Personal tax CBA

keane155

Hi, I did the personal tax CBA this afternoon and was just wondering how other people who did it have found it.

I personally didn't like it, and think i might prefer paper based.

About 45 minutes into the exam the exam just decided to lose connection and it took a few minutes before we got them back on - and all of my share pool answer had disappeared!! I don't really like the wording of the questions and the multiple choice - it's hard to work out what some of them are actually asking I think.

I also had questions on some stuff like how much the allowable benefit for computers is and when this was brought in or something - didn't have a clue, I put April 08 and looking at HMRC website it was April 06 I think.

Also didn't really like the questions where they give you a blank grid and you have to decide how to answer the question yourself. Not too sure how I have done, I just want to forget all of my tax stuff now though.

Emma

jenny3549

Hi Emma,

Everything that you said is exactly what I've been fearing about this exam! I'm fine on the past papers but the sample CBE on the AAT site and the one provided by Kaplan are exactly as you described - really badly worded questions so you can't actually tell what they are asking for and those horrible blank grids.

I'm really not looking forward to mine on Monday. Wish I'd gone down the paper route.

I think all these multiple choice give them a chance to cover far more things than they would in a paper based one but they give you an hour less!

keane155

Hi Jenny,

Hope the exam goes OK for you on Monday. I didn't get any written questions (the ones where you have to reply to an email or letter), I had a question on payments on account dates and amounts to be paid and have today realised that I have totally gone wrong on that question because I didn't include the balancing payments only the first two.

There are a lot of computer marked questions and the computer isn't going to have a clue how I reached my answers, on paper based I would have my workings there but we just binned them after them exam. I don't understand why they are changing them all over to computer based though!

Good luck for Monday, let us know how you get on.

SusieQtips

keane155 wrote: »

Hi, I did the personal tax CBA this afternoon and was just wondering how other people who did it have found it.

I personally didn't like it, and think i might prefer paper based.

About 45 minutes into the exam the exam just decided to lose connection and it took a few minutes before we got them back on - and all of my share pool answer had disappeared!! I don't really like the wording of the questions and the multiple choice - it's hard to work out what some of them are actually asking I think.

I also had questions on some stuff like how much the allowable benefit for computers is and when this was brought in or something - didn't have a clue, I put April 08 and looking at HMRC website it was April 06 I think.

Also didn't really like the questions where they give you a blank grid and you have to decide how to answer the question yourself. Not too sure how I have done, I just want to forget all of my tax stuff now though.

Emma

I don't quite know how I found it really, i I like you, found the questions very badly worded and wasn't quite sure what they were asking. Some questions asked for things that weren't in the text book and hadn't been covered in class, so it was just pure guesswork. I also had a question on when payments were due but all the answers were the same (in my answer they were) so i know that's wrong. After taking 3 hours to get there(2 buses and 2 trains) and being freezing cold, I did what I knew but didn't have the energy to try and work things out that I didn't have a clue about. There seemed a lot of frivolous irrelevant questions and no questions on lots of things we had learnt. Having spent a lot of time revising, I felt cheated. Either the questions i could do were really easy or I have made a complete mess of it. Watch this space!

jenny3549

Hey Guys,

I can only re-iterate what you both said after doing mine today.

Really felt the whole thing was a mess. Completely agree that some of the questions were so badly worded. If it were paper based at least you could say that you were assuming they meant something in your answer but you just had to guess! Really, really annoying.

I also had two things crop up that weren't in my books (and I used both Osborne and Kaplan!) which is frustrating so just a case of guessing.

It really didn't feel like a test of what I knew. What few calculations they had were very basic, the rest of it just filled with superfluous true or false stuff.

So glad I'm not the only one to feel the same way! I know that exams can't cover everything in the syllabus so there will always be stuff you have learned that doesn't come up but really.... this felt as though you could just have learned lists of things and never practiced a single calculation.

Wouldn't mind if that then made it easy but I know I will have things wrong just based on the badly worded stuff.

Very frustrated.
:mad:

keane155

Hi,

Also still feeling very disappointed with the exam. Does anyone know whether there is one of those questionnaire things where you can give feedback like on the paper based exams?

