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My first attempt at APM and passed with 62%. Absolutely delighted and utterly gobsmacked as the results came through as I was convinced post the exam I had failed. It was also my last exam, and when I heard about the email fiasco I was even more convinced of a December resit given I didn’t receive the offending message.
Like any of the professional level exams, knowing the content, syllabus and theory is only your starting point. This is not enough on its own to pass the exam. You need to work on techniques by practicing as many mocks and exam standard questions as possible. Marks are scored by applying your content knowledge to specific situations and information given in the questions, this is a skill in itself.
Practicing exam questions whilst working through the example answers will train your brain what the examiner looks for in responses. This will also reinforce knowledge of content and syllabus.
Congratulations to all that passed. And to those that failed- keep doing the right things: exam question practice is key
@mon1982 said:
@patbvk21 I have applied SAF – suitability, acceptability and feasibility.I applied SAF to the first question, most of my financial answers obviously fell under the Acceptability heading. Kicking myself this morning as I failed to write about the negative cash flows in the middle years of the project. I was preoccupied with linking back to the case study so mainly concentrated on the overall profit margin of the project. Also tried to link any potential change in gearing as a result of the project back to the case study as they’d indicated debt to equity levels were to remain constant. Would have been easier if they’d given us a balance sheet. I hope not writing about the negative cash flows in the middle years doesn’t come back to haunt me. I had plenty of qualitative reasons as well so hoping I scored highly there, it was of course straight forward to comment on the generic strategy of diversification into road construction etc.
Question 2 threw me, only managed a couple of points and had to move on as I didn’t want to waste time scraping around for poor points. My two points were the seemingly lack of authorisation on the PID for the project as I was under the impression from my revision this was the primary purpose of the document. I also managed to write about the business case being included in the ‘contents’, again from my revision I remembered this should be a stand alone document.
Question 3 was okay, hoping I scored relatively well here. Picking out the faults/ weaknesses in internal control was very much like an audit and assurance exam as somebody else said.
Question 4 was a bit of a disaster as I was rushing, got one slide down and the notes but how coherent it was is a different matter!
Hoping I scored well enough in question 1 and 3 to scrape a pass, it’s fortunate that these were the questions worth the highest amount of marks.
Fingers crossed but I think it’s touch and go for me.
