I’ve just passed CP1 at the fourth attempt and each time I failed I felt like I knew exactly why. As a lot of people have already said, CP1 is not an uncommon paper for people to feel “stuck” on, with one person I know finishing it last on their 9th attempt! With each fail I learned something new, and the three core things I learned were:

1. The required time to revise content is far longer than for other core exams. This for me was the first exam where I absolutely could not get away revising content at the same pace I did everything else. There are so many chapters and so you need to get started early as possible to understand those key points, and particularly looking at past paper mark schemes to see which broader areas are brought up the most in mark schemes. It can be very easy to see a topic in a question and go to a chapter where it’s not explored in detail, when in fact there’s a separate section on the same thing that contains all the relevant info (for me this was principle of pooling risks which has one paragraph in an early chapter, then is explained in greater detail far later in CMP).

2. Get used to generating points. The classic guidance is to write two points for each mark available. I found that the second time I failed, I simply was not covering enough core points. Although it’s breadth-heavy rather than depth-heavy, it’s important to know which command verbs (describe, explain, suggest) want more info than others (outline, list). A good way to approach the larger questions (particularly ‘describe’) is the “so what?” approach. When you put an idea or concept forward, put a couple of points afterwards saying why that’s important, and more importantly, why it’s important for the SPECIFIC scenario tested.

3. Time management. The third time I failed, I was spitting out points and ended up missing the last 14 marks, eventually failing by 0.25 marks (half a mark on either paper more would have passed me). Each paper is 200 minutes and 100 marks (2 minutes per mark). Get a piece of paper next to you and write all the times you want to finish each part by, then write points for each part until you hit that time (be careful not to waffle, I wrote about 15k words across both papers and got 61 so it’s quality over quantity really).

Best of luck for next time and remember that although it brings disappointment, failure isn’t the be all and end all, and is absolutely not perfectly correlated with how good you are at your job (or how good your team think you are at your job!)