APM*** P5 June 2014 Exam was.. Instant Poll and comments ***

hard

I dunno know what the examiner want to do...

there could have been 100 pages why only 10 page questions; examiner could have printed the whole news paper. Our lives are joke to ACCA. And yes very well destroyed. cheers to kaboom;

That Question 3a and 3b kinda suck, i could have spent the whole day still i wont be able to figure it out

that was my 5th attempt. dont know wat to to do...

I wanted to write 3d and 4th, but because of the fact that 3d took me too much time, I hadn't time to figure out normally, and instead of 4th, I wrote 2nd :( in 20 minutes. But I knew answers to 4th better.... I was under serious stress.

overall paper was quite technical compare to last few attempts.

nothing from various models. very extraordinary. hard to cross this. examiner need to act in a little bit soft way considering the question pattern. may god help all friends who are suffering with P5.

Added up and total came to about 49! Possible to slip or hopefully examiner will find something to award marks for. Insha-Allah, hoping to pass. A pass will be good enough.

I think pass percentage may climb up to 33% this time.

I felt I covered thoroughly the vast majority of syllabus during my study and annoyed that so few topics came up. Where were the performance management models (Pyramid, Prism, Scorecard, Building Blocks), where was BCG or Ansoffs or porters 5 forces. And where was Value-Based Management in my study text, yet 10% of the exam.

Paper was not well balanced and just trying to understand the questions to avoid the pitfalls took up quite a lot of time. Just question 1(a) itself contains pitfall of asking us to comment on the format/preparation of the report. If we did not read requirement and story carefully, we will probably rush in with ratio analysis and criticising its financial performance.

guys, how to analyse the Q1 part (i), what did you say about the report in Q1?

A complete joke of a paper!

Castillan, I agree. Q1 was set up for people to answer what they think was the requirements. I think the examiner is trying to make a point of understanding requirement rather than testing relevant material (surprised no model was tested considering how much of the syllabus it accounts for) Also asking for Eva was fair enough, but not giving wacc formula was ridiculous considering this was in p4 formula sheet! Thankfully I sat p4 this sitting too, but would definity have struggled to remember if I didn't sit it.

I think the examiner has to revisit the chapter talking about cultural differences! The Exam in itself was challenging, but not extremely hard. Really hard was to understand what the examiner is asking and what he is looking for in the answer!!! He should understand that we are not all English natives and a lot of us don't even work with native English speakers, and we may not be familiar with some particularities of the English language. I mean that we are not taking this exam to spend 1h guessing what he is asking... He should formulate some of his questions to be more straightforward or give details of what he expects to find in the answer.

you are correct, more money for ACCA

For Q1 part(i), i added pretty generic comments like the report is too quantitative and only provided information regarding financial performance, qualitative factors are not considered. Also mentioned that there is no comparison with past year data. Performance was also not benchmark against the market or competitors. Not sure what i wrote is correct but i just crap whatever i can.....

I actually Found out quite recently that "evaluate" means advantages and disadvantages. I mean why doesnt he Just say pro and cons etc. I agree that getting past the requirements seems to be a barrier for most people, and to be fair they probably know the answer but are falling into the pitfalls unfairly laid upon them.

Well that's the reason why, having had even the first glimpse of Q 3, i moved to Q4. Did the Scenarios really call for a bit general answers, or it seemed to me like?.

Ana agree with you. Though I think even native English speakers will have problem understanding the examiner's requirement. Examiner should relook at the consistently low pass rates for the past 5 sittings and make the paper more doable and not more difficult zzzz... think he is aiming for pass rates below 30%.

Castillian I think there is some sense in your cap as I said exactly the same things you said but I didn't get it straight away until I came back to it after attempted other questions. You look at the mission statement to identify their stakeholders and pick one model to answer the question. I used standard and reward from building blocks for employees and customers perspective and internal business process from the bsc as performance tools they could have used instead of budget. Then even the budget was related to activities beyond the control of employed so was not appropriate as a measure of their performance.

Requirements are so unclear that too much time is wasted on understanding them. It may be just a lucky guess if you write right staff in your answer.

I think lots of predictions came up this time, but paper is very lengthy, VBM, beyond budgeting,EVA, Staff management,mission statement all came up. On 1) part three I use building block model as implementation of VBM, Not sure.

My humble advice for all. Please always treat the pilot papers shortly before the exam. I was fortunate to have treated the latest pilot paper just yesterday to have figured out q3. 2 questions from today's paper was featured in the pilot paper including our glorious question 3.

Dimeji Yes agreed. Just trying to tie back our answers to the story as much as possible. But sometimes it takes time to figure out the correlation between the different topics (e.g what is the correlation between VBM and mission statement?). In most instance we just throw out whatever comes soundly to our mind. No time to figure whether this answers the question.

I think question 3 was about risk decision making : Maximax, etc

Q3. Maximax maximin and minimax regret. Risk appetite and attitude then do a pay off table to offer your advice

VBM I used strategic and operational VBM to explain

Castillian that is why the examiners confess that there are no straight forward answers hence the term technical and professional. The mission statement mentions maximisation of shareholders value and you use vbm as a strategy of achievement for that objective. Remember that vbm is a mgt approach where strategies and processes are aligned to ensuring that non value adding activities are eliminated. That is creating value for shareholders.