To Reach Too High

Whether or not accountancy firms do this now I don’t know, but when I was a trainee accountant between 1987 and 1990 salary was very much linked to exam results.  The final exam was Professional Exam 2 (PE2).  Just four papers in three days – passing gave a 50% pay rise from £12,000 to £18,000.  Every year since 1980 I had taken exams and when I took them in 1990, I wanted them to be over so badly.

There were the usual revision classes in Cambridge, so I stayed with Mum and Richard during the week days (at least I had a decent car now so there was no repeat of the problems of GCC (see post  https://fivemilesout.home.blog/2020/09/23/suddenly-the-rain-came-down/ ).  The revision clashed with the Italia 90 football tournament and, at first, I was gutted that I would miss most of it.  The last world cup had been in Mexico, the middle of the night in the UK and the next was to be in the USA with bad kick off times.

In fact it turned out to be perfectly timed.  I would get back from revision class in time to watch the afternoon game.  Eat and do a couple of hours work and then watch the evening match.  After spending 6 hours studying in Cambridge this actually made me relax rather than just burn out – something must have been going right as I topped the list of candidates at our revision centre in the mocks.

I thought Dragan Stojkovic was the best player there, but Lothar Matthaus was the most influential in the end.  England were agonisingly close, losing on penalties to West Germany, with only a weak Argentina team to face in the final.

Dawn and I were doing the exams at The Assembly Rooms in Norwich and booked ourselves into a small hotel not far from the exam venue.  Dawn drove up Monday evening, but I went in the afternoon – I wanted no chances of something going wrong with the journey.  The hotel was not what we had expected – no private bathrooms (that we had paid for) and the restaurant was closed.  That first night I got a Chinese takeaway, but a bland one (no stomach problems could be allowed to happen) and it was horrible.  There was nothing on TV to calm my nerves – Monday nights in those days were full of crap – Come Dancing was the best of a bad lot.

The weather was boiling but the exam venue, The Assembly Rooms, did not allow drinks to be taken in.  It also did not provide air conditioning.  We started with the Auditing paper, which was my least favourite (no numerical content) but it was okay.  Along with Gavin, from the Bury office, we had a sandwich lunch and went in for the afternoon.  (Gavin hated England and moaned about everything – he was from Scotland and had only come down to study and work as the Scottish exams were even harder).

(The Assembly Rooms)

Financial Accounting in the afternoon was tough – and that was meant to be my best paper.  After eating dinner at Burger King we went back to the hotel to revise.

Day two dawned even hotter.  The morning was Financial Management/ Management Accounting.  The general feeling was that it was a fair paper as well.

In the afternoon, all dehydrated, it was disaster time.  Technically at PE2 there was no syllabus – you could be examined on anything and the examiner for the Taxation paper took that literally.  There were 40 multiple choice questions and four long form questions that were the hardest I had ever seen and I had done every past paper question for years before.

One question asked you to work out a Capital Gains Tax/ Industrial Buildings Allowance loss and then asked how to use it.  I got a profit; a sole trader question about changing accounting dates that would have required three hours on its own to do and two other nightmares on obscure taxes.

I realised after reading it at the start that this was a disaster, but there was one hope.  The exams were standardised so that the same proportion passed each paper every year.  Even though the pass mark was meant to be 55% all I had to do was try and get a mark where I was in the top 40% of candidates.  I took extra time on the multiple choice and tried to harvest marks on the long form questions.

Coming out there were loads of people crying.  To have that paper at the end of two days with so much riding on it was seen as evil.  Unlike the joy that people had at just being done with exams for a year that had happened the last two times everyone was contemplating retakes.

I drove home with a terrible dehydration headache thoroughly fed up with it all and cursing that tax examiner.

It turned out that the examiner was sacked and that was the only paper he ever set.  He had been a member of the Chartered Institute of Taxation and had set a paper more suitable for them.  We were told that to get 40% of candidates to pass the Tax paper the pass mark had been lowered to 28% – not officially but that was the news that passed around.  Bloody stupid way to assess people.

The Waterboys were never a band that I was big on, but this song was the background to my revision and was later used as the come down song at raves.

The Whole of the Moon