*** ACCA Paper SBL September 2018 Exam was.. Instant Poll and comments ***

It was a 100 point case study with questions around strategy financial and nonfinancial issues, ethics, controls, project management, risk committee and big data.

Thought the paper was not too bad, hard because it is the first but at the same time, it was practical. My only wish is that I hope the markers or examiner would also consider practical answers rather than basing on a fixed set of answers. There are a lot of possible answers, so a bit of consideration and flexibility would be appreciated on this one.

I also struggled with the PID question. I think a lot in the suggested PID made sense, but criticised the lack of detail and missing main risks.

It was not a bad paper. Found it fair when comparing it with the specimen exams. I have also struggled with PID…i encountered deficiency of ideas on how to recommend improvements… and time was up when i reach to Big data… which was my favourite topic actually! Fingers crossed for pass…

@dskinner83 said:
The company was one which constructed roads etc. In a couple of different countries and had an opportunity for a large contract in a mountainous country. There were various ethical/reputational issues and then there was also the possibility of taking on contracts which involved maintaining the road infrastructure as well as constructing it in those countries.

For the PID, I think I put that the risks weren’t specific enough, and they needed analysing for likelihood and impact so possible responses found be constructed, but I have no idea if this was right for a PID. I was grasping at things to put at that point!

I also put something about not knowing what the impact of late running stages would be – would it impact on the others? And there was no mention of what resources were needed, beyond money. Again, no idea if it was right.

Just crossing my fingers for at least 50% on this one. :/

thank you.

I agree. It was completely unlike any of the specimen exams. Found it very difficulty due to trying to answer the paper with models but it didn’t need any. Felt like it was asking for commen sense.

Was the first question about accepting the maintenance contract? Or accepting the road building contract? I wrote about financial and non financial factors for the road building contract. Just thinking that wasn’t correct.

@patbvk21 I have applied SAF – suitability, acceptability and feasibility.

@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.

@tomrichardson92 I am pretty much same. Q1 and Q3 seemed to be manageable. The rest was absolutely painful.

For question 1, I used SAF as well and also discussed extensively about the liquidity, cash flow and profitability of the proposed contract. The question does not require any specific model. Question 3 is fine too. I attempted the question on Big data analytics as well. Fingers crossed.

Rasaq Salaudeen
Lagos, Nigeria

Question 1 I did a sensitivity analysis and discounted the cash flows. No good financial information so I used 10%. I was trying to do a PESTEL for the non-financial, but same here the information was not so good in the question. Main points were that they were not used to build roads in this mountain area and that there is a risk they have underestimated the costs.

Question 2 I wrote about the main risks he had in the paper and that they were not the main risks in my opinion. This was a tricky question.

Question 3 – Quite straightforward.

Question 4 – Went ok, time pressure on the second slide. Argued about the possible access to information from the different governments and if these jobs were currently governmental, about willingness to outsource the jobs to another country.