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by Pippa Riley 25 Oct 2004 Diploma in Financial Management Relevant to All papers

In the final few weeks before your DipFM exams you need to revise to refresh your memory as to what you have learned over your period of study. This will maximise your chances of success in the exams. There are three key aspects to revision:

• when to revise
• what to revise
• how to revise.

When to revise
When taking school or college exams in the past you may have got used to the idea of drawing up a revision timetable. This technique is just as useful for the Diploma in Financial Management.

At the start of your revision period you should draw up an overall timetable to ensure that for each paper you cover all the most significant topics and enough other topics to provide insurance should your best topics not appear.

You should also consider:

• the order of revision: you may want to tackle the most important topics first
• the necessary skills to acquire: you must practise key skills such as analysis and communication
• the timing of any revision course that you plan to attend
• the need to sit a mock exam at the end of your revision.

You can then break down your overall timetable into weekly and daily timetables. Remember to build in flexibility in case certain topics need more revision than originally planned or you have to take time out to cope with unscheduled work or a domestic problem.

Don't be over-ambitious in drawing up your revision plan and commit every hour of the day to study. Everybody needs regular breaks to recharge batteries and provide variety. Successful techniques include:

• taking ten minutes in every hour to make a cup of coffee, listen to the news headlines on the radio etc
• building-in breaks for such necessities as lunch, exercise, relaxing and seeing friends.

You will not be able to revise all day, every day. Work and family constraints may preclude that and in any event it is just not physically or mentally possible to maintain such a pace of revision. Give some thought to whether you prefer to:

• revise in the early mornings, perhaps before work, or to enable you to finish relatively early in the day
• do less in the mornings but then achieve a good stint of revision in the later part of the day
• concentrate your revision on weekday evenings, thereby enabling you to have free time at the weekend or vice versa.

What to revise
Key topics
At the start of your revision, draw up a list of the key topics for each subject area. You can identify these in various ways:

• Topics that recur regularly in the exam papers.
• Topics that underlie the whole subject area, such as the concepts of qualities of financial information or stewardship in Subject Area 1.
• Current issues, for example developments in performance management techniques or corporate governance.
• Recent articles by the examiners. The current examiners are Ronnie Patton (Module A) and Peter Atrill (Module B) and they are both regular contributors to finance matters. Look through past issues to identify their areas of interest and concern.
• Topics shown as high priority in textbooks or home study material.
• Topics identified as essential in the examiners' comments on previous exams and projects. If an examiner says that a question on a key area was poorly answered it can be a signal that the same topic may be examined again soon.

These are the areas where you should spend most time, and are the topics on which you should practise full questions. Remember to cover all of the examinable aspects of a topic. For example, as well as revising a technique, don't forget to revise its advantages and disadvantages.

Difficult areas
Most students find some topics quite straightforward but struggle with others. Even approaching the exams, there may still be some areas about which you don't feel confident. Think through what it is about the topic that you find difficult and adapt your revision to suit:

• Lack of knowledge: concentrate on methods that test knowledge, such as writing out summaries, quick quizzes and multiple-choice questions (MCQs).
• Computations: where you do not understand a computation go back to the examples in the textbooks, trying to note the logic behind each stage. Then practise questions as much as possible, (for example from past papers or those included in the BPP Practice & Revision Kit) referring back to the textbooks if you struggle. Then try another question without referring to the text and see if your performance has improved.
• Higher skills: if you have had problems with questions involving higher level skills such as analysis or interpretation of accounts, practising full questions will give you more confidence in applying those skills. Keep the problem in mind while you are answering the question and try to address it: are you saying enough about why the figures in the accounts have changed; are your recommendations clear and specific?

Don't get bogged down with difficult topics. Focus on what is most important about the topic and what is likely to earn you the most (or an acceptable level of) marks. Don't spend a lot of time grappling with a complication that will only be worth a mark or two extra in the exam.

Breadth of revision
Breadth of revision is particularly important for the DipFM exams, due to the style of the paper. The compulsory MCQs will cover all major areas of the syllabus and can focus on very specific aspects. In addition, your choice of written questions is relatively limited, and the topics covered may be unpredictable.

You can check the breadth of your revision by looking at past exam papers on ACCA's website at www.accaglobal.com/students/diploma_fm and ensuring that your revision plan would have enabled you to answer all of the compulsory questions and enough of the optional questions on the paper.

How to revise
The two main aspects of revision are revising material and practising questions.

Revising material
There is no substitute for writing things down if you want to remember them. It is far more effective as a revision technique than just sitting and reading, as the act of writing will help your recall later on. Your study notes are too bulky to revise from. You need to create some kind of master set of notes to summarise the key points. You can do this by:

• Consolidating your existing notes into a more manageable volume for final revision. Try writing key points or definitions in capitals or highlighting them so that they stand out.
• Making revision notes on A5 index cards (cards and boxes to file them in are widely available from stationers).
• Creating mindmaps where you summarise all the key points about a topic on one large sheet of paper. This can be very helpful if you have a more visual mind; colour coding of topics and key points can also help here.
• Don't forget to note things like pro formas and layouts for computations and accounts and learn those too. Make yourself write out a pro forma balance sheet and profit and loss account; write down key formulae such as the EOQ and accounting ratios.

Active reading
Once you have created your revision notes you need to read through them (or write them out again if that helps) to start to make them stick into your memory.

• Try reading out loud. This gives you the benefit of hearing information as well as seeing it. Try taping yourself reading your notes and then listen to them again.
• Read actively. For example, stop frequently to test yourself (try to write down the definition you just read, make yourself recite the headings of a cashflow statement).
• Use different resources while reading. Read your notes but also chapter round-ups and quick quizzes from the Study Text.

Practising questions
Practising questions is critical to exam success. Include time for doing questions in your revision timetable, identify questions that you would like to tackle at each stage of your revision from past exam questions or from the banks in the BPP Practice & Revision Kit and tick them off when you have done them.

At the revision stage you should focus on exam-standard questions, so that you get the measure of what will be expected of you in the real exam. If you are running short of time, at the very least produce answer plans to as many questions as possible or practise the computational parts of questions. This will expose you to many different types of question so that you will hopefully see familiar styles of questions in the exams themselves.

Revising for exams is always hard work, but you can take comfort from the fact that solid revision will maximise your chances of success and enable you to gain this really worthwhile qualification.

Pippa Riley is range manager for the DipFM suite of publications and editorial project manager at BPP Professional Education

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