The Chartered Accountants Academy’s CTA program represents the final academic gate before entering the profession. Each year, a cohort of dedicated students finds themselves in the retaker class, a group characterized not by a lack of effort, but by a specific and recurring set of intellectual hurdles. Our analysis, drawn from direct student feedback, marker reports, and performance trends, reveals that failure is rarely due to a lack of information. Instead, it stems from a fundamental disconnect in how students process, apply, and communicate complex financial and managerial concepts under pressure. This paper outlines the three core; interlinked challenges facing repeating students and presents a pedagogical framework, the Retakers Success Pathway, that is deliberately engineered to dismantle these barriers. By shifting the paradigm from memorization to mastery and from template use to adaptive thinking, we are not merely teaching content; we are rebuilding the cognitive architecture of future Chartered Accountants.