How to Write CA Inter Law Answers — Practice

Question 1

Two candidates answer the same question on whether a charge registered late is valid. Candidate A writes that the charge must be registered within thirty days and that late registration requires the Registrar's permission. Candidate B writes that the charge was created on 4 January so the thirty-day period expired on 3 February, that registration on 20 February was accordingly late, and that the Registrar may allow a further period on payment of additional fees. Explain the difference in marks.

Accepted Answer

Candidate B scores roughly twice what Candidate A scores, and the difference is the application step. Both candidates state the same law and both state it correctly, so the provision mark is available to each. But an answer in this paper is marked in three moves — state the provision, apply it to the facts actually given, and conclude — and A has supplied only the first. A has demonstrated that the rule can be remembered; B has demonstrated that it can be used, which is what a professional examination is testing. Notice specifically what B did with the facts: the question supplied a creation date and a registration date, and those dates are not conversation, they are the question. Computing that the period expired on 3 February and that 20 February falls outside it is the entire legal work the examiner wanted to see. The general habit to take from this is to write the facts into the answer rather than around it — the named company, the named officer, the actual dates and amounts — because doing so forces the application step that candidates otherwise compress into half a sentence.

Question 2

A candidate cannot recall whether the relevant provision is section 73 or section 76. State what they should do, what they should not do, and the principle behind ICAI's marking that governs the answer.

Accepted Answer

They should state the rule accurately without citing a number, writing that the Companies Act, 2013 provides that a company may accept deposits from its members subject to specified conditions, and then apply that rule to the facts. They should not guess between 73 and 76, and they should not abandon the question. The governing principle is that ICAI's marking rewards the substance of the provision, with the citation treated as a signal of command rather than as the substance itself. So an answer that describes the rule correctly without naming the section earns most of what a fully cited answer earns, while an answer that names a section and states the rule wrongly earns nothing, because the wrong rule is the wrong answer whatever number sits beside it. A wrong citation is actively harmful in a way an absent citation is not: it tells the examiner that the candidate's recall is unreliable, which colours the reading of everything else on the page. Two practical rules follow. Never leave a question unattempted because a number will not come, since the marks are in the rule. And never invent a number, since the downside is real and the upside is at most a fraction of a mark.

Question 3

Explain why a running threshold table is the highest-value revision aid in this paper, how it should be organised, and why organising it by chapter is worse than organising it by kind.

Accepted Answer

More marks turn on numerical thresholds in Paper 2 than on any other single category of knowledge, and thresholds are simultaneously the most memorisable material in the paper: which companies must appoint an internal auditor, which must rotate auditors and after how long, which must constitute an audit committee, what paid-up capital or turnover triggers a requirement, how many days for filing or registering, what percentage of members may requisition a meeting or demand a poll. None of it requires understanding, all of it is closed, and it is the kind of knowledge that decays fastest without deliberate revision. A single table built from the first week of preparation and added to as each threshold is met ends up two or three pages long and is worth more in the final week than any chapter in the book. Organising it by kind rather than by chapter matters because that is how the entries are recalled under pressure: all the day-limits together, all the percentage-of-members limits together, all the paid-up capital triggers together. A candidate holding the numbers that way can answer a threshold question in ten seconds, whereas one holding them by chapter must first recall which chapter the provision sat in, which is an extra retrieval step and the one that fails under time pressure.

Question 4

Set out the structure of Paper 2 and explain why Part II is described as the best-value block in Group I. What is the consequence of leaving it until last?

Accepted Answer

Part I is Company Law and Limited Liability Partnership Law, carrying seventy marks across twelve chapters of the Companies Act, 2013 together with the LLP Act, 2008. Part II is Other Laws, carrying thirty marks across the General Clauses Act, 1897, the interpretation of statutes, and the Foreign Exchange Management Act, 1999. The paper is assessed as seventy descriptive marks and thirty marks of case-scenario multiple choice, with no negative marking. Part II is the best-value block in Group I because thirty marks sit in three short, closed, rule-based topics that require none of the sustained reading the Companies Act demands. The General Clauses Act is a set of interpretive rules and definitions; interpretation of statutes is a set of named rules and presumptions such as the literal, golden and mischief rules and the principal presumptions; FEMA is a small set of definitions and a distinction between two routes. Each can be secured in a fraction of the hours a Companies Act chapter takes. The consequence of leaving it until last is the commonest way this paper is failed by candidates who know the company law well: they arrive at the examination with seventy marks prepared and thirty barely touched, and finish in the high thirties, which fails the paper and therefore the group however strong the other two papers are.

