(Posted June 2025)
If you find yourself in the unfortunate position of having to rewrite a PEP module exam, make sure that you set yourself up for success on your next attempt by focusing your studies in the right areas.
Mental Reset
Before you jump back into studying, it is important to be mentally ready to tackle the exam again. You may be experiencing many emotions, such as frustration, anger, or a feeling of hopelessness. You will need to process those emotions before you are able to set them aside to be ready to make another attempt.
Recognize that you are not alone. Lots of candidates are unsuccessful on one or more of their exams. These are not meant to be easy. Professional exams are intentionally difficult, not only technically, but from a time management perspective. However, they are doable with the right focus and skills. Know that you can pass this exam. Take the time to understand this reality and deal with the emotions you have, so that you can begin studying with a clear mind.
Understand Your Past Results
It is also important to understand why you were unsuccessful on your last attempt so that you can focus on the right areas in your studies. Review your exam results and determine whether it was a specific technical competency area that caused the difficulty, or whether it was a specific portion of the exam (e.g., the case(s) or the MCQs) that caused the issue. For example, you might have had excellent Financial Reporting scores on the Core 1 exam, but you did not have good Audit and Assurance and Taxation scores. Or, maybe you did really well on the Core 1 case, but scored very low on the MCQs. Understanding what the issue was will help you focus on your weakest areas when you begin to study.
Make a Study Plan
You cannot effectively study with the end goal of passing the module final exam without making a study plan. This will help hold you accountable and give you direction in what you are planning to accomplish to make focused improvements.
Consider the following to determine how much time you can realistically dedicate to your studies each week:
- When you are planning to rewrite and how much time you have until then.
- Your work obligations.
- Your personal commitments.
Then create a weekly study plan using those available time slots and your areas of focus. For example, you might decide that you can study 3 hours on Mondays and Wednesdays, and 6 hours on Saturdays. You will then want to create a plan for each of those days in each week until your exam to cover the necessary skills. Some of those days may be dedicated to practicing case writing, while others will be dedicated to technical study or practicing MCQs. You will want to decide how many days you want to schedule for each technical competency area as well.
Remember that you want to focus on your areas of weakness. We often want to feel good about ourselves and will default to the areas we know best or are most comfortable with but that will not help you improve significantly. Focus on the areas that need work. However, do not completely neglect the areas where you did well either since you still have to rewrite those, so you need to keep those fresh as well.
An effective study plan should also include what resources you are planning to use. You may have only gone through the module on your first attempt. Consider whether you used all of the materials provided effectively. There may be materials there that you did not use that could assist you in your studies. If you used all of the module materials provided, you may need additional practice materials. Densmore offers an EDGE course for each of the PEP Core and Elective Modules to provide you with additional practice MCQs and cases for your studies.
Debriefing
A common theme with unsuccessful candidates is their lack of debriefing skills. We often talk to unsuccessful candidates and ask them about how they debriefed their practice MCQs and cases. Often, the answer is that they just read the answers and thought they understood them. Just reading the answer will not transfer that knowledge to you. Instead, you need to debrief each MCQ and case that you write. Debriefing is where all the learning happens. It is the process of working through the question to understand what went wrong and how to improve on future questions. To learn more about how to effectively debrief for PEP exams, review our blog.
Other Resources
Depending on where you need to focus, you may find these other Densmore blogs useful in helping you master the various components of a PEP exam: