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i find this very unfair too cuz of the past resource available for students are mostly calculative questions and exam sat by another examiner which did not strike a balance between cal and theory based questions, it is obviously tilted to the latter.
Most likely most of the lecturers will have their style of teaching changed after this sitting.
Why must we be the guinea pig? 🙁- Topics: 0
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I think the exam is really hard with too many interpretation questions instead of calculation (alhtough the new examiner has indeed said that in his examiner approach).
Q1.
I had no idea what is the difference between CSF building and monitoring. So I just differentiate them by building good brand and good product and monitoring their performance (in terms of profitability, good customer statisfaction, etc).Q2.
Was quite okay with some discussion about traditional costing and ABC and beyond bugetting approach.Q3.
EVA and other key ratios. The calculation was quite okay. Not so sure about the discussion part though.Q4.
Another difficult part. I was running out of time and thats why Im choosing Q4 over Q5 as there seem to be less information than Q5. I waffled a lot in here as I am not sure how to answer part a…i really did not have a clue. I answered by using : employees work ethics, business culture in Ostland (customers would like to see the sales people in person instead of by email). For part b, i just compared the target with the actual then comment on their performance.Overall I think it is quite difficult exam which is time pressured. I was not able to finalize every parts of the questions requirement. Cross my finger and I hope I will pass this one.
Best of luck to you guys as well.
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yep, with the movie company in q1 i went on about getting audience repsonses through reviews and complaints lodged to the film board of control, communication with the customer and assess market share and market segmentation. the company operated in 3 markets that are totall diff..alot of what you guys wrote is similar and akin to what i thought. hopefully the idea is that you apply real world common sense with an apptitude for performance management…seems to be what he got at in the article. for example, sounded like FP operated in a performance pyramid, top down approach, and we could assess performance using combindation of difference csfs and dimmensions etc….
tricky in that you could ace it but at the same time fail it if that makes sense? guess you have to write what he is looking for and he never made that clear in many of the questions!!!
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I wrote on how success could be achieved with what films achieve blockbuster status i thought it was very relevant do u think so this is all for ques 1 of course
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I finished my revision by practising most revision kit question(not all) and past exam papers….I was shocking for seeing too many interpretation questions on this sitting….it’s more like P3 and different from previous papers.
can not helping laughing by applefanfan’s posting…wish u have a nice Xmas,all the best for everyone here- Topics: 0
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yeah i agree buddy,. see from reading his article, its assumed you know the technical stuff, learning off lists doesnt cut it. you have to think outside the box, very p3 & p1…so could go either way for everyone!!
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@ kc81 , yes, u can ace it or fail it !!
Q1 – i tried my answer to be as relevant to the scenario as possible, and imagine it in real life situation. monetaring or building CSF, never heard of them either. i thought monitoring are those which are external to the organisation and which FP needs to be constantly aware of (logic from monitoring) eg. the movie reviews, the holiday trends, vampire mania, etc. building i said is about building within the organisation. like having strong cost control, or any other factors that relate to improving operating performance.
part C i linked them all up, eg. movie ratings on the website etcQ3 – EVA easy, op bal of working capital and interest after tax adjustment.
Discussion was very similar to examiner article.. at this point of the exam i start getting behind my scheduleQ2 – tried the ABC and traditional. not so sure whether ABC cost driver apportin was rught, but picked up on cost drivers and overheads costs being not in order etc. comment was logical based on the figures i got, so at least that should score a mark
Beyond budgeting, well it was 8-9marks, i have few good and lots of waffle too
Q5 – not bad, everything was ready calculated so pure analysis. a good subjec as well, corp failure
overall mark allocated to questions seem very random
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Why in these days suddenly question papers become so long and to much analysis in that short time. They decided to kill us by long question??????
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I feel it was quite okay, not that bad…Although the first question was unexepected, it was rather difficult to come up with proper CSFs and KPIs for such a specific industry under time pressure. And 2a was a bit complicated, not sure I did it correctly. But I’m happy with the optional questions, I feel I made up for lost marks in the first two questions. Good luck to everyone with the results:)
I think paper was quite different from past sittings…………but not a bad one…I think it was lot more easy to do if you understand th ewordings…
Q1 was based upon a previous article upon csfs and everything was there what examiner has asked….building monitoring csf as…
Q2 a was bit confusing what to do ….I ended up with low cost in abc so recoomended to lower the price so that benefit from future compititors.
b was beyond budgeting… so was nice…def..principles…drawbacks of traditional budgets …and some realtions with scenario….Q3 a VBM…measuring value of company by future cash flow…..value mindset…link with performance management..
b EVA very easy calculation EPS share price…but struggled to write more except two three points…
c) again linking eva to cash flow as eva has same logic as NPV and difference in traditional profil measures…
I did Q 5.was running out of time so wrote very few points on each parts although if enough time was there was a easy one….
overall marking should be easy as paper was different and was not as expected…- Topics: 0
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Completely out of left field this exam was. Where was my lovely budget comparison? I barely picked up my calculator – it was much too theoretical. It worries me when ppl say they had to ask for another answer booklet. Does that mean I didn’t write enough?? And don’t even talk about Q1… ugh! I felt like a, b & c was the same question – just phrased differently. lol
I actually liked Qus2 coming out of the exam but then someone said the mark-up was NOT on full cost, just the production cost? Arrgh! First P4 now this, why me?- Topics: 0
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don’t think this paper was fair at all! Fair enought he examiner said he would give more discursive questions – but to give discurisve question on parts of the paper which have no really length to them is pretty bad!
