PMACCA Paper PM exam was - March 2021 Exam - Instant Poll and comments

How do you calculate market share variance ?

How was the exam? I felt the MCQ were kinda confusing! Does anyone else felt the same?

It is a different term for Sales Volume Operational Variance

I feel like the longer writing questions weren’t too bad, the MCQs were trickier

can someone please share the questions asked , especially Sec c ?

what topics were asked in sec c ?

I had the same question. If I am not wrong we had to calculate the rolling budget first and then calculate the variances. The question was such a disaster didn’t know where to start with. Not sure how I did.

Did anyone also had this very weird question where there was a demand for product given PER WEEK (500 I believe) and the price, and it was told that the demand is price elastic, and that the cost went up so the company would have raise the price? And there were 4 options to choose from about what will happen with the demand / revenue (?) PER DAY, whether the demand will be <500, or >500 etc. And all the values were like they still meant per week but it clearly said per day. So the whole question really made no sense and was about to spot the per week/per day substitution. I was looking at for a long time and could not decide, whether the question was actually that nastyor there was just a typo in the exam? Very weird.

I had the same question. I used the logic that if demand is elastic and price changes by a percentage then demand will change by a percentage more than price. So here the price changed by 10% ($2 to $2.2) so demand will change more than 10%, if we take 10% atleast then demand will change to 450 (500 Less 10%). It means less than 450 and at a selling price of $2.2 *450 = $990, revenue will be less than 1000 Hope i was right.

1 of my Section C cases was calculating operational and planning variance for material price and usage. Price - 4 marks, Usage - 4 marks. Then on the same case one of the questions was to calculate total material revised cost for given month which gave 2 marks. And 1 question was to discuss the performance of the purchasing manager - 10 marks.

This is the right approach. Unfortunately I did not understant the question in the exam. Only when I came home and checked elasticity chapter, I realised it was a very easy question. which didn't even require long calculations...

I have another MCQ question, which I couldn't calculate. If someone did answer this question please share how you calculated it. I got confused because I didn't know how to get budgeted number of units. Here is the question: Question required to calculate materials mix variance. 5 units of Product P requires: Material A 3 kg at a cost 10$ = 30$ Material B 2 kg at a cost 15$ = 30$ Actual production for the month was 100 units which used 120 kg materal in total costing 15000$. (I don't remember the exact amount, anyways it is still possible to calculate I suppose). There was no price variance.

One more tricky question was to calculate environmental cost in input/output accounting. I've never seen calulation questions related to environmetal topics. Neither in revision kits nor workbook itself (I studied from BPP 2020 book and 2017-2018). So it was a bit confusing. Product Q uses 2 chemicals - A and B. Scrap materials are disposed at a cost 250 per tonne. During the month 1000 tonnes of A and 1500 tonnes of B were used to produce 50000 tonnes of Product Q. 4 tonnes of Product Q were scraped and were reused in the nexts month's production. What is the environmental cost?

This is for students who did not attend in March session. Current ratio is 1.6:1. 30% of the current assets are inventories. If the company sells half of it's inventory all for cash with 100% mark-up, what will the current ratio be? Got the answer at home. Easy but at the exam nerves usually block your brain ))

Section A and B were fair, I feel I was well prepared for these. Section C was a disaster! Expected a decent written question using some sort of calculations!

I got the same!

What should be the answer to this?

The paper I sat for had ZERO variance questions, not a single question of it. I was upset, because variance was a favourite topic of mine. My section C - the second question was an absolute disaster, it was on the 3 E's (economy, efficiency and effectiveness). About the government cutting on the police forces' budget, hence assess the performance based on the 3E's. The first question (of Section C) required us to prepare a p&l statement of 3 clinics which was easy to the point I felt like something was wrong. But overall it was okay. Just the second question (of the 3E's) was a killer, for me at least. The Section A and B questions were fairly okay. I was done with it in an hour! Although I know how careless I can sometimes get, as such I had depended on the Section C questions to go well but alas, only time will tell whether my answers were worth it.

What were your Section C questions? Just roughly.

I’m writing PM in June, and I sincerely hope you guys pass.

Section A & B was fairly tricky but I was able to finish it in 1.5 hours, I got enough time to think and write on the section C question. I hope I will pass this time. All the best to all of you too for the result.

I had the exam with the balance scorecard question in section C and two hours into my exam almost finishing I only had last question to do in section C which I didn't even look what the question was when the exam window went black and would not reconnect, it turns out I had some technical issues and they wouldn't let me back into the exam to finish, the investigator didn't chat nor he called me so I rang Acca and have been withdrawn and moved to re sit exam next Wednesday, totally fed up as I though it went OK-is anyone in similar situation? What was the last question in section C if someone had same set of questions I'm now wondering what I've missed on? I'm worried now that I will get more difficult set next week...

With the ratio question it wasn't just what the current ratio will be if the company sell half inventory with 100% mark up, the question was what the ratio would be if they use all money from the sale of that inventory to pay their liabilities.

In one of my section c questions I got asked what the market share and market size variance is. For market size I said that this was the planning variance and compared the original standard to the revised standard and for the market size variance I said this compared the revised standard to actuals. With the reason for calculating being that one is in a Manager's control and the other isn't. Would I have got any marks for this? I completely forgot that the market size and share variance relates to sales only.

I think if they were asking about market size they were expecting to see sales volume planning variance which compare revised budget with the original and for market share its sales volume operational variance comparing actual results with revised standard or budget.

Thanks. Do you think I would have got any marks for saying about the planning and operational aspects or no because I didn't mention sales.

rahul6342 wrote:I had the same question. I used the logic that if demand is elastic and price changes by a percentage then demand will change by a percentage more than price. So here the price changed by 10% ($2 to $2.2) so demand will change more than 10%, if we take 10% atleast then demand will change to 450 (500 Less 10%). It means less than 450 and at a selling price of $2.2 *450 = $990, revenue will be less than 1000

This is exactly what I did. I think it's right

Are you sure about the last part? Cause I swear I did not see it ????? Chose 1.39:1

xHolmesyx wrote:Thanks. Do you think I would have got any marks for saying about the planning and operational aspects or no because I didn’t mention sales.

Well I'm not sure what you exactly calculated in your variance but you did say that market size was planning and market share was operational and then you mentioned that market size may be out of control to manager, so to my understanding if you calculated variance wrong you may not get any mark for calculation but if your assumptions and performance valuation based on YOUR OWN figures made sense you should score some points in the discussion part because your own number rule apply as for what I read in technical articles