ACCA F4 Tips

I have taken the exam sitting for ACCA F4 and F5 on June 2008. F5 was a killer paper for me and I really did bad. As for F4, I did pretty well and have enough confidence that I will pass this paper. In this post, I would like to share some tips on how to prepare for ACCA F4 which I think should guarantee you the pass.

The exam format of the current F4 paper does not give you options, you have to answer all questions. If you are aiming for perfect marks, you have to cover all topics under the syllabus to be equipped with enough knowledge to answer all questions. If you cannot cover all topics, read on this post for some tips.

First of all, we will divide the whole syllabus into 5 main topics: Singapore Legal System, Contract Law, Company Law, Tort Law and Corporate Governance. Out of the above five topics, Contract Law and Company Law are considered two big topics and covers a number of areas. The coverage of the other three topics are relatively lighter. The questions will be based on all those areas and the main obstacle faced by the students in attempting this paper is the huge amount of memory work to be able to remember many facts from all those topics. Students are expected to remember case names from Contract Law and section numbers from Company Law in addition to the rules of the Laws. If a student does not study regularly from the beginning, it's nearly impossible to clearly remember all the topics in the exam hall.

Secondly, we will try to put our focus areas in preparing for the exam. Since the exam questions are to be based on all the above five topics, you can exclude one or some of them from your focus areas. Let's assume that you will exclude Company Law from your focus area, you can just read through the company law to roughly know about the rules of the Law. In my opinion, reading through the rules of the Law is easy since the Law is basically based on common sense. You are not supposed to remember sections names or subsection names from Company Law. Or you can exclude Contract Law from your focus area, ie., you are not supposed to remember all the English case names or local case names. But you are still required to know the rules of the contract law. Again, in my opinion, knowing just the rules of the law is easy to remember since they are all common sense. The need to remember those case names with some foreign names is a challenging part. In summary, I assume that you can either exclude Contract Law or Company Law from your focus areas.

Thirdly, since you have already excluded one of the big topics from your focus areas, you are supposed to cover up all details about the rest of the topics to guarantee you a pass. This includes remembering all the rules and sub-rules about the rest of the Laws. To be more precise, you are supposed to cover up the topics that you have chosen by thoroughly studying them from Exam Kit, Text Book and Lecture Notes.

In summary, by the time you go to exam hall, you know that in the worst case scenarios, you will be able to answer most of the exam questions but could probably miss a few. But missing a few questions while doing well for the rest of the questions could probably guarantee the pass for this paper.