Passing Level 3 Synoptic - a tip which might help

HelensDesk

Hi, I studied for AAT Level 3 at our local college. We have had many delays and disruption to our classes and exams due to Covid. We finally managed (6 months late) to sit our Synoptic last month. Although I use spreadsheets a lot, I struggled with the Excel parts of the exam and ran short of time. I particularly struggled with the Management Costings question as I found this topic hard to start with. As I was running out of time, I skimmed through the unanswered parts and looked for things I could do - for example an IF function. I knew my figures were likely to be wrong but I put in an IF function anyway. I passed by 2%! Adding in a couple of extra functions/ calculations made all the difference. Hopefully this advice might help others pass - if you are running out of time or you can't do the question, put some figures in somewhere and demonstrate the skills you do have by putting in the functions, tables, or whatever they are asking for in the question, as it will all pick up marks and could make a difference between a pass and fail.
Having read other comments, I agree there doesn't seem to be enough time in the final exam. During the first 4 I had time to go back through and re-check all of my answers, then go through again working out how many marks I had definitely got and still left 20 mins early. The final one I felt like I had to rush through it all and ran out of time in both parts of it.
(Disclaimer - I have not discussed live exam material - it's general knowledge that there is usually a Financial Accounting & a Management Accounting question for each of the Excel parts, and also that pivot charts, tables, IF statements, etc are likely to come up)

livintiv

As someone who's sitting the advanced synoptic soon, thank you!

Jac67

I have just received my Syntopic Result and also passed with 72%. I was really pleased as this is the hardest of the 4 assessments I have taken. I now just need to sit the Indirect Tax and then I can apply for my AATBQ Membership.

My advice on how to complete the Syntopic is to do all the practice assessments, make notes of the excel commands that come up and become familiar with these commands. I agree with Helen in putting all the formulae in that they ask for even if you don't have the data or you think the data is wrong, the assessor looks for the formula used. There are a few practice assessment videos on you tube, again watch these and make notes of what comes up.

Good luck

Annaoj90

I livintiv
I wanted to sit advanced synoptic soon but im not confident about writing part, try to review all , still keep practising exel and I've got general knowledge about ethics but still not feel confident to sit my last exam.... I will give myself more time

livintiv

Jac67 said:

I have just received my Syntopic Result and also passed with 72%. I was really pleased as this is the hardest of the 4 assessments I have taken. I now just need to sit the Indirect Tax and then I can apply for my AATBQ Membership.

My advice on how to complete the Syntopic is to do all the practice assessments, make notes of the excel commands that come up and become familiar with these commands. I agree with Helen in putting all the formulae in that they ask for even if you don't have the data or you think the data is wrong, the assessor looks for the formula used. There are a few practice assessment videos on you tube, again watch these and make notes of what comes up.

Good luck

Thank you! I'm in the middle of doing practice exams now. In the spreadsheets part, are you actually using excel, as we normally would? I'm wondering if I have to memorise all the functions and their syntax, or whether I can use the helps in excel itself

Annaoj90 said:

I livintiv
I wanted to sit advanced synoptic soon but im not confident about writing part, try to review all , still keep practising exel and I've got general knowledge about ethics but still not feel confident to sit my last exam.... I will give myself more time

I know what you mean. I'm pretty nervous too!

HelensDesk

You can't use the 'help' function as that takes you to the internet help, which is not allowed... however, if you click on the function symbol, you can search for the function you want to use, and then use the help boxes in the 'wizard'. It really helps to just click on a lot of the stuff in the ribbon under each tab, to see what they do, what they're for and how they work. To basically familiarise yourself with the layout and which things are under which tabs. And as mentioned above - there are some really useful Youtube videos online. I found some by First Intuition particularly useful.

HelensDesk

Also, if you don't have access to Excel you can use 'WPS Office' instead. It's a FREE alternative but the layout is almost identical to Word & Excel. I use WPS all the time at home (partly because it's free, but more importantly, if it crashes (rarely) or windows does an update while I'm away from my computer (frequently!!), if Ire-open the WPS window, all of the things I was working on re-open and pop-up exactly where I left them. I found with Excel even if it was set yo back up every 2 minutes, it tended to lose about 2 hours' worth of work
[Note: I am not affiliated with or employed by WPS Office; I stumbled across it when searching online and have not looked back since installing it a couple of years ago.]