Using Time Effectively in FD1

Alright, so I’m not going to talk about the very basics. You will already know and appreciate that Part A of FD1 is short questions worth up to 10 marks, with all questions to be answered and Part B of FD1 is longform questions worth 25 marks where you have a choice of any two questions out of the three provided.

Looking to the UK timetable for 2021, it would seem that the PEB are planning for a 4 hour FD1 exam - I wonder if this means they have abandoned the online exam and will be returning to the Oval. It could just be that these published timings are provisional, but better to plan for 4 hours and then if the exam goes online you can adjust.

Marks per Minute

If the exam is 4 hours, that means you have 240 minutes for the exam, which means that you have approximately 2.4 minutes per mark. This means that for a average 9 marker in part A, you have around 20 minutes with the remainder for checking, and for each part B you have an hour.

How I Used the Time When I Failed

In my first two attempts at FD1, I would calculate how long I had for each question before diving headlong into it. I would briefly read the question and try to write as much as possible of what I thought was relevant to each question before moving on. This resulted in the answers being a stream of conciousness as I tackled one topic in the question before dashing to the next, potentially missing the big picture.

Come results day I would do relatively good in Part A, where the topics are few, and very poorly in the more complex situations presented in Part B.

If you have sat FD1 and your section A is good but your section B is bad, then this might feel particularly relatable to you, in hindsight.

How I Used the Time When I Passed

At the very start of working with my tutor last year, I explained that I knew my stuff and scored highly on Part A, but for some reason my marks on Part B weren’t keeping up. She made a radical suggestion that seemed like a very big ask at the time.

She suggested that half of my time should be spent planning each question. I was sceptical, and the reason I was sceptical was because I figured the more time I spent writing, the more likely I was to hit on the points which award the marks. What I didn’t appreciate at the time was that I was wrong to be sceptical, and that my approach was wrong.

I tried it out on my first practice paper of the summer, and I was pleasantly surprised. When my tutor returned my paper, my marks had immediately improved. Part B in particular improved dramatically. I was a convert: I stuck with this system throughout my tutoring and employed it when I sat the paper for real (and passed).

Put the Planning into Practice

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. As such, I urge you in your preparation to try it, even if you are sceptical. Dedicate half of your time in a question to just planning the answer.

Taking this approach slows everything down. It allows you to consider what the question (and the client in the question) wants from you, and allows you to balance your answer. Instead of a stream of consciousness, you get breathing room leading to a structured answer covering the issues. After all, how often are the model answers pages and pages of waffle?

I found that this approach makes it easier to see the big picture in Part B. If you’re a resitter with good Part A and poor Part B scores, I’d be especially keen for you to try implementing this approach, as I did.

Final Thoughts

You could begin implementing this approach in the Coffee Table Questions to get used to the pace of answering questions in this way. If you’re already doing past papers, begin implementing it there.

Of course, in order to spend half the time planning, you should have a strategy for how you write a plan during exam conditions. If you don’t, you might look to the back of Doug’s green book which has some suggested planning methods. If you were already planning and it didn’t work for you, perhaps you could change your approach.

If you want to do what I did, I’ll cover the planning technique I used throughout my summer revision and in the live exam in a future article.