*** ACCA P3 December 2016 Exam was.. Instant Poll and comments ***

It was an okay paper in my opinion.

Q1 – a was fairly easy, I did BCG, parental developers and basic financial analysis. Ended up spending about an hour on it though.
Q1 – b threw me like most people on here have already said and the final part of it I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to write so I left it to come back to but didn’t have the time. Didn’t do it in report format as I only realised halfway through writing the answer that it asked for that.
Q2 – I started but couldn’t figure out how they got their figures so gave up.
Q3 – Was okay. For me the line between e-business and e-marketing became very blurry but I think I did quite well. Ran out of time on the second part but got 2 benefits and 2 risks of e-procurement written down and explained.
Q4 – Part a was very easy, expecting near full marks from that (although I forgot to do organisational structure). Part b I had no idea, wrote a few sentences but not sure if I got any marks. Part c I wrote a few paragraphs on as it came up in a past papers but I couldn’t remember it.

Expecting somewhere between 40 and 60 marks.

@matdemon said:
What if i didn’t use any model in question 1 but did all the analysis throughout with performance calculation and analyse the calculated data and give reasons like global warming and like that. Will it work? Because particularly it wasn’t metion to use a model right?

In past papers they don’t always specifically tell you which models to use but you are still expected to use one or two. For 19 marks I’d expect to be using at least 2 models.

Global warming? Were we sitting the same exam?

I just added a part of global warming that why a paperless environment is encourged and i provided detailed discussion about the portfolio with explanation. So it won’t be enough because my answer was a bit practical than bookish.

No constraints, risk assessment, objectives not smart and can not be used in benefit realisation review.

I don’t think I will pass..I didn’t have enough time to complete the paper

Seems to be a common occurence that they maje the december exam toughm they threw a real curveball in last dec q1 too. Morale of the story is: revise the whole syllabue and dont get comfortable practising pestel and balogun hope hailey.

@lalawhite said:
yep, definitely failed! Q1 is really where I got lost.

Did you get stuck on project management? That was really different and not like any past questions?

@gtavicecity said:
Please answer this. I used BCG matrix correctly but named it BGC matrix intstead of bcg. Wil i be penalised?

It would have to be a very very harsh marker for you to lose marks for that.

Hallo all 🙂 I would like to ask you some things. First, maybe I misunderstood, but I wrote that one of tne omissions is the missing of initial investment. I saw only costs in P0 which are supplamebtary to initial cost but didn’n see the cost of the process. Am I right?

The next question is what did you write about 3Vs of big data. I gave only definitions of the 3Vs.

Thanks in advance 🙂

I would personally disagree with this. Studying this paper I have felt was easy to absorb the information/subject matter. Probably the easiest subject I had sat actually. However, I made a disaster of this exam.

The first question was fair for the most part apart from a couple of questions at the end. The Project initiation document or whatever it was and you had to state what was omitted and reasons why info should be included. I studied for this exam pretty hard but did not come across this at all. Then the question about what a finance team member should contribute to change, project & risk management (& one other can’t remember) – where was this in the syllabus as I did not come across it? (maybe it was a think outside the box question but if you don’t know you don’t know- able to hazard a guess at project & risk). So much on strategy development I knew inside out but of no use here in this question – only really BCG as a model and could touch on few other things but calc’s made it difficult for time and to scan for points and write up in essay format.

2nd part of exam focused on narrow topic areas in my opinion. I look at Q2 (regression and time series analysis) having looked at this just last night but decided not to do because my calculator bat went! and I thought prob take ages with disseminating/analysing the info anyway.

Onto Q3 and this was e-commerce model – again fine with that but then seemed to focus heavily on e-procurement. Again I did not come across this in so much detail in my study (I know what e-procurement is but for so many marks this threw me).

Q4 was fair enough but any previous questions re cultural web was more open ended – this question was specifically to address staff development with relation to cultural web. Bit harder question IMO. Competency and learning development questions (2 x 5 marks) fair enough.

I did the Sep 16 paper and thought that was a very easy paper. Guess just depends on luck sometimes with what you get – what suits one person won’t suit another.

Well looking into the comments i m litrally shocked as question 1 was fairly easier…onlt the last part of the question was a bit challenging..the rest question i found pretty fair..!!!

Obviously given the fact that Q1 was good , the rest part of the paper has to be pretty tough and challenging… i did Q3 and Q4..though i am nt very confident about the PART 2 of both the question…. i still feel that Q1 had easy marks to grab..!

The rest I believe that it is practically impossible to finish this paper on time, so just focus on puttIng as much marks in your pocket as possible!!!

Wishing some luck to happen …. so that i m able to pass it!!

Really struggled with this paper, mainly question 1.

for the omissions part I used the kaleidoscope headings like timings, capacity, capability, scope…do you think I would get anything for that? seem to be way off from what people on here have said?