Question 5

Describe the narrative structure that makes twelve chapters of the Companies Act easier to hold, and give one example of how knowing where a chapter sits in that narrative tells you what it is about.

Accepted Answer

The narrative is the life of a company, and every chapter of Part I sits somewhere on it. The company is incorporated: promoters form it, the memorandum and articles are registered, it acquires separate legal personality. It raises capital: it issues a prospectus, allots shares, issues debentures, and may later alter or reduce its capital. It borrows and secures the borrowing: it accepts deposits subject to conditions, it creates charges over its assets, and those charges are registered so that later lenders can see them. It is governed: it holds meetings, passes resolutions, appoints and removes directors, and declares dividends out of profits. It is accountable: it keeps books, prepares financial statements, appoints auditors and is audited. And it may operate across borders, or be a foreign company operating here. As an example, the registration of charges chapter follows the deposits and borrowing chapter in the narrative, and that position tells you what it is for before you read a line of it: having borrowed against its assets, the company must put the security on a public register, because a later lender who cannot see the earlier charge would lend against assets already pledged. Provisions read this way feel connected rather than arbitrary, and connected material is retrieved more reliably.

Question 6

State the correct approach to the 30-mark case-scenario MCQ section, the common failure, and the rule on attempting.

Accepted Answer

The correct approach is to read each scenario once, carefully and completely, before looking at any of its questions, noting the dates, amounts and designations because those are what the questions will turn on; then to answer all the questions attaching to that scenario together before moving to the next. The questions are deliberately linked to a single fact pattern rather than standing alone, which makes them efficient if approached in that order and slow if not. The common failure is reading the scenario afresh for each question, which multiplies the reading four or five times over and still produces a shakier grasp of the facts than one careful reading, because each hurried pass is looking for one thing rather than understanding the situation. Budget the reading as fixed and non-compressible and expect the answering to be fast. On attempting, the rule is absolute: attempt every question. There is no negative marking on the objective portion at Intermediate or Final level, so an unattempted question is worth exactly zero and any answer is worth strictly more than zero in expectation. Deliberating about whether to attempt is not merely unnecessary but costly, because it consumes time that could go to elimination.

Question 7

A candidate's answers are substantively strong but consistently score below expectation. Their scripts consist of long unbroken paragraphs referring to 'the company' and 'the director', ending with a discussion of the law rather than an answer. Diagnose and prescribe.

Accepted Answer

Three separate presentation failures are compounding, and none of them is a knowledge problem. First, long unbroken paragraphs: an examiner marking two hundred scripts against a scheme awards marks for points they can find, and a dense block containing five correct points is routinely marked as though it contained two, because the points are not visible as points. The fix is short paragraphs carrying one point each. Second, referring to the parties generically: writing about the company and the director rather than about Alpha Ltd and Mr Rao is a symptom of answering about a type of situation rather than about this situation, and it usually indicates that the application step has been skipped or compressed. Using the names supplied forces the application and makes the answer readable at the same time. Third, ending on a discussion rather than a conclusion: where the question asks whether an appointment is valid, the last sentence must say that the appointment is valid or is not valid. A candidate who explains the law at length and never states the conclusion has left the easiest mark on the table, and has also left the examiner to infer an answer the candidate never gave. Where a question has multiple parts, they should additionally be answered in order and labelled, since the marking scheme is organised by part.

Question 8

Design a study routine for this paper, and identify the gap that a reading-only routine leaves invisible until the examination.

Accepted Answer

Read a chapter, then immediately answer two past questions on it without looking back at the text. The routine is deliberately uncomfortable, and its value lies entirely in the discomfort: the gap between what has just been read and what can be produced from a blank page is the whole of the remaining work, and a reading-only routine never exposes it. That gap is recognition without recall — material that feels familiar when read, because recognising is genuinely easier than producing, and that yields nothing when the page is blank. It is invisible until an examination supplies the blank page, which is why candidates who have read everything report that the paper was harder than expected. Alongside this, build the threshold table from the first week and revise from it weekly rather than from the chapters, since thresholds decay fastest and are cheapest to refresh. Work Part II early rather than last, because thirty marks of short closed material left to the final week is the commonest way a well-prepared candidate still fails this paper. And practise writing the three moves explicitly and in order until the structure is automatic, because under time pressure structure is what survives while elegance is not, and an answer with the right shape and imperfect prose outscores the reverse every time.

Practice — How to Write CA Inter Law Answers

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