STUDENTS
Passing your EPP exam The Ethics and Professional Practice exam requires you to explain how you would respond to real world dilemmas in the workplace.
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thics and Professional Practice can be a daunting subject for many – even experienced accountants! This short article should hopefully give you some hints and tips to help you put your best foot forward in the upcoming exam.
Practice questions
You wouldn’t run a marathon without training – and you should also think of the upcoming exam as a test of fitness that you need to train for. Your BPP book contains a large number of practice questions that you should be trying in the run-up to the exam. In particular, remember to practise the following skills: ● Read the scenario carefully, underlining or highlighting key points or anything else you think is important. ● Read the question carefully – it is particularly important that you answer what the question is asking you to do, not the question you would like it to be asking. ● Plan an answer to fully address these points – it’s a good idea to take a new paragraph for every point you’re making. Once you’ve answered your question, review your answer carefully against the solution in the book. It’s very easy to look at the solution and think, ‘Yeah, I would have got that’ – but if you didn’t put it down on the paper, you wouldn’t have got the marks in the exam. Spend some time thinking about how your answer compares to the model one: does your answer contain all the necessary information, and are all the key points covered in detail? It’s a good idea to practise the question again, changing it based on what you know now.
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Write enough
In many of the recent exam attempts, we have seen candidates answer with very brief and underdeveloped answers. Quite simply, a complex and detailed ethical situation can’t be answered in a few brief sentences. It is therefore important that you write enough to allow the marker to give you marks. No matter how much you’ve thought about a scenario or think you understand it, the marker can’t award any marks unless you put those thoughts down on paper. Let’s take this example from the December 2021 sitting, question 1 B (ii): Identify and critically evaluate two threats to effective corporate governance within the above scenario and suggest what safeguards could be adopted to reduce these threats. To fully develop an answer to the above we would have to do the following: 1. Write down what each of the two threats were. 2. Critically evaluate them – in other words clearly state why they are a threat to corporate governance. ISSUE 123 | AIAWORLDWIDE.COM
