CA Foundation is the first step of the charted accountancy course, we know you are excited to be part of the course and at the same time worried about the examination methodology. So here we are to help you out in this aspect.

The foundation examination consists of 4 Papers:

In the above given 4 papers, paper-1 and 2 are going to be descriptive whereas 3 and 4 are going to be objective.

The skill assessment schema mentioned in the course prospectus states that at foundation-level examination focuses more on evaluating your skill to apply the knowledge you gained rather than assessing your comprehension skills. Each paper will be for one hundred marks which total to four hundred marks for the whole examination. There are two criteria that you need to satisfy to qualify for this examination which is:

Forty percent rule: To satisfy this criterion you need to score a minimum of 40 marks on each paper

Fifty percent rule: Aggregate marks obtained from all four papers should exceed 200 marks.

These criteria are quite uncomforting but remember as I mentioned before Institute wants to assess your ability of understanding and practical application of the knowledge you gained. The good news is that if you are not able to satisfy any one of the criteria but scored above 60 marks in any of the papers you will be given an exemption for the same.

Negative marking methodology

Yes, there is a negative marking for papers 3 & 4 namely, “Business Mathematics, Logical Reasoning and Statistics” & “Business Economics and Business and Commercial Knowledge” which will be in objective mode. Papers 3 & 4 will be having one hundred multiple choice questions each and 2 hours of time for each paper. Essentially, you have 4 options for each question out of which you need to select one correct option for which you will score one mark but if the option selected is wrong then a 0.25 mark will be deducted for each wrong answer.

How to take advantage of negative marking

You already got to know about marking patterns in the foundation examination and in this section, we would try to explain how you can leverage this marking pattern. Intrinsically, you have 4 options in front of you out of which only one is right. You should have an in-depth understanding of the concept to answer these questions and I would suggest practicing all objective questions given in the institute’s modules and RTPs and MPTs hosted on the institute’s website. Coming back to the exam situation you can classify the questions given into three categories and use the rule assigned to each category for answering the questions. The classification of questions varies from person to person.