All papers at managerial and strategic levels: good exam technique can make the difference between success and failure. David Forster offers his tips for scoring those vital extra marks.

The first thing that students sitting any managerial or strategic level paper will encounter is the 20-minute period of reading time. The clear objective for the reading time is that candidates should be better off after these 20 minutes than they were before it. If you simply read the question paper through from start to finish, you might find yourself starting to panic--particularly if the topics you'd expected, or hoped for, don't seem to feature. What you do during this period, therefore, needs to be positive and motivating. It represents 11 per cent more time in a three-hour exam, which should mean more marks--perhaps even 11 per cent more.

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You need to plan what you will do in your reading time before you arrive at the exam hall. Because all the papers vary in structure and content, you'll need a different plan for each one. You should consider a number of approaches. For example:

* Section B at strategic level and section C in all managerial level papers except P7 involve a choice of questions. You could read all the questions and requirements and make the choice in reading time. There may even be time to plan answers to the questions chosen.

* For papers P4 and P5 you could focus on section A during the reading time, answering multiple-choice questions and making brief plans for answering other objective test questions, This approach could be adopted for the non-calculation questions, if any, in section A of the other managerial level papers.

* You could focus on the compulsory section A question in the strategic level papers or the compulsory section C question in paper P7.

Although question papers are collected at the end of an exam, they do not go to the markers. So, if there's anything you have written on the question paper during the reading time that the marker needs to see, it must be transferred to the answer book. This applies in particular to answers to multiple-choice questions and to answer plans for written questions.

You can tackle questions in any order in the answer book. An answer to a different question should start on a new page. But this rule does not apply to the answers for the sub-questions in section A of the managerial level papers. At the top of each page in the answer book there is a box to indicate the number of the question being attempted on that page. You are strongly advised to complete these boxes, because this allows the marker to see clearly which question you are attempting.

The layout in the answer book for section A of managerial level papers deserves a special mention. The number of sub-questions varies from paper to paper and from sitting to sitting. There were 17 sub-questions in P1 and nine in P2 for May 2008, for example. In theory, you can write the answers to the sub-questions in any order in the answer book, but you are strongly advised to write them in sequence (1.1, 1.2, 1.3 etc). Each answer to a sub-question should be ruled off. If you cannot answer a sub-question, leave an appropriate space in case you have time to return to it, rather than answer it out of sequence at the end. If it's a multiple-choice question, you may as well make a guess anyway. Workings to calculation questions are very important. If your answer to one of these is totally correct, you'll normally score full marks. But, if your answer is wrong, "method marks" will be awarded for the correct approach or a partially correct answer if legible workings have been laid out clearly in the answer book.

Answers to written (non-calculation) questions need to be planned. This process should ensure that your answers are relevant, written out in a logical sequence and, above all, fulfil the questions' requirements. Written questions at managerial level can carry as many as 25 or 30 marks each (on P5 and P4 respectively), and as few as five marks or fewer on all papers. I suggest that you should spend up to 30 per cent of the allotted time for any written question on reading it and planning your answer.

Your plan for a long written question should be written in the answer book immediately in front of your answer. Even five-mark questions require a brief plan. Many candidates spend too much time writing irrelevant answers, particularly to the shorter written questions. That initial planning time should ensure that you answer the question and nothing but the question.

David Forster runs a course for CIMA on applied exam techniques, which will next be held in London on October 20.