*** F5 June 2012 Exam was … Comments and Instant Poll ***

al4sarah even i did the same=p
it was my second attempt, paper came hard but my preparation was good enough so i tackled it

F5 exam was from hell, I’m still in shock… no chance of passing, already revising towards attempting it again in December! Phew!

oh friends,
F5 paper wsa not as usaul though i hope that i have done satisfactorily and hoping for pass with resonable extra margin.

goodluck for every one those who work hard.

yes! i trully agree with the previous posting. the exam yas far from what everyone ihas ever expected. the difference between this exam and the previous papers is more than obvious! i think that having a question that is divided into two sub-question each giving 10 points is not fair. or at least this is not a way to check what does the student know.

That’s very good information by fasb.

We all should strongly protest against this unethical, unfair, unprofessional, unacceptable approach by F5 Examiner.

I totally agree and think we should complete the survey and show our huge dissatisffaction with the paper, I mean after all the hard work we put into studying this paper only to be disappointed! Its not easy trying to achieve your goal in life but again you don’t have to be tricked or made to believe it’s unattainble.

There is a question for December exam: If the manager (examiner) sets the target (exam) based on the last exam sitting, how would you describe the standard? Explain the standard wich you think is correct from the employees (Students ) point of view. Also evaluate the Manager’s (Examiner’s) approach!
10 Marks.
A: Basic
B: Current
C: Attainable
🙁 Ideal

I would defo go for “D”.
Love the way the examiner always says “students failed to revise core subjects of the syllabus”!!! I think this time she failed to examine any of them.
So much time wasted for nothing, the exam was a JOKE, but not a funny one!!!
I guess early exam booking is advisible for December as demand will be high!

I think the paper was tricky, few of the never examined areas were examined, but this is what professional qualification papers are all about, expect the unexpected. My opinion is only that ACCA should not make these early papers that much tough for the students, at least for this level papers, the papers should not be constructed in a way to fail maximum students, rather than they should be given a fair chance of passing it.

I still just cant understand 8 marks for TQM question.

Just my 2c worth but I think everyones efforts are being focused on the wrong people here. The examiners job is to make it difficult and to throw some curve balls… I am fairly confident I failed or if not only narrowly passed but there was nothing in the exam that I didn’t understand. The problem was the topics I was lead to believe will come up and where I should focus my efforts. For example, standard costing played a major part in question 2? Yet this was a topic that was left for home study through BPP. As a result I skimmed through it and gave it no weight. I only knew what TQM was from opening the page by chance the day before. Whilst I understood the concepts putting these into meaningful precise points was difficult so I will only have picked up a few marks. The whole healthcare scenario was quite confusing and hard to apply theory to though but I think the emphasis was on the six differences about a service industry – again very hard to qualify having spent no time on the subject.
Questioon 1 was going well – separate fixed and variable costs to find the cost per product. From memory I had one as cheaper to outsource the other to make in house. Then came the limiting factor – labour hours. This threw me completely as normally I’d look to find contribution per bottleneck factor and rank. However, there was no SP so contributin could not be calculated. I simply worked out the cost per bottleneck hour by dividing cost by hours taken and ranked the cheaper product as 1st. I suspect there was more to it – maybbe work out variable contribution by producing in house and using this – if this works? In the end I had the two products switch in terms of lower cost so made 100000 of 1 and 50k of the other – I forget which way round it was.
The discussion was then on the potential flaws of outsourcing – reliability, quality control, stability of the supplier, proximity to supplier, incentives to produce at quality if contracts were fixed for 2 years etc.
The point I maker is that whilst this question had a nasty surprise it should have been taught to us – I’m sure the correct way of ranking by contribution is simple and our tutors should have the foresight to think of ways the exxaminer might trick us.
Seasonal variations – luckily I looked over this so had a good crack. I think the trend was 43.25 increasing, then add this to the previous moving average to get the next quarters, times by the SV etc. I’m not sure but suspect the ‘average’ sv bit meant we needed to consider the previous quarters sv also??
I don’t belive the discussion was so much about flexible budgeting as to how the poor forecast models were affecting morale. They were obviously drivign budgets making excess wastage leading to reduced profitability etc.
The variance question should have been simple but I messed up somewhere as my total variances didn’t match exactly everything was provided. My profits did add up though so I know I got something right but definitely missed the planning variance bit. Given there werw only 10 marks I think surely this level of detail was not needed although if it mentioned market share then I’m sure they wanted us to use it.
Finally, the last question was quite simple in terms of ROI and RI. Profit after fixed costs apportionment * 12 / the bottom capital figure. The impact of the fixed costs creeated a drop in the ROI – outside of the control of the divisional manager. Both were still above the 10% cost of capital though so were worthy. I also mentioned that the machinery was a relatively expensive and depreciated heavily so was possibly a risky use of company funds. I completely missed the controllable versus net profit point they mentioned so waffled on without answering the question.
Looking back I know I could have done better but the pressure and time constraints made it hard to focus. I don’t think anything was unanswerable, merely not expected therefore not revised in detail which I blame more on the tutors that the examiner. More marks were available for discussions that I’d expect so I know I fell down here as I didn’t much too much focus on this in my revision – if these were covewred in lectures with more emphasis I’m sure we’d remember without needing to revise over and over again. Its much harder reading from the text book and trying to take it in.
My main problem was lack of preparation – starting to revise 2 days before and expecting to cover the entire course plus the areas of ‘home study’ was unrealistic. Providing I can get close to 40% ill be relatively happy in the knowledge that at the retake with a little more work Ill be okay.
If/when I fail I’m going to be on to the tutor to complain as I really can’t see what my money has gone to. Paying for course only to be advised of ‘home study’ chapters makes little sense to me and if anything is detrimental in giving the wrong idea about which topics to focus on

Q1 , Q3 and Q5 were not bad, but Seasonal Trending,
Well I covered Target Costing, and gave some relevant answers, but struggled to come up with ideas applicable to service industry, TQM were hardly covered in my class or in revision course.
I spent hours upon hours, especially understanding the decision trees (as this was never examined before and was new to the syllables) as well as other core areas, linear programming, learning curve, throughput accounting, lifecyle costing, pricing, profit volume charts, performance management, variations etc. etc.

I think my answer had 100,000 of the 0.75hrs product = 75,000 leaving 25,000 remaining. This equates to 50,0000 inhouse, 50000 outsourced of the 0.5hrs product – so yes, quite possible – although probably not correct.
When I said hard to qualify I meant I couldn’t remember the exact terms ie. SHIP – which now you say is very easy to remember. I was able to describe them in a roundabout way bbut without the corrects terms o I’d assume I’d drop a few marks. Hardly the easiest 4 makkrs though giving that this was covered in the home study chapter of standard costing – the one that I and I guess others skipped over.

I actually ordered the revision kit but never got round to looking through it which was obviously a stupid move. My point is that BPP should cover these in the main course but instead it seems like they rely on revision kits, revision classes as an extension of the time they have to teach. I understand time is limited and they can not cover everything but I think an extra week or two of teaching would allow for a more comprehensive schedule. The course is very expensive and so I question how much value there is if you need to do lots of extra study off your own back.