APMJune 10 Exams POLL Paper P5 was Post your comments here

Did anyone else feel there was very little in the exam. Very wishy washy with nothing to get your teeth into. Lots of waffly comments. Where were all of the models. Blanaced scorecard and that was it!! Hopefully did enough to pass.

I found today's paper, easy in itself, but very lengthy, There was lot to write about with models and value for money. I left 9 marks due to time shortage. Hope to get atleast 50

@brucester1974 said:
Did anyone else feel there was very little in the exam. Very wishy washy with nothing to get your teeth into. Lots of waffly comments. Where were all of the models. Blanaced scorecard and that was it!! Hopefully did enough to pass.

Cannot Agree more...
Where were the ROI RI EVA NPV Learning Curve etc...
This is the last paper for Shane Johnson. From the Dec 2010, the examiner will be Alex Watt...

i was expecting more calculation and hadn't prepared enough knowledge and waffle!!! my bad - but definitely failed!! oh well!!

CAN SUM1 PLS WRITE THE QUESTIONS and MARK ALLOCATION if you can remember pls!

It truly was not a tough paper! very bad time management...
hoping for a pass, though dnt think i did that well. I did question 5 last and didnt attempt all of it.
Fingers crossed, otherwise ill be sitting again in December...
Arrrgg!

@brucester1974 said:
Did anyone else feel there was very little in the exam. Very wishy washy with nothing to get your teeth into. Lots of waffly comments. Where were all of the models. Blanaced scorecard and that was it!! Hopefully did enough to pass.

Absolutely!!!
No NPV, RI, ROI, EVA! Nothing from P5 at all!!! Even "balanced scorecard" is more of P3 than that of P5. Absolutely awful exam!
Had no time to answer a lot of subsections in questions.
And a very strange task on EV in Q2 about horses - spent a lot of time, but did not get it right...
Maybe my first fail...

The exam was easy.
I think I could pass it together with F5 two years ago :)
Thanks to Shane Johnson for his present and good luck!

Hope the markers to recognise the marks fairly.

HOW DID YOU CALCULATE THE EXPECTED VLAUE and Q2 ?

And in VFM , what did you right abotu service charactersitics like perishbility , heterogenity etc ?

@hisham006 said:
CAN SUM1 PLS WRITE THE QUESTIONS and MARK ALLOCATION if you can remember pls!

Q1 - Report on:
- balanced score card and importance of NFPIs (13 marks)
- calculate average cost per consultation for full time staff and sub-contractors (about 7 marks)
- comment on trends in the table (5 marks)
- what are the benefits and problems of working with sub-contractors (6 marks)
- professional marks (4 marks)
Total: 35 marks

Q2:
- prepare budgeted PL (7 marks)
- prepare EV table (9)
- comment on EV table (3)
- discuss why government decided to open a college comprising both equine studies and a riding school (6)
Total: 25 marks

Q3:
Discuss meaning and relevance to the company of the following:
- Value for money (VFM) audit (8 marks)
- efficiency, effectiveness, economy (6 marks)
- discuss simultaneity, perishability, heterogeneity and intangibility of service (6 marks)
Total: 20

Q4 - ABM (did not select it, so do not remember the task)

Q5:
a) discuss how statement of target cost may assist the company in obtaining @Platinum Status" (8 marks)
b) comment using the data in table on:
- financial performance and marketing
- intarnal efficiency
- extranal effectiveness (6 marks)
c) .... (do not remember)


-

How did you calculate expected value?

phew! job done now we can watch the world cup. but, has any one noticed almost all the tuition providers got it wrong on tips??

@PrinceAcid said:
How did you calculate expected value?

the way you are supposed to by multiplying the values with joint probability ;)

i left one whole question, and there's no model to apply i spent all my efforts on them and there was nothing .and what was that value for money audit? fail:(

@PrinceAcid said:
How did you calculate expected value?

I reduced the revenue by the percentages quoted, deducted costs and then mulitplied by problability for each probable outcome. Total all of these up to get the EV. This is done for both the college and riding school to give the overall EV for the company.

disaster...hadnt even thought this paper will be this tough..

I passed I think - but still not happy with the exam.
No Failure Prediction Models
No EVA, ROI, RI, NPV
No Pricing
No Learning Curve
Only TQM, Target Costing, E Values and Balanced Scorecard. The rest of the paper was the ability to waffle and pad an answer!
For Q 2 I said the government set up the Academy because;
1) To maybe provide a socially important service at a lower price than a private company. Important in a developing country
2) To show that they are philanthropic and this would help them in attaining investment from foreign companies and foreign governments in aid
3) Often governments in developing countries have an enormous sense of pride and nationalistic tendancies. They may not like a private company providing such an important service.

