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Hi,
You may find helpful to see my comments under the topic “How to Pass P5? Started by Ashish.”
Best wishes,
AshishAnother point I found useful, was to answer your best question second, not first. I do not know why, but the way it works, that the first question you answer, you will lose marks. That’s how the mind works. So do not waste your best question by answering it first. Answer your best question second.
Then, of course, the hardest question will be the third one to be answered. This way you will get those marginal marks you need to get to 50, the pass marks.
ACCA asks our opinion as to what we think of the exam. Every year I get an email asking me to give my feed back. I have made it clear in the past that questions are too complex and scenarios are too long and confusing. So far they have not taken any notice.
I noticed that when I made some remarks about the website, they have taken note of that! So we have to keep telling ACCA through our feed back that P5 has been unnecessarily made complicated. After all the exams finish, they put on the website, asking for our feed back. It will be good to make use of it and tell them how fed up we are with P5 style.
Yes, I ready the questions about 5 times and still could not make sense of them. I thought there must be some printing mistake why I cannot understand the questions, but of course, they are deliberately arranged to confuse us.
Hi.
Yes, I found that the exam was set to trip us up and it was not testing our understanding of performance management, but was testing our ability to solve puzzles.
There was simply no time to use SWOT that was already provided. 2 different questions asked how the metrics were affected. I got completely confused.
I managed to calculate the 3 operating profits, but there was no time to show the workings. I got so confused that I calculated the breakeven point but with different figures! The breakeven point was not even mentioned in the question, it was in the scenario.
I found this exam to be disastrous. No wonder the pass rate for P5 is only 29%, the worst of all the subjects.
Regards,
AshishHi.
I fully agree with everything you have said. I also love this subject but the way exam is set, it is extremely difficult to pass. I have failed 3 times and my marks are going down instead of going up! I also got 75 on average during mock exams but I find this time my performance is disastrous.
I found that Q1 was complex and very confusing as to what it was asking us to do. Everything you have said is how I found it. The scenario was unnecessarily too long. I had to read the questions about 5 times and still could not understand what they were asking me to do.
It seemed as if the exam was testing my ability to solve a puzzle and not my understanding of performance management.
Anyway, only the result will tell what we have done.
Best wishes,
AshishHi Kibalka,
Sorry to hear that you are annoyed about P5. Hope your result cheers you up. In life, generally the difficult things are more rewarding.
When it comes to timing in exam, I found it helpful not to do the compulsory question first. Leave it till last. Also, if a question is for 5 marks, then I multiply it by 1.5, which will be 7.5, but only count it as 7 minutes. Similarly, a 10-mark question will be 14 minutes, not 15. By reducing the timing by one minute, I got time to read the scenario and finish within time. I prefer to read slowly so I do not have to keep reading again and again. This December I finished P5 exam 15 minutes early! Then realised that in one of the questions (4a) I had forgotten to calculate the ratios, which I did in those 15 minutes.
Hope my comments help. I very much sympathise with students struggling to pass.
P5 is harder than other papers. We know that from looking at the pass rate. P5 had 29% pass rate, so 71% are going to fail.
In the question about Z score there was no additional information. There was no need to calculate anything, because, as I understand, the question aske us to suggest what will make a difference in those figures.
Hi Marky,
In my opinion switching to P5 is not wise, because pass rate for P5 is only 29%. I have already failed P5 twice and sitting for the 3rd time in Dec 14. To deal with taxation, pay attention to the difference between personal and corporate tax.
A
Yes. I find the scenario material is too much reading. Under exam pressure we do not have time to re-read the scenario. If only they will put less reading material in exam questions. I did not have time to read the inheritance tax info again and completely messed it up. The actual question was easy, if only I had the time to read it again.
Q1 part (1) did not require commentary, just calculations. Commentary was in part (2)
For Q1 the last portion, asking whether there will be a planning gap, I found it very tricky. The target $135m was net operating profit, but our calculations would depend on contributions and not on profit, becasue we have to remove the fixed costs. For option 1, my answer was that the target will be met, but for option 2 the target will not be met. Having said this, I am not hoping to get any marks for this part any way. I find we are told to think before we write, but there is simply no time to think. We are expected to know the answer as soon as we finish reading the question. If we stop to think, we run out of time.
Yes, I took the approach of Building Blocks as it seemed to relate. But I did not realise the matter about suitability of strategy you have mentioned. I thought it was about culture, so I wrote about that.
While I found the P5 questions reasonably difficult, Q2 was tricky. It was not asking for evaluating the performance using the Pyramid, but it was asking to evaluate the evaluation system used by the business. I made the mistake and started writing about evaluation of the business, but then half way through read the question again and realised that it was the system that needed evaluating, not the performance! I failed this exam for 4 marks last time, so I hope I will pass this time.