Tawjihi Business Field common mistakes
Tawjihi Business Field · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
When recording a transaction, the candidate debits and credits the same side (for example, debiting both Cash and Equipment when buying equipment for cash), then balances the trial balance by forcing a plug figure into a suspense account instead of finding the error.
Candidates memorise 'debit the receiver, credit the giver' as a phrase without building the habit of testing each entry against the accounting equation (Assets = Liabilities + Equity) before writing it. Under exam time pressure the plug feels faster than re-deriving the entry.
What to do instead
Before writing any entry, state aloud the two accounts affected, their type (asset, liability, equity, revenue, expense), and the direction of increase or decrease; then apply the rule that assets and expenses increase on the debit side while liabilities, equity and revenue increase on the credit side. Practise 20 mixed transactions daily and verify each with the accounting equation. When a trial balance fails to balance, compute the difference, check whether it is divisible by 2 (a one-sided posting) or by 9 (a transposition), and trace the ledger rather than inserting a suspense plug.
The candidate calculates gross profit correctly but then treats a cash sale of a fixed asset, an owner's drawings, or a loan receipt as trading revenue or as an expense, so net profit and the closing capital figure are both wrong.
Candidates conflate 'money came in' with 'revenue earned'. Cash movement feels like income, and capital injections or asset disposals look like ordinary receipts, so they get posted to the sales account.
What to do instead
Build a classification drill: list ten receipts and classify each as revenue, capital, loan, or disposal proceeds before touching any account. Remember that revenue arises from ordinary trading activity only; drawings reduce capital, loan receipts create a liability, and disposal proceeds go to the disposal account with any gain or loss reported separately. Reconcile closing capital using opening capital plus profit plus additional capital minus drawings, and confirm the figure matches the balance sheet.
In a supply-and-demand question the candidate shifts the demand curve when the question describes a change in the price of the good itself, or shifts supply when the question describes a change in consumer income, and then reports the wrong new equilibrium price and quantity.
The candidate has learned 'price up, demand down' as a slogan and never separated movement along a curve from a shift of the curve. The vocabulary of shifting is memorised but not tied to the distinction between the good's own price and the determinants of demand.
What to do instead
Adopt a fixed two-step routine for every question: first identify whether the changed variable is the good's own price (movement along the curve) or a determinant such as income, tastes, prices of substitutes and complements, or expectations (shift of the curve). Then identify which curve moves and in which direction, and only then read off the new intersection. Draw both curves, label the axes, and mark the old and new equilibrium with arrows. Drill ten scenarios per sitting, including cases where both curves shift.
The candidate defines GDP as everything produced in the economy, counts the sale of a used car or an intermediate good such as flour sold to a bakery, and double-counts the value of the bread, arriving at an inflated national income figure.
The candidate has memorised the letters of the acronym but not the qualifiers: final goods, produced within the country's borders, within a defined period. Intermediate and second-hand transactions feel like economic activity, so they are included.
What to do instead
Write the definition with all four qualifiers and test each item against them: is it final, is it newly produced this period, is it within the territory, is it in the period? Exclude second-hand goods (only the dealer's commission is new output) and count intermediate goods only through value added. Practise by computing GDP for a three-stage production chain using the value-added method and confirming it equals the expenditure method total.
Asked to distinguish management functions, the candidate lists planning, organising, leading and controlling but cannot say what happens in each, and in a case question recommends 'better planning' as the answer to every problem, including problems of span of control or motivation.
The functions are learned as a four-word list for recall questions, without worked examples attached. Case questions then trigger the only label the candidate remembers.
What to do instead
Attach one concrete workplace example and one output to each function: planning produces objectives and budgets; organising produces a structure, delegation and span of control; leading produces motivation, communication and direction; controlling produces standards, measurement and corrective action. For case questions, first name the symptom in the case, then map it to the function whose output is missing, and justify the mapping in one sentence. Practise with short cases where the correct answer is organising or controlling, not planning.
