What are people’s strategies for tackling the AM paper? Do you just start from Q1 and work your way through (what I have been doing so far in my mocks) or is it worth diving into a question mid-paper that you feel more confident in? Trade off in my mind is bagging “easier” marks quickly and leaving more time for harder questions vs. risk of getting muddled up in the exam and dropping points/not leaving enough time.
I advocate starting with your strongest areas and working toward your weakest ones, but I also advocate trying different strategies when you are working practice exams, to see what works best for you.
Attacking easiest to hardest questions may work for or against the candidates. I was very much comfortable with equity during mock exams but in real exam when I jumped to that section, I found almost all questions pretty difficult. That can make candidates further nervous.
I think what to keep in mind is, not to get involved in any particular question and move on as soon as possible to start working on next question. Morning session is the one that most of the candidates feel time crunch.
^yup.
You may think you know a certain subject, then you end up sweating bullets over it.
I think I will take up the suggestion to try it once during practice exam to see how it works, but at this point, I think I will go in order during the real thing to avoid flipping back and forth --> keeping track of what I skipped --> worry if I miss anything.
I think not going in order will add more difficulty and confusion than what it benefits.
This. I find it easier to go in the order given. I don’t cope well with papercuts.
retaker here. i read somewhere that its best to save the PWM/IPS questions towards the end, assuming that they’re your strong points and you can bang out a, say, 19/24 rather quickly. i would tend to agree with that. last year i tried to go in order, i did the IPS stuff correctly and left like 35 points blank.
I plan on going in order and if I run into a question that I think may take too much time, then I skip it and come back to it.
Why?.. because if a question is alloted 8 minutes but you spend 25 minutes on it, you’re screwed! Some questions might be alloted 10 minutes but I can crank it out perfectly in 2 minutes. I want make sure I get those ones done and get full marks on them.
But I find it a waste of time to skim through and pick the best ones to go first… Then you’re just wasting 5 minutes.
I agree with 125 here. I definitely plan to run straight through it. I can see myself getting completely lost and anxiety levels skying if I was to go from Q1 to Q5 to Q2 to Q4. Yuck. Just have to manage time around each question. When the bell goes off you have to bail. If you didn’t know the answer in the time allotted you simply don’t know the answer.
I started at the beginning but skipped and wrote down any subquestion I knew I couldn’t answer immediately within the alotted time (the subquestions are not related, so skipping one is no problem in order to answer the next). This way I finished all questions I definitely could answer and I had about an hour spare time to finish up on the 8-10 questions that took more time or which I found very difficult. I finished the ones that took more time first but of which I was quite confident I could at least come to an answer. Then for the last 2 or so questions I just wrote down some statements that I knew would give me some points but were not close to actually answering the question. I scored quite well on the AM last year and I am quite confident this strategy contributed to that.
I think I will follow something similar to this in reading the comments above, just need to be disciplined and know when to leave something and move on. Good idea of writing down all those you skipped!
Maybe stupid question on level 3 but can we write on the pages “THIS PAGE IS INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK”?
For stuff like this: which subquestions we left out…