into the wrong level of detail - either skim over a load of points and lose a ton of marks on the "deep dive", or focus really heavily on one or two points and lose the marks from others. The command verbs and the wording of the question generally are your main indicator here, but getting feedback from the tutor helped to train me into getting a better balance for depth vs. breadth. I found that they barely ever want you to just reel off lists, and they barely ever want you to go into tonnes of detail about one thing. You could say nine or ten valid things about the approach to setting a discount rate in an assumptions question but it's rare that they'll want you to be that detailed, even if it says "discuss". Only do that if the question wording is so narrow that it's obvious you have to. Making all of your points clearly distinct from one another is also important here.

I also submitted a couple of assignments. I complained about my feedback on the first one because it didn't go into any useful detail about why I wasn't getting marks for some perfectly valid things I'd written. ActEd reviewed it and responded with much more insightful feedback, which really helped. Basically anything that can give you a window into the examiner's mindset is great, and generally it's easier to get that from interaction with ActEd than from the examiners' reports. And there's no harm in going back to ActEd and saying "but WHY is that the right answer, and this the wrong one?".

I plastered my wall in notes! I couldn't rely on them too much because of the massive time pressure in the exam itself, but it did help me to stay on track during certain questions when I was thinking "what else can I write about this?" and then I would look up at my risk-sharing mind map and find another one or two things to add in.

More obvious points:
- I went through past papers and really focused on the areas where I was losing a lot of marks. It's really easy to fall into spending your time on questions you're good at. Even sitting entire papers is a bit of a waste of time after a certain point. Find your weak points and do only those types of questions again and again until you start to do well on them (unless they rarely come up or don't usually carry many marks).
- I made sure to tailor every single question I answered. Don't put in anything that doesn't apply to the situation you're given. I would guess that the examiners are a bit kinder to the students who make it clear that they're tailoring because they believe we know what we're talking about, rather than just writing down anything we can think of.
- State the obvious. They often give out a full mark for saying something like "the funding level in scheme A is higher than scheme B" at the beginning of an answer before you go into more detail about the whys and hows.
- Get into the habit of answering in bulletpoints. Makes it easier for the examiner to read and also easier for you to mark your own mocks. Also makes it a lot easier for you to keep on track and make sure you're covering enough distinct points.

I wish I could give you a magic formula, but honestly I think the exam and the marking is sometimes a little bit of a lottery, and 62 isn't exactly smashing it so I'm no authority anyway. Just try to really find out your weak points and talk to people, including ActEd, about how to fix them.

Good luck