The candidate confuses the marketing mix elements, for example answering a question about distribution channels with a recommendation to cut price, or describing promotion as 'advertising' only, and omits place and physical evidence entirely in a case.
The four Ps are memorised as words without the decisions each one contains. In service-sector cases the extended mix is not known at all, so the candidate falls back on price because it is the easiest lever to describe.
What to do instead
Build a one-page matrix with each P, the decisions it covers, and one example per decision: product covers features, branding, packaging and the product life cycle; price covers strategies such as skimming, penetration and cost-plus; place covers channel levels, intermediaries and coverage; promotion covers advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, public relations and direct marketing. Add people, process and physical evidence for services. For each case, state which P the problem sits in before recommending an action.
In a commercial arithmetic question the candidate applies a percentage increase and a percentage decrease to the same base in sequence and reports the original figure, or computes a markup on cost when the question asked for a margin on selling price.
The candidate treats all percentages as additive and does not track which base each percentage is applied to. Markup and margin are learned as synonyms rather than as two different denominators.
What to do instead
Write the base next to every percentage before calculating. Remember that a 20 per cent rise followed by a 20 per cent fall does not return to the starting value because the second percentage applies to a larger base; use the multiplier method (1.20 times 0.80 equals 0.96). For pricing, fix the formulas: markup equals profit divided by cost, margin equals profit divided by selling price, and selling price equals cost divided by (1 minus margin). Work ten problems where the base changes mid-question and check each answer by reversing the calculation.
When asked which court hears a commercial dispute or what happens when a contract term is breached, the candidate answers with general moral language ('the company must be fair') instead of naming the legal rule, the remedy, or the forum, and mixes up the roles of the parties in a cheque dispute.
Commercial law is revised as narrative rather than as rules with elements. Ethics is treated as a separate topic of opinions, so legal precision is replaced by moral commentary whenever the question sounds evaluative.
What to do instead
For each legal topic, memorise a three-part skeleton: the elements that must be proved, the consequence if they are proved, and the forum or remedy. For contracts, drill offer, acceptance, consideration, capacity and intention, plus remedies of damages, specific performance and rescission. For negotiable instruments, fix the drawer, drawee and payee roles with a diagram. For ethics, answer using a named framework (for example, consequence-based, duty-based, or virtue-based reasoning) and apply it to the facts rather than asserting a personal view.
The candidate treats simple and compound interest as interchangeable, uses the simple interest formula for a multi-year deposit, and mixes nominal and effective rates when comparing two loan offers, so the cheaper loan is identified as the more expensive one.
The formulas look similar and the candidate selects by keyword rather than by whether interest is added to principal. Effective annual rate is learned as a definition without being linked to the number of compounding periods per year.
What to do instead
Write the condition at the top of the page: interest on principal only means simple; interest added to principal each period means compound. Use the compound formula with the number of periods matching the compounding frequency, and convert the nominal rate by dividing by the periods per year before compounding. Compare loans only on the effective annual rate, computed as (1 plus nominal rate divided by periods) to the power of periods, minus one. Drill five comparisons of the same nominal rate at annual, semi-annual and monthly compounding and rank them.
In a spreadsheet question the candidate writes a formula that copies correctly down a column but not across, or builds a VLOOKUP where the lookup column is not the first column of the range, and reports an error value without diagnosing it. In word-processing questions, headings are formatted manually instead of with styles, so the table of contents cannot be generated.
Relative and absolute references are memorised as a dollar-sign rule without the underlying idea that a reference shifts by the same offset as the formula. Lookup function constraints are not learned as constraints, and manual formatting is faster in the short run, so the candidate never builds the styles habit.
What to do instead
Learn the anchor test: identify which row and column of the reference must stay fixed and place the dollar sign only there, then verify by copying the formula two cells right and two cells down and checking the result by hand. For lookups, state the rule that the lookup value must sit in the leftmost column of the table array and use an exact-match argument unless a sorted approximate match is genuinely intended. For documents, apply heading styles first and insert an automatic table of contents, then update it after edits.