Hello and welcome to this presentation for ACCA F5 Performance Management. My name
is Jo Ryan and I'm a subject matter expert at BPP. During this session we're going
to be focusing on how to approach narrative questions within the F5 exam.
This is preparation that you can use for any exam at F5 and we're going to be
having a look at why it's important. So I'm going to start the session of by
thinking about why we need to consider narrative questionedsas a particular
topic. I'm also going to be having a look at the skills that you need to approach
narrative questions within the exam and the approach that you could take, with
specific reference to question 5 from the June 2015 exam, which is the Lesting
Regional Authority. So first of all then, why are narrative questions important in the
exam? Well approximately 50% of the exam is going to be discursive. The pass mark
for the exam is 50% as well so if you opt to focus on the numerical
questions only and the numbers then you're paying a very high risk strategy because you're
trying to get all of the numbers right within the exam. Often, there are easy marks as
well to be had within the narrative questions, so some of the easier marks could be
knowledge marks. If we take the recent June 2015 exam, nearly 60% of the marks
were discursive. So what that means is that we really do have to make sure that
you know how to get the narrative marks in order to pass the exam. For the exam
itself it's really important to make sure that you're comfortable with what the
narrative questions are asking for. So we're going to have a look at how to
approach these and we're going to have a look at the skills which are required,
and we're also going to be thinking about what differentiates a weak answer and
what gives us a good answer within the exam. If you are focusing on the
numerical questions, I know that student's do this because it's really good,
you have have a look at the answer, you can have a look at the solution and you can go,
'oh yeah,
I got that right ,I'm happy with my approach and I know that I performed
well'. The problem comes with narrative questions because students look at the
model answer and unless you've copied the model out there's no way
you're going to have written exactly the same. So the first thing really to overcome
is the fact that many students dislike the narrative questions because they're
hard to debrief. Don't worry about that because when it comes to your exam, the good news is
you've only got to write the questions , you've not got to mark them afterwards.So lets
think about the skills then that we're going to you for our narrative questions.
First of all we need to make good use of the reading and planning time at the start of
the exam.
You get 15 minutes up front and you can make a real difference here to your overall
performance in the exam. Many students who fail are going to be very marginal so if you
can make a real difference in your performance just before the exam
formerly starts then you're going to be doing very well. We also need to make
sure then that we can dissect the requirements properly from the verbs and
thinking about a specific approach that you can use to make sure that your
answers are succinct but mostly to the point. So during the reading time then, what
can you do? Well you could do an answer plan. The narrative questiones lend
themselves very well to being planned out. There's no point in planning out a
numerical question where you have to copy out all the calculations and write
all your workings down twice, but with the narrative questions you can do a very
brief answer plan. And the great thing about this plan is it doesn't need to be
legible, it doesn't need to be well presented unlike the rest of the exam,
you can scribble it down however works for you. You don't need to worry about you
plan being neat and tidy; planning is a very personal thing. I would recommend using
some kind of spider diagram or mind map, avoiding a list. Why would I avoid a list?
Well if you write things down with points 1, 2 and 3 by the side of them, the chances
are that you'll end up writing them in that order.
If you've written it as more free flowing then you can actually prioritize
and write up your best points first, which might not necessarily be the first one
that you thought off.
You also need to dissect the requirement from the verb and think about the mark
allocation. If it's asking you to 'explain' then you need to go into more level
of detail. If we're looking at a requirement, we will look at question 5
in a moment, that asks us to 'briefly outline' or to 'describe' the steps involved in a
process or the advantages of a particular process we can use the marking guide as
an indication of how much to write. Because one of the dangers of narrative
questions is knowing too much and writing more than is available in a
marking guide. And finally thinking then about how to approach them and the types of
paragraphs that we need to be writing. This is an accountancy exam so we're not looking
at necessarily writing the same paragraphs that we would have done it in an
English exam, we're looking at getting our point across in a succinct way.
We're also going to be using headings to break up the answer and to make it more
appealing to those markers. So 'peas' then. Starting off with the next slide, I've
got some peas on the slide because that is my approach that I would
recommend that you use. Make your point,
explain why it's relevant and apply it back to the scenario. So this structure
then is saying to you right, what is it that I'm trying to say? Why is it relevant? Why
does it answer the question that's been set? And then if applicable
apply it back to the scenario. So take something from the past scenarios that
you're given and incorporate it into your answer. So rather than just saying, "sales
have gone up" in a performance management question, you can say, "sales have gone up" full stop,
why this is relevant, and then you can apply it back to the specifics of this
particular scenario. And that will take something then which is going to be worth
zero if you just wrote, "sales have gone up", into a point that could well be worth
2 marks if it's well developed and well explained. So you need to remember.
explanation and application, 'PEA', as a way of making sure that your
points are developed enough. If you use this approach you'll end up with short, punchy
paragraphs of between two and three sentences each, and each of those short
paragraph should be sufficient to score you the marks that you need. So I said
we were going to look at question 5 from June 2015, the Lesting Regional