Night Before Guide

#WBS13 — The Night Before

Provenance — written 2026-09-29. A short, final-hours-specific companion, not a repeat of forge-forty-eight-hour-checklist.md (which already owns the T-48-to-T-4 re-read plan, the full trap self-test, and its own brief "final hours" section) or forge-spaced-repetition-schedule.md (which owns the multi-week tiering). This document does one narrow thing neither of those does: rank, by strength of real evidence, the smallest possible list worth a tired last glance tonight, and name what to leave alone. Every claim traces to research/veridian/WBS13-verified-facts.md, signal-frequency-and-boundaries.md, or the 48-hour checklist itself, cited inline. Short quotations are under 15 words with attribution; nothing longer is reproduced. No likelihood, percentage or grade boundary is stated anywhere below — none exists in this course's WBS13 sources (signal-frequency-and-boundaries.md §3).

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#If you only look at five things tonight

Ranked by how independently the evidence repeats, not by topic importance:

1. Gearing's formula, out loud, twice. The only trap in the whole facts bank confirmed as a real failure in two non-adjacent series independently — Oct 2022 ER: "large gaps in knowledge and understanding"; Jan 2025 ER: candidates "did not know the gearing ratio formula at all." Non-current liabilities ÷ capital employed × 100.
2. ARR vs simple payback — say both formulas back to back. Jan 2022 ER: candidates "confused ARR with simple payback" and answered in years and months instead of a percentage.
3. Discuss needs no conclusion; Assess and Evaluate do. Confirmed from Appendix 6's own wording and the Level 4 descriptors — a conclusion tacked onto an 8-mark Discuss wastes time you don't have; its absence on a 12- or 20-mark answer caps the mark below top band.
4. Marking is holistic, not an AO checklist. Near-identical wording in 5 of the mined examiner reports (Oct 2022, June 2022, Jan 2023, June 2023, Jan 2025) — a partial, generic attempt at every element scores lower than real depth on fewer.
5. Use the extracts, don't copy them. Confirmed independently on two unrelated companies — Oct 2021 (British Airways) and Oct 2023 (Disney) — both examiner reports record candidates who "copied" or "paraphrased" the extract instead of arguing from it.

Everything else worth re-reading is already ranked, by topic, in the 48-hour checklist's §3–4 — this list is deliberately shorter than that one, for the point where you have less energy than time.

#What not to start learning fresh tonight

Do not open a spec point you haven't already revised and try to learn it from scratch — at this distance from the exam that's a net loss of sleep for a fact that won't stick. The full, honest list of genuine content gaps (topics with no primary-source worked exemplar to calibrate new pattern-recognition against) already lives in forge-forty-eight-hour-checklist.md §6 — Analyse/Construct tariffs, the acid test ratio, labour turnover/retention/absenteeism formulas, empowerment, organic growth methods and overtrading, and CPA's EST/LFT/float mechanics. That list isn't repeated here; go there if you need it.

#Tonight, specifically

Sleep counts more than one more re-read. Check the calculator has working batteries. Don't attempt a fresh timed paper — the 48-hour checklist's §5 already makes this call and this document doesn't re-argue it.