Where in P5 do CSF’s/KPI’s come up? Certainly not mentioned in open tuition lectures, and don’t recall seeing them in BPP either. This is a question I would expect to find in a P3 paper – given that I sill have this to do then I had no idea what to write – panicked and wasted too much time! Unusual to have a whole question based on one part of theory – not like he “pilot question” at all in my opinion.
HORRIBLE! will be re-sitting next year!
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Everyone has a different style, I asled for 3booklets, mind u only used one page of the last booklet
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Completely disgusted by the examiner why do this to us …..we practise past exam questions then find out exam nothing like anything we have done..
Worst p5 paper I have ever seen!!!! I have done all practice but nothing could prepare me for this.I am sure pass rate will be the low 30s . The questions were not worded properly so didn’t understand what was wanted.
*****Third time writing this paper…..I hope I pass b cuz I am FREAKING FED UP…..didn’t feel as bad as i felt after the 1st 2 times i wrote it…but i’m still not in the clear…..PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE LET ME PASS!!!!****
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I think the paper is ok, compared to P4—loads of both computations and reports! The questions are not lengthy, but our answers are long. The questions are reasonabaly long so leave us enough time to thhink and write. The new examiner’s sample question has stated and showed his new style for the paper–he expects we have analytical skill rather than computation.I have studied the text book too and still found going through the book is useful. Something(theories, models..) always comes across your mind during the exam. Anyway best luck for all of us
it was horrible. one of the worst papers I’ve seen and it was the last one for me.
Can the tutor make some comments on the answers so that we can judge our answers please?- Topics: 0
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It was interesting to note that exam made use of several articles in Student Accountant – on CSFs, Beyond Budgeting, Failure predictions models. The ABC latest article explained well together with the calculations the difference between the traditional and ABC approaches to allocate overheads, and the ABC exam question was set in that line.
The new examiner did not ask any extraordinary question. In fact, as a post – event analysis I can state that reading with understanding those articles alone contributed substantially to exam success.
As we should bear in mind the exam questions will always be not the ones we saw, it was important to learn the textbook along with question practice.
Yes, I was also surprised by the new style of paper overall. And aware very well that it is quite obvious where you score marks on calculations rather than on totally discursive questions ( As I saw my 2 mocks markings, I realised that even half of page writing does not guarantee you 1 mark).
But I do not think that by seeing different style of questions which were absolutely within the syllabus I have a right to claim the unfairness of the paper.
However I suspect that overall ratio of calculations to discussions has not been maintained on this paper, which according to LSBF free video lecture- out of total 120 marks available( 5 questions = 120 marks) average discussion marks = 74.7 and average computation marks = 45.3. If examiner’s performance assessed on these KPIs, next time we shall definitely see more computations.
My colleagues – students, what do you think about the adherence to those PIs?
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I attended BPP taught course, revision course and their mystudy too but they did not help me much as I hadn’t done F5. I was totally hopeless that I didn’t even have the courage go through the revision kit hardly. But luckily I got the idea of downloading opentution’s notes and I simply read the whole notes just the day before exam. To my surprise the exam sounded much easier than any of the previous questions and I try to attempt from BPP’s kit. I didn’t leave any part except the calc part of ABC. So I now have a some rays of hope. Thanks to opentution for the clear and easy notes which I could read like a story unlike BPP’s horrible notes. I should also mention we were taught by the subject expert of BPP on the revision course with his high standard?!. One should re-think of joining BPP/Kaplan again as I don’t their courses are value for money anymore!!!
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REMEMBER IF YOU FELT THE EXAM WAS UNFAIR (I DEFINITELY DID!) THEN PLEASE LEAVE FEEDBACK WITH ACCA AS THEY WILL TAKE THIS INTO ACCOUNT WHEN MAKRING THE PAPER:
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Didnt expect that at all…have been through the past papers as part of my exam prep and apreciate that this is a new examiner, but where was the continuity?? I really didnt like the style of the exam,far to wordy (im not the best writer in the world and time was totally against me) and some of the language use wasnt good. Not so much roll on February but roll on June for the re-take…
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Screggle I totally agree with you. Guys we should all leave negative feedback to this exam and maybe hope for some curve grading. This is by far the worst approach to the syllabus I have seen from all ACCA papers. I read crap load of material and did all of the exam kit and i have as much chances to passing this exam as a person who did not prepare at all ( well maybe 5-10 points more). Leave your feedback [url==https://www.accaglobal.com/allnews/students/2010/NEWSQ4/News/3381129null[/url} ][/url]
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I did leave a feedback to complain the damn P5 ! I also did a lot and thought I would have chance to pass it,now no confidence, not a little.
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