It’s not all about the content in your accountancy exams, with marks for presentation being awarded as well as testing your knowledge.
Your presentation could be the difference between a pass or a fail, earning an additional 3 or 4 marks that are worth having in your back pocket.
Planning your answer properly and presenting it clearly is an important component to success, so it’s crucial to structure your answer in the correct manner, considering what format it needs to follow and how long each section should be.
By joining my Accounting Exam Accelerator Programme you’ll receive expert help on how to best format your exams and we’ll cover presentation specifically based on what the mark scheme awards points for.
What The Mark Scheme Says:
There are professional marks available for three types of assessment, each with their own criteria.
1. Logical Flow and Structure
This covers everything about the way in which your answer is structured, including paragraphs and clear separation of points that are made.
It’s important to remember that your response to an exam question should follow a chronological order and each point should be clear and concise.
2. Appropriate Tone and Language
You need to ensure that the voice you are presenting throughout your writing is appropriate to the question you’re answering, usually involving a formal presentation of information.
Maintain a professional tone through your use of technical terms, but don’t over complicate your answer by making it sound like a thesaurus – finding this balance can be tricky, so attempting past exam questions and looking at the mark scheme afterwards as part of your revision can prove to be extremely beneficial.
3. Presenting a Convincing Argument
A somewhat deceptive point, this seemingly content-driven assessment actually requires you to organise your answer in a convincing manner rather than use the written word to do so.
Presenting your answer in a convincing way involves having a clear opening, argument points and a concise ending.
My Top Tips:
There are lots of simple tricks you can pay attention to and utilise in your exams, many of which are easy to implicate but equally as easy to forget when it comes to the big day.
1. Read The Requirements
Make sure you provide what you are asked for, whether it be a letter, report or otherwise.
2. Appeal To The Audience
Address who the audience is and tailor your answer to their needs – do they have a financial or non-financial background and do you have to provide facts or influence them?
3. Pick A Person
You need to write in either the 1st person for a report or 3rd person when constructing an argument, so it’s important to remember which one to choose depending on what the question requires.
4. Show Your Working Out
You might remember this from school, but it’s still as important today to show how you worked out a computational question such as a cash flow statement, corporation tax computation or a flexed budget.
5. Introduce Your Writing
Your introduction should be two sentences to simply set the context, covering what you’re going to provide in your answer, acting as a great starting point and also something to look back on and remind yourself what you should be writing about.
6. Headings
Where possible, group appropriate points under common headings, but this is only applicable to certain formats.
7. Leave Space
Rather than scattering a question answer across different pages in your booklet or on screen, if you find yourself stuck it’s best to leave a space and return to it later instead of moving onto the next one immediately on the line after.
8. Be Specific
Your answer must be specific to the scenario in hand, for example you should use the names of people and organisations from the question.
9. Link Up
Always use a linking sentence to connect topics and paragraphs, making your answer much more professional, for example, “Having covered these arguments for topic X, I will now move onto the key issues in situation Y.”
10. Conclude Your Answer
State your suggested course of action, but you can also mention the counter argument, just remember to be persuasive and not repeat points as the marks only apply to the first time it was mentioned.