Setting up a study schedule so you won’t burn out.
For a major exam like the
Uniform Final Exam, you need to plan out how you’re going to prepare for it. There’s no book to open up and study for 5 hours a day. Instead, you have to write practice exams.
The UFE, the final exam you need to pass to get your CA, consists of one day devoted to the five hour comprehensive case, the “comp”, and six 80 minute multi-competencies stimulations (“multi”s) spread equally over 2 days.
When preparing your study plan, we’ll assume the company you work for will do one comp a week which they’ll mark for you. That gives you four more days – write one comp on the first day, debrief it on the second day, and then write multis on the next two days. One or two multis per day, depending on how you plan things out..
Weekends, of course, are off. You can’t burn yourself out while studying. The effect of burnout is more than just feeling bored or tired: you don’t feel like trying as hard.
And that’s lethal, because when you’re practising you have to behave as if what you’re doing is really “for real”. Otherwise, you have a very high chance of developing very bad habits that could carryover to the final exam.
It’s no different than training for a sport or an artistic performance: your practice regimen has to reflect how you’re supposed to behave, otherwise you’re just going through the motions of preparing for your event, and not actually improving your skills.