*** ACCA Paper APM March 2019 Exam was.. Instant Poll and comments ***

Hi everyone.

I am putting down bits that I wrote in hope that others have written something similar.
1) No non financial indicators and part of the mission had non financial objectives.
2) Did not really measure the growth in value.
3) No forecasts for example for website sales. Should split these from revenue.
4) layout in 000’s however clear and simple to understand.
5) Detailed costs would have been more appropriate for operational decision making and not at the board level.
6) no narrative explaining big deviations in performance.
7)No preferred supplier external information.
8) No details about capital despite the refurbishment being such a big project,

b) i ran out of time.

c) the management team were key players and their objectives of growth should be measured.
employees-minimal effort
lenders keep satisfied and gearing information would be useful
health groups-keep informed.

d) eva of -8.9m and adv and disadvantages, destroying value for the business.

q2) :0

q3) economy is the average salary per teacher. 84000 for school 1 and 2. Above national average so is not economical

efficiency is the number of students for each teacher- outputs for the given inputs.
think 32 for school 1 and 5 for school 2 so school 1 appears to be more efficient.

effectiveness- actual-expected/expectedx100
both were lower than the national average which means they did not achieve their objectives.

conflicts within the 3e;s
to increase effectiveness, the school might need to hire more experienced teachers which means economy would go down.

b) league tables require a lot of staff and hence costs.
– does not take geographical regions in to account- salaries higher in these regions
-different subjects taught
– weighting for the ranking is subjective.
-demotivates students
-doesnt take in to account the context in which the school operates for example school 2 is for students with learning disabilities or something along these lines. It would not be appropriate to have to many students in one class.
– funding is reduced based on rankings however for example school 2 may look like it is not effective in achieving its objectives but the parent satisfaction is 99%

This was my 6th attempt.

I no longer know how we are supposed to answer questions in APM exam. I used a countdown timer to write non-stop for 45mins copying out the tutorial answer word by word and I always came to the conclusion that I would only make it to 50-60% of the answer of the exam kit. That means the answers they produce are much much longer (not just a little bit) than what you actually need to write in the exam. Trouble is that it’s difficult to make our answers shorter because if we don’t explain our points deeply enough, that’s why we will lose marks. Equally we lose marks by wasting time if our points are too lengthy. You can’t win with this paper…………

I forgot to use 65% as equity when calculating the WACC, i used 35 in both cases. How much marks would I be penalized for such mistake? I’m not getting any sleep as even 1 mark could be decider which was the case in my last attempt with p5 ended up getting 49

how many marks are going for EVA calculation? I didn’t get enough time to write the commentary part…

I wud say i was only able to answer about 70% of the questions. Was just too time pressured. The exam wasn’t difficult so to say but time was needed to write out quality answers. Fingers crossed. Hopefully the 70% i answered gets me a 50 lol

Hi,

I have calculated EVA correctly step by step but in place of writing negative EVA, I wrote positive EVA and by mistake I did analysis based on positive EVA. How many marks approximately the examiner will deduct? Please reply

Was a fair paper. Time pressured as expected. Good thing was the report evaluation in q1 gave a bit of a headstart. 6 pros and 6 cons link to goal done although more difficult to find pros on the report than cons. I dont think people should worry too much about messing up EVA calcs. 14 mark question (8 marks calc 6 marks pros and cons of measure). Usaully get a 0.5marks per adjusment and 1 mark for EVA,WACC,Capital Employed (maybe 2 marks for CE)& stating whether its adding or destroying value.

Intergrated Reporting in Q1 was a suprise topic but was not too bad i guess. 2 marks each on Human Cap,Financial cap & Social/Relationships cap + plus link with case e.g Health Groups sugar tax info for unions etc. Focused ob reporting needs for wider stakeholders and type measure there should be.

Q2 on ABM took more time than expected. Was hoping Corp Failure would come up. A lot of info on the 3 products req for application marks. Stated the jargon on ABM (strategic + operational) probs worth 4 marks. Had to look at the info for all products think ABC/ABM would benefited the high volume product as cost per unit would have reduced and it was in competitive market so benefit of gaining competitive pricing + margin. I just broke it down per product and put 3/4 points on each.

Q3 was ok. Got a bit streched for time on league table limitation so wasnt able to link to much too case.

Was WACC 35/135 and 65/135 ??? overall 7.4%

I got minus 5mill EVA

ABM was tough . Overall my writing was appalling , the time pressure is something else .

For league tables there were huge ramifications if the non weightings were wrong or info collected was not right , teacher laid off and schools denied funding ,and the risk of sending child to the wrong school . Also needed huge amounts of staff to compltee the league tables . who was going to pay for this the tax payer ? or is it voluntary ?

I wasted time drawing blank on the outcomes for BCG i nearly died , unbelievable rookie error . If i dont pass that is where i lost easy marks .

Don’t forget to adjust the debt % to get post tax debt %, the figure shown was pre tax.

I think since many are still concern about getting the right EVA amount, here’s something that can give us the idea of the marking scheme – December 2015 (Iron Chicken) Q1

Economic value added

Calculation:
1 mark for each of:
– Research and development
– Depreciation on leased assets
– Tax paid
– Capital employed year start figure
– Non-cash expenses
– Research and development
– WACC
– Economic value added
Maximum 8 marks

For our sitting (Vultures Retail) – since it’s a 14 marks asking students to
– Calculate the EVA
– Discuss the outcome
– Evaluation of EVA methods.

We can probably gauge how to allocation the 14 marks into those 3 parts. hence inaccurate EVA perhaps only loss 1 mark at most, but the rest in your workings still gain some marks. Most of the comments here got a Negative EVA, so the discussion part would probably be on right track.

Cheers!

its formula was debt/debt +equity

So i believe it is 35/135 and 100/135

I came out of the exam thinking i passed and with every passing hour I think I have failed .