Paper P5 Dec 2010 exam was

wow this paper would have taken everybody for a suprise.There was hardly any calculations in sec a other than abc and absorption costing…..

sec b contained eva and some babyish ratios……

Overall the paper was fair but pretty lenghty….Looks like the new examiner has stamped the paper with his own syle. Basically he’s not interested in calculations as he has mentioned in his examiners approach…..
I would love to see the exam pass rates under this approach…..
Many students today were shocked with massive theory and analysing bits of this paper….

sad sitting…unexpected hard…

I’m pretty certain I’ve f***** this one right up! This paper was TOTALLY different from previous papers and I know if you have learnt everything then that shouldn’t really be an issue but I’m sure the BPP taught course focus is driven by past papers and from my memeory we only really covered about a third of the paper.

I was hoping that most pepople felt the same so that the marking would be more lenient, but it appears that most people on here found it to be OK, so seems like there is a good chance of me faling.

H O R R I B L E

Reasonably ok but the first time I have ever used more than one answer booklet – really lengthy.

very lengthy and not what i expected at all, totally agree with ‘khadkaroshan’ very p3 – not holding out much hope to be honest.

Think its a bit unfair to have revision from one examiner that everyone does then an exam written by someone else that is so totally different.

I have alreday left this as feebcak on Acca website, think others should too !

I am surprised that I found it ok, mainly because I couldn’t do the calculations so the lack of them was to my advantage. Thought some of the wordings of the questions were really confusing and I completey BOMBED 2a, bye bye 15 marks but other than that I hope I was actually answering the questions correctly.

I anticipated it going a hell of a lot worse!

Guys i’m really sorry if some of you feel like you’ve done terribly bad but you should be mindful that this paper is an advanced version of paper f5 and you can’t expect the paper to be full of calculations specially when the new examinor has indicated himself that there will be less calculations and more reasoning.
Anyway, its done and dusted now……so stick it in the pigeon hole and focus on your other papers to come.
all the best

the wordingh in q1 was general at best, monitoring and buildingh etc..i took the approach to use csfs from both building block and bal scorecard, monitoring being profit, competitiveness etc, and building being innovation, interna processing improvement, felxibility, resource and cost utilisation etc…

i think he wanted the whole paper to link together and thus never spelt out what he wanted in the questions…i think if you attempt everything you cant go wrong, especially with theory

the paper was crazy!!!

yes Q1 i just could not think of PI’s for the “increase customer satisaction”, i ended up with surveying customers leaving cinema, and complaint level on website (rubbish).

never ever heard of “building/monitoring”. i prsume building meant building the company thru mkt share/mkt growth so i wrote about increasing being more attuned to customer tatstes and mkt share thru diversifying into new film genres etc? waffle. monioring being control activities?? could be way off..

i said analysing sales and cosy figures for profitabilty which was a v limited answer too.

Q2 – made a mess of the ABC calc, couldnt work ouw what to do with admin of prod, so costs were way off. did ok on why beyond buget would be good for the comp i think : non stdised product, quality differentiator etc so absoroption costing is not suitable…etc
Beyond Budgeting was ok too.

Q3. EVA – calc was v basic, i thought i was doing something wrong it was so straight forward.
take the profit add back interest, work out WACC and cap emp and bingo. 3 mins work.

said EPS was based on accounting profits and these can be manipulated and Share price is volatile and based on lots of factors outside comp contol so not a great measure.

VBM – all i said was a focus on value added activies, and get rid of non added value etc..went thru examples of how it would help the comp.

Q4. Z scores / Failure

this was fine too, qualitative/quantitaive was ok, analyse the calcualtion given was ok too. just talked about z score failing in 2 of 3 years, that z scores are all called with TA in the denomiator, when TA increased rapidly the Z score will fall.
i said it doesnt take into a/c the future revenue generation potential of the comp as they have just invested in new machies etc.. (not sure how right i am). talked about gearing and WC too here.

over all Q1/Q2 v poor maybe 25/60, hoping for 25/40 in other 2 Q’s
fingers crossed for that, its going to be a tight one.

Apparently, the new examiner is a horriable person. he just doesn’t want us to have a nice Xmas. I did a lot of question and thought i prepared very well, however….i still have nothing more to say in the exams.