APM*** P5 June 2011 Exam was … Post your comments here and vote in Instant Poll ***

@dou said:
hey guys,

can i know the meaning of critically assess in your mind?
For my understanding through the website, i knew that critically assess is weigh arguments for and against something, assessing all evidence. Decide which opinions, theories, models or items are preferable. So, measurement will be needed??hmm...

and the notional interest of capital, in the question 1, i get from bpp text book that it was WACC, so i think many of us is getting wrong, even by using the assumption, except the examiner 'planned' to give more people pass, thus they will give more sympathetic marks. (pray to the GOD!lol)

Any ideas for question 2 about the evaluate the performance measure? I just felt examiner is testing us about the understanding on the using of BSC. Thus the measurement method make me feel little bit weird. Will you use share price to evaluate your company financial perspectives? i think NOT,because it was depends on the markets and you are not controllable on it. So if you show it, it was not related to your company performance for the year, right?(As profit margin or ROCE is more likely that you can control on it.)
*Share price changes is based on supply and demand and only can say the company had attracted new investors.

Q3,building block. A) part is bonus, it just want us show out the detail of building block, it was purely like fundamental level style. So, they was testing do you study the models before coming to the exam.

And q4 is rush for me,because i put too many times on the transfer pricing to understand what they are talking about. it was really messy question if compare to the questions i did before.

Anyway, i just hope for a pass, no need flying colour! REALLY, pray hard for everyone. Then most of us can graduate and throw the books away permanently.

MASTER!! I hope i can come it in this year!

@jenniedawnwilson1 said:
Hi All

Without going into too much detail, famous last words, my main sticking points were.

Q1- a)straight away i spotted the overhead allocation and couldnt decide whether the figures for the calcs should include them, or act as if they werent there?? i ended up doing two sets of calcs, one lot including them, one lot without. i knew this wasnt ideal, but i thought if i made a call either way it would be wrong!
Also wasnt the whole point in the WACC that there was no share capital, it was just debt, so the wacc was just the the debt (100%x whateva the cost of debt was)?

Q1-b) how annoying, i was actually hoping trf pricing would come up, but the way he worded the question was so weird i didnt actually understand what was going on in the scenario (i wrote this on my exam paper).

Q2 & 3- were fine in a sense, but felt 20 marks for basically just talking about a model related to the scenario was too heavily weighted. felt like i was kind of repeating myself a lot.

Q5- i only picked this because when i saw the BCG i panicked, i hadnt looked at this since studying p3! Again annoyingly, I had studied Environmental Management Accounting, it was tipped by the tutor, but it was only when got to this question (in the last 20 mins of the exam) i realised they were talking about 3 different types?? I knew what it was, the advantages, why people would use it, the costs etc. but didnt even know there were 3 types. When i got home and looked in the text book, there were indeed 3 types! Messed that one up then!

Overall I think although ok from the outset, there were a lot of marks on very few areas, obscure areas of the syllabus were tested (apart from q1), and he needs to explain himself better in the questions. I best have passed, cos i cant be bothered sitting this one again!

Guess that was a bit too much detail! OOPS!

@joe46 said:
Can someone please tell me briefly what the criteria for transfer pricing are as asked in the exam?