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Hey guys, I absolutely hate SBL — such a boring and useless exam in my opinion with 0 practical knowledge.
In real life all models are useless, all companies look for one and one thing only — to maximize profit and reduce costs, they would outsource everything just to achieve that goal. But no in SBL you have to talk about strategic importance and other b*******.
And then they give all those scenarios that would be never possible in real life and you have to comment on them. Such a waste of time and energy. And btw this is my last exam I cleared all other exams in the first attempt achieving scores of at least 61 but failed terribly SBL in June so I am preparing for September.
I used Open Tuition for all my exams except for Advanced Tax. But honestly SBL lectures I don’t find that helpful. They don’t go over any practice problems.
In addition SBL syllabus is pretty wide but in reality much of that is useless for exam. You may end up knowing lots of things of 0 practical application for the exam.
I signed up for another prep class, wont mention it here since don’t want to give free advertising and then practicing as much as possible. I do believe books/revision kits are also useless to prep for the exam.
Anyway I just felt like expressing my truthful opinion about this miserable exam.
Seems that you are just frustrated with the result and the rest is your own opinion. I think you do not have enough experience to connect the dots from SBL exam to actual management. Scenarios might be unrealistic (life can also be unrealistic sometimes) but that is why they are called scenarios. I am exactly in the same position as you with one exam left and September will be my first SBL try, but the syllabus seems not far away from real issues the companies have to analyze. “To maximize a profit and reduce a cost” is an outcome of strategy but you need to know how to maximize the profit and reduce the cost and this is more less the purpose of this exam to me. Seems to me that you do not understand that revenues are not increasing just because someone says so or decides to increase the price (which might actually kill the company), same with costs and it is easy to stay behind the competitors if you do not analyze your strategy, environment, capabilities, if you do not forecast or investigate the variances. I have found quite a lot of analogies to real life and I think that maybe at some point in your career you will find too. Good luck with the exam! Hope we will make it on September 🙂
Have to say I agree with the original poster after today’s sitting. Studied an awful lot of content only to be given a curveball. Now the 6 week wait to be told I haven’t passed and then cram everything in to 6 weeks before my resit. ACCA really need to think about their structuring of exams. I don’t feel like I passed today but on the slim chance I did, I don’t want to start a new topic and then find out I haven’t passed and then have to resit and go over all the stuff I studied before. Feels like a memory test which is not relevant to today’s world. Why can’t we have more exams which are shorter in length and quicker to mark so we can actually be experts and understand theories rather than trying to guess what might come up in an exam.
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