*** ACCA Paper PM December 2018 Exam was.. Instant Poll and comments ***

The only question I have is how do you flex a budget without more information in Section C, the requirement read doing a revised budget for 6 months making the necessary adjustments….Actual performance cannot change in such circumstances…

@missboo said:
Seriously? You wonder why you’ve failed two times already. Practice questions and exams are key to passing. Your FD isn’t making a sound investment if he does pay. You aren’t putting in enough work. Are you sure accountancy is right for you? You don’t seem motivated.

I’ve already been working in accounts for 3 years now, recently joined a new company. I passed AAT using same study method.

Motivation has nothing to do with failing exams. Like others have said, the style of questions made it more difficult to apply the knowledge/calculations. Like I said, I do study but it’s just that whenever I sit in the exam room, my mind goes blank, especially whenever I see one of those scenario based questions with a long passage of text.

What is your method of study? I am keen to complete my ACCA exams hopefully by end of next year, but it doesn’t seem likely now.

For the budgetary control section C question, I just assumed that we needed to flex the 12-month budget to a 6-month budget, as the original was comparing an annual 12-month budget to the actual results for the first 6 months, and that seemed illogical to me.

Flexed the costs and revenues to a 6-month budget and to the actual activity level of 950 units, and then compared how the variances differed from the original comparison that was given to us.

NO IDEA if that was what they were expecting, but it seemed logical to me at the time. I even stated that at the beginning of the question so the examiner knew what I did: “My Assumption: Flex budget from 12 months to 6 months and compare”. Hopefully, they’ll give me some credit!

@simspetya said:
Even so, I think the budget has to be adjusted with the new price,
And the manager will not be kept responsible for the variance. Otherwise we should prepare a separate budget for every manager’ responsibility.
This is my logic

The materials is like a planning variance so was changed for the purpose of assessing the Production Manager. The labour decrease was an operational variance so I kept it the same as budgeted. The statement was to judge the performance of the Production Manager. And yes they may well do a different one to judge the Purchasing dept. At work we provide separate summaries with variances for different teams. Although not like this due to the nature of the business. If you made reference to these you may gain points anyway.

@missboo said:
Why don’t you do practice questions/past papers? Everything points to this being critical. The knowledge doesn’t sink in just watching lectures. If you aren’t motivated to do practice questions how do you think you’ll pass the P Papers? I manage an accounts assistant, if they told me they’d failed an exam twice (possibly three times) and hadn’t bothered to do a few practice papers I’d be questioning their commitment to this career.

This exam was not hard and was very similar to the practice questions I came across. Stop making excuses and put in more effort – loads of practice questions. I manage my study around work and two young children, it’s not easy but it’s doable. No wonder the pass rates are so low for ACCA.

Indeed the exam overall wasn’t that hard, but was just the information presented wasn’t exactly easy to take in and to apply what was learnt.

FYI I passed F6 taxation without practicing questions. I pushed the pass rate up for F6! 🙂
Do disclose your pass marks for previous exams and what study kit you use.

However, I feel like the key for me to pass this exam is to buy a revise kit and practice questions.

@tyjac, I didn’t take this particular paper and was just nosing around in this topic, but seeing your comments I felt I had to post to give you some advice.

Take it from someone who has just taken their final ACCA exam, you will NOT finish this qualification without question practice. You might have got away with that in AAT, but you won’t in ACCA.

You say it wasn’t easy to take in the information and apply what you learnt. There’s only one way to practice that skill, and it’s not watching lectures!

And once you get to the final 4 papers, it will get much harder as you will be much more time pressured. There will be a lot of information to take in for each question and you need to be able to quickly absorb what is given to you, link it to your knowledge and get planning and writing. You need to start practicing this now while you’re on the lower level papers or you’ll be completely out of your depth when you get there.

I practice lots of questions for every exam (using the Kaplan kit but BPP is also fine) and so far have passed every one first time with a good mark. Practice lots of questions before your resit. As you’ve already taken it twice you might as well start now. You’ve probably watched enough lectures! Anyway, I hope you take my advice, but best of luck to you for next sitting.

I did a rolling budget approach, by using the actual (with the notes), sum, and compared with the Budget.

Btw how does the result appear.? Like do we get to see where we were wrong.? Do we get a report regarding the exam.?

The Theatre Box too was confusing. How do your get the Breakeven and Margin of Safety only for the Theatre Box. The fixed costs were for the entire event and not only for the Theatre Box. So it was difficult to calculate the FC, BE and MoS for the Theatre Box.

Even the minimax regret question was confusing.

@cr333 said:

@tyjac, I didn’t take this particular paper and was just nosing around in this topic, but seeing your comments I felt I had to post to give you some advice.

Take it from someone who has just taken their final ACCA exam, you will NOT finish this qualification without question practice. You might have got away with that in AAT, but you won’t in ACCA.

You say it wasn’t easy to take in the information and apply what you learnt. There’s only one way to practice that skill, and it’s not watching lectures!

And once you get to the final 4 papers, it will get much harder as you will be much more time pressured. There will be a lot of information to take in for each question and you need to be able to quickly absorb what is given to you, link it to your knowledge and get planning and writing. You need to start practicing this now while you’re on the lower level papers or you’ll be completely out of your depth when you get there.

I practice lots of questions for every exam (using the Kaplan kit but BPP is also fine) and so far have passed every one first time with a good mark. Practice lots of questions before your resit. As you’ve already taken it twice you might as well start now. You’ve probably watched enough lectures! Anyway, I hope you take my advice, but best of luck to you for next sitting.

Thank you. I will start practicing with a revision kit and work on questions, as I do put in work in ensure I get good marks, but in the end, it just doesn’t work out. Maybe this is the way to pass ACCA exams and score good marks. I think I also need to get use to the way the exam questions are structured and phrased.

What investment appraisal technique could be used as an alternative to Residual Income, I’m aware of Net Present Value from my f9 studies as the most superior investment appraisal teqhnique. But to mention that technique in the context of the F5 syllabus seemed incorrect, I mentioned Return on Capital employed instead…

This was my first ACCA exam and I didnt realise the questions on Sect C differed for everyone in the exams, my section C questions didnt have an revised budget to do as others are talking about here, it was all about the 3 E’s and MR=MC did anyone have similar questions? I was gutted because id spent so long revising the complicated techniques that I didnt even know how to calculate marginal revenue!

I thought I knew variances off by heart but got really stuck on the labour rate planning variance as there didnt seem to have the actual hours used and I couldnt see how to figure this out from the info given? Anyone get stuck on the same question (section B). Think i put 160000 adverse but it was just a guess!