There’s something quietly satisfying about completing what we start, about giving each task our full attention, seeing it through to the very end. It feels responsible, and it just feels just right. We are, most of us, romantics when it comes to such effort. But professional accountancy exams, be it ACCA or ICAEW, in their quiet brutality, often reward something else entirely: restraint, dispassion, and the slightly uncomfortable wisdom of letting go.

Take a typical professional accountancy exam, ACCA, ICAEW, or the like. You’ve got 100 marks to score in 180 minutes. It sounds generous, however, usually it’s not. One mark deserves no more than 1.8 minutes. If anything, slightly less.

“Time borrowed from one mark is time stolen from another.”

I guess it’s a bit about human instincts. We start the question nicely, ideas flow, and things feel good, but then, without warning, the process slows, and we are no longer answering, instead just polishing and unnecessary tweaking points that were already good enough. And slowly, invisibly, you begin to cross a line economists know well: the point of diminishing returns.

The law of diminishing returns tells us that each additional unit of input, after some time,  yields less and less additional output. Applied to exams:

• Your first ten minutes on a question might earn you seven marks.
• The next ten, perhaps five.
• The third? Maybe two.
• Beyond that, you’re tidying the furniture while the house next door is on fire.

Your time is producing less, not because you’re less capable, but because the marks left to win in that question are harder, more expensive or perhaps you have already scored ten out of ten. And here is where the truly rational student makes a deeply counterintuitive move. They stop. Not because the question is finished, but because it’s done enough. They leave a paragraph hanging, a point undeveloped.

“No question is entirely unanswerable. For the student who has prepared with care, and who takes a moment to understand what is truly being asked, there is always something to say, something worth offering.”

I know this lesson not only in theory, but from the quiet cost of lived experience. Throughout my educational journey, I resisted exam techniques with something close to moral conviction. I saw them as a betrayal, legalised shortcuts that rewarded clever navigation over deep understanding.

I chose instead to pour myself into one or two questions, sculpting them with care, writing as if the exam were a canvas and I the artist. And they were, I believe, beautiful answers, measured, thoughtful, well-crafted. And when I say I approached exams like an artist, I don’t mean it metaphorically by the way. In school and university, I quite literally wrote my answers with a calligraphy set (different sets for Urdu, Pashto, Arabic and English writings), the proper ink, and the old-fashioned nib. Not the quill, thankfully. I wasn’t that far gone. I tried to make my answers look beautiful on the page, of course, but also to sound elegant, adding a touch of poetic flair, as if the examiner might be swayed not just by accuracy, but by tone.

But beauty, it turns out, doesn’t win prizes in the economy of timed assessments. What I produced with such pride came at the expense of breadth. I gave too much to too little. And while I stood by my approach with a kind of intellectual defiance, I paid for it in missed marks and a quiet regret that I had misunderstood the rules of the game, not out of ignorance, but out of reluctance to play it.

To accept that an incomplete answer might serve you better than a perfect one is to step away from perfectionism and towards wisdom.

“It is to recognise that exams are about getting just enough right, in as many places as possible, very similar to life. Perfectionism is a lovely idea, but in both exams and life, it often asks too much and gives too little.”

The allure of finishing one question properly is powerful. We like closure and we enjoy feeling thorough, but each minute over 1.8 that you give to a single mark is a minute denied to another…that question you haven’t yet started! It has easy marks waiting, simple, accessible, low-hanging fruit. But you’ll never reach them if you’re still polishing your way through diminishing returns.

“In professional exams, success often goes not to the most brilliant, but to the most disciplined.”

The smart student realises an exam isn’t a novel, it’s a timed game of mark-hunting, a kind of trade-off. You’re not being rewarded for literary flair, you’re being paid in points for getting to the point. So if you find yourself deep into a question, polishing every last sentence like it’s going into the British Library, please stop. Look at your watch. Then ask yourself: Is this still earning, or just spending?

And remember that restraint is not failure. A half-finished answer, abandoned at the right moment, is not a flaw in your technique. It is your technique.

And in that decision to move on, to start afresh, to gather new marks rather than labour over old ones, you are doing something quietly radical. You are choosing breadth over perfection. Strategy over sentiment. And in so doing, you are learning not just how to pass an exam, but how to navigate the economy of your efforts with a little more grace.

That, in the end, is what these exams ask of us. Not completeness, not brilliance, but just the courage to leave things half-done, when half-done is wise.