If the rest of the exams are like that I'll be redoing the lot of them. Really annoyed that I spent so much time revising and could answer practice questions well before the exam, only to end up with questions that made no sense at all.The exam tested more comprehension than accountancy skills - not happy!

beavis182

How come people are already taking the CBA personal tax exams? Im still waiting for Premier Training to sort out the assignments before the exam. I studied it all and revised really hard just to be told (back in october) that the assignments arent ready until mid December.

jenny3549

beavis182 wrote: »

How come people are already taking the CBA personal tax exams? Im still waiting for Premier Training to sort out the assignments before the exam. I studied it all and revised really hard just to be told (back in october) that the assignments arent ready until mid December.

I think different providers have different timescales. I'm with Kaplan and they still haven't released the assignments for that unit but I wasn't prepared to wait any longer to sit the exam - had to wait nearly 4 months as it was for the AAT to release them!

Vini

Personal Tax

Hi guys, I am really scared . I have exam next week . I would like to know that there is any eamil or memos.

Can any one help me with few questions.

Capital gain: If somebody gives an asset to his friend then it should be actual proceeds but in Osborne book they said it is Deemed proceed. I am really confuse can any one help me.

Employment Income: If employer provides any assetsfor e.g. furniture or home cinema then wehave to do time apportioned. yes or no. Becuase in Osborne there is no time apportioned for this activity.

leighboz

I did the Personal Tax CBA yesterday and I completely agree with everything said. Questions ranging from the mundane to the impossible with little inbetween. Everything worded terribly and awful grids of white boxes which you have to spend 10 minutes just thinking how you are going to lay it out.

I also got a Server Error message half way through which meant everyone had to stop for 10 minutes while it was fixed and they couldn't print out our results at the end, so I have no idea when I will find out if I have passed!

Computer based assessments seem a big step backward for the AAT.

Dipak Thanki

Just got back from the exam. Night bloody mare. Seriously what is this, I get random questions that I've never bloody seen before or even heard of.

antevans1

I too sat the exam today. I can't put into words how annoyed I am, but I'll try.

Well, the first thing that happened was that everybody's computer froze on the first page. That was 2 minutes in, and a sign of things to come. After calling the IT guy to sort it out, we resumed only to find questions that were not even covered in our text books. The rest were so vaguely worded, it was very difficult to decipher exactly what they were asking. Other questions were so lacking in information that I just guessed what they wanted. There wasn't even enough info to logically work out what they wanted, therefore, no point wasting time on something that could be asking one of two or three things.

I didn't find the empty boxes too difficult to deal with, It just looked a bit of a mess. One thing that did really annoy me was their constant use of double negatives in the true or false questions. If I had wanted to pass an English comprehension exam, I'd have studied English, but that's just a personal gripe.

Finally, having completed the exam, I was half way through submitting the 'paper' to the AAT, and their server kicked me out again! Took a good half an hour for the IT guy to attend, return to his office, ring the AAT, pause the college master computer that dealt with the link, back to our exam room to get my computer unfrozen in order to reboot it, then back down to his office to unpause the master so I could log in again. Of course, after that, I wanted to go through my answers again to make sure that they were all still there, only for the bloody thing to freeze again! Fortunately, this time it sorted itself out after a minute or two, and I submitted it successfully.

I have to say, it was all a bit amateurish, bordering on the incompetent. Even the downloadable version of the practice CBA hasn't been updated with the new allowances and limits etc. Everything seems to have been rushed, even to the point that Osbourne were late printing some of the books due to the AAT not finalising the syllabus in time. Makes you wonder if anythings been missed.

For the AAT to insist on CBA only this year, with us going into the final year, without ensuring that the system was fool proof is nothing short of a disgrace.

The AAT need to get this fixed right now!


Edit: I forgot to mention, I've had to type this on my phone because the AAT server keeps logging my PC out of the forum. How bloody typical :rolleyes:

hanalav123

I totally agree, I came out of the exams and told everyone how badly worded the questions were. I wasn't sure what answer they were looking for as they didn't explain what they wanted. I also agree with a previous post where at least of the paper based you can show your workings. I hope the big white grid that you had to fill in for the shares is going to be marked by a human as I had no idea how to lay that out! Has anyone got there results yet for it?