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To: debs4521@hotmail.com
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Hello Open tuition team,I would first like to say a big thank you for your generous service to us students.
Would it be possible for OT to do an exam question debrief? Especially for the P papers. Iam doing P5 and seriously finding it difficult to understand what the examiner is asking, but once I have finally discovered it I can easily answer the question. For example Dec14 Q1 (ii) I have read the question and the answer and am struggling to match the two, others i have spoken to also feel the same. If a question was worded like this again, we would find it hard to understand what the examiner was actually asking – can you please help?
Q1 (ii) is (obviously) about stakeholders and the appendix lists their levels of interest and power. This is enough to then categorise the stakeholders in the Mendelow’s matrix (the only stakeholder model in the syllabus) and that automatically suggests how they should be handled or approached by management. Eg key players have to be looked after very carefully and will more or less get what they want. In contrast, suppliers would fall into the minimal effort quadrant which means that management can alsmost ignore them.
Performance measures are only worth having if they measure something that needs to be measured. So, how the company is doing for its shareholders could be measured by ROCE and EVA and NP%.
Customers are key players, but measurement there is weak, with perhaps only revenue growth helping (in that I disagree with the answer) but revenue growth is not a great measure. If customers are key players we need to keep them happy and loyal. Therefore, customer satisfaction surveys and comparing our performance to that of competitors shoudl also be used.
HTH
We don’t routinely give exam debriefs as usually the examiners’ answers clear things up and our time might be better spent answering specific queries, like this one.
Hi,
The first half of the question was more confusing. If you read the examiners answers It seems that the examiner is repeating the question (e.g apendix 1) in his answers and then at the end adding the “approach” e.g key players. In the exam I thought there was no way he would want us to do this as it seems repetitive and did not justify 1 mark each.
I have taken the time to read the examiners report which has helped a bit but I still think his questions do not clearly state what answer he is looking for.
Can I add, this question highlights the problems people have with this examiner.
Q1 (ii) has two parts to it:
a) “justify appropriate management approaches to each stakeholder”.
b) “based on this analysis evaluate the appropriateness of the performance measures suggested”Regarding part a) The examiner has confused things by including medium levels of interest for some of the stakeholders. Now I know there are Mendelow matrix that have low, medium and high. But normally they only have low or high.
In addition some stakeholders were split i.e. employees had a group of key employees.
In addition as the question had evaluate in it (albeit in relation to the performance measures) it would be very easy under exam conditions to evaluate the actual position of the various stakeholders. i.e. have they been mapped correctly.
As debs4521 has pointed out the examiners actual answers are rather bland and simply repeat what is stated in the exam qyestion.
For the second part he awards up to 10 marks for the 5 points. Presume 2 per point. Looking at his answers four cover shareholders, that is up to 8 marks for one basic paragraph!
He also has a paragraph criticizing the lack of a measurement for customers – but that is not what was asked. We were asked to “evaluate the appropriateness of the performance measures suggested” he really should make his questions clearer.
It even says within the scenario specifically “do not, at this stage, suggest long lists of additional indicators” as the examiner has done in his answer!
‘Evaluate’ usually means find pluses and minuses. If you recognise that customer performance measures were inadequate, I think it is reasonable to suggest how these might be extended.
There are four groups of stakeholders so 4 marks per group. Preumable 2 each forsuggesting management approaches and 2 for discussing performance measures, so not a lot is needed for each.
We can all misinterpret questions and are surprised when we see a model answer that takes a different approach, but I must say, I didn’t think that this one was too bad.
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