By now, you should have worked through at least some of the ICAEW Case Study Learning Materials, and used our Beal Review Toolkit to understand what went wrong if you were unsuccessful in November. This is your groundwork.

Now, you need to prepare for writing your ICAEW Case Study report in the 4 hour exam time.

The secret to this…

Practice!

You have a lot that you need to do in 4 hours; combine that with the pressure of exam conditions and it is easy to see how it can all go wrong.

Picking up the pace

Speed and stamina are both key. Let’s go back to our racing driver – the race being Le Mans!

Le Mans takes place over 24 hours and the winner is the driver that covers the greatest distance. Similar to your ACA Case Study exam – you have 4 hours to produce an answer that covers all the key points. 

Four focused hours

When was the last time you worked on a report for 4 hours without stopping for a break? It is TOUGH!

So, you need to practice writing succinctly and completing your work to time. Now is not the time to attempt every ICAEW Case Study past paper you can find in 4 hours. This will cause burnout and fatigue, and without actively reviewing your work you will not improve.

Your brain needs to adjust and build up to this level of intensity. Breaking your preparation down by Requirement is a technique akin to race-pace runs: gradually building the distance you run at race pace, starting at a slower, more comfortable pace and then adding segments at race-pace. This builds your speed and stamina together.  

Clearly, for all this to work you need to have a detailed time plan. The examiners give you an outline time plan in the Exam Paper and we give you a more detailed one in Mastering Case Study.

This week’s challenge: Develop your speed in answering Requirement 1.

For those of you enrolled on Mastering Case Study as part of your Complete Case Study Preparation, you can use one of the Scour mock exams for this exercise. Otherwise, please use our free Beal Mock Exam Sample Material.

There are 5 parts to writing your answer to Requirement 1:, reading the Exam Paper exhibits, Appendix 1, your planning, writing your answer, and editing it for your Executive Summary.  Our time allocation for Requirement 1 (including the Executive Summary) is 85 minutes.

Using the ICAEW CBE software to build your confidence in using the platform too (see our video on the new ICAEW Computer Based Exam):

• Write your answer to Requirement 1 with no time deadline
• Compare the total time you take against your time plan
• Compare your answer against our illustrative answer to see where you need to improve
• Identify where you need to save time and how you are going to do it
• Practise reducing the time you take in these areas
• Re-write your complete answer to meet the 85 minutes deadline