The UFE is the last exam that a future Chartered Accountant is expected to complete. While it is no surprise that among other things the exam tests your technical knowledge, most candidates can readily identify at least some gaps in their knowledge. The fact is that studying technical can be challenging. What should you do to retain the information better? How best to ensure that you spend your time studying productively? What is the optimal way to learn and memorize technical information?

If you are an experienced writer this year, we recommend you start studying within the next few weeks despite the fact that the UFE is many months away. Why? Research shows a direct correlation between repetition and memory. Ideally, you should acquaint yourself with new information gradually, as opposed to cramming it into your brain over a short period of time. John Medina, in his New York Times bestseller Brain Rules, concludes that if we want to retrieve the information easily we need to re-expose ourselves to it in successively more elaborate ways and at fixed time intervals. A Harvard psychology professor, quoted in Medina’s book, recommends that, “If you have only one week to study for a final, and only 10 times when you can hit the subject, it is better to space out the 10 repetitions during the week than to squeeze them all together.”

Therefore, we advise the following approach when studying your technical:

1) Prepare a comprehensive study schedule, which has all your study days planned out ahead of time;
2) Choose several topics that you will focus on each week;
3) As the week progresses, make sure to continuously review those topics that you touched on in the beginning of the week;
4) Do not expect to have perfect core knowledge of all the technical aspects of a topic right away. Continuously reviewing the topic will ensure that you are retaining the information better;
5) We suggest refreshing your technical knowledge before embarking on your case writing, i.e. build a base first! You will continue to learn and refresh your technical competency so that by the time you get into case writing, there is an existing base on which you can build.

We’d be glad to share more tips with you at our Memory Techniques Group Session! Check out the Workshops page for more information or get in touch with your exaMENTOR coach!