Would that get me the 6 marks I need to pass??

Also, for the budgeted income statement - anybody else get profit of around $5.4 million?

Discursive questions were very open and confusing - not sure what they really wanted. It feels like the examiners formulated the answers first, and they came up with the question to suit it. Trouble is, we can't read his mind well enough to intepret the question!

Also, did anyone notice the mistake in Q2? The heading of the probability table given. It should be "no. of students" instead of "student fees".

Princeacid: to calculate the EV, u need to list down all 9 possible outcomes by pairing the outcomes up. Then calculate the adjusted profit for each outcome individually, add them up together to get ur net profit.
Get combined probability by multiplying probabiliyt of outcome 1 with probability of outcome 2. Multiply the results again to obtain the EV. Finally, sum them up together.
Lengthy, took me 5minutes to figured out what they really wanted.

This is what i did calculated 3 values for College(No change , 10% decrease ,20% decrease) and 3 for Riding school( (90,80,70% utilization)


and then added the revenues and multipled with corresponding joint probability

NC+90
NC+80
NC+70
-10+90
-10+80
-10+70
-20+90
-20+80
-20+70


hope i got it right (damn spent soo much time on it )

on ev, i picked profts derived from (a) as basis. then i) no change in school profit had 0.2 prob that had to be multiplied respectively to capacity (occupancy?) of horses whch was 90%, 80%, 70% i think. repeat process for -10% change in profit whcih had 0.5 prob and lastly do for -20% change, something like that.

i did this last but couldnt finish properly, no time!

not bad,i believe God will crown it with success.

@howexcellent said:
on ev, i picked profts derived from (a) as basis. then i) no change in school profit had 0.2 prob that had to be multiplied respectively to capacity (occupancy?) of horses whch was 90%, 80%, 70% i think. repeat process for -10% change in profit whcih had 0.5 prob and lastly do for -20% change, something like that.

i did this last but couldnt finish properly, no time!

What is this 90% ?

What i did is ,

revenue x 10 % (decrease) x probability..,.

?

even my lecture was almost wrong on tips. I expected EVA, RI*, ROI, corporate failure, environmental issue. well, hoping to pass. Fingers crossed.

that was ok paper,a bit lengthy i am not been able to complete the paper but still hoping for a pass

Guys , one thing i noticed , NEVER EVER EXPECT ANYTHING IN OPTIONAL PAPERS !! SPECIFICALLY P4 and P5 !! .....

If u do , u will be demotivated in the exam ....

@enigma1981 said:
I passed I think - but still not happy with the exam.
No Failure Prediction Models
No EVA, ROI, RI, NPV
No Pricing
No Learning Curve
Only TQM, Target Costing, E Values and Balanced Scorecard. The rest of the paper was the ability to waffle and pad an answer!
For Q 2 I said the government set up the Academy because;
1) To maybe provide a socially important service at a lower price than a private company. Important in a developing country
2) To show that they are philanthropic and this would help them in attaining investment from foreign companies and foreign governments in aid
3) Often governments in developing countries have an enormous sense of pride and nationalistic tendancies. They may not like a private company providing such an important service.

Would that get me the 6 marks I need to pass??

Also, for the budgeted income statement - anybody else get profit of around $5.4 million?

Yes I got about 5.4 million which I thought was unusually high considering the revenue but it may be a reflection of the lack of competition.

The tuition fee's were extremely high.

Thought the exam was going to be worse, the discursive elements suited me better though.

90% is 0.9 = horse utilisation. However stop worrying about this bit prince. lets all hope for a pass!

I didnt apply profit changes to total revenue of college & horse however i changed fee per student & per horse category revenue of all three categories respectively and got six figures of net profits accordingly then i applied joint probability like that
first category profit of college x probibilty + first category of horse riding x probabilty
(XXXXXXX x 0.2 + XXXXXXXX x 0.1?)
So i ended up getting nine figures of expected profits
i hope i did right as i remeber doing it somewhere in question bank of IFP Book.
What do u say???

i too..think the paper was too lengthy..with little stuff in it!!
just not the type of paper expected..
u knw..RI,ROI,EVA,NPV!!

wer did all dt go??
well...hop atleast 50!!

May Allah give me a pass!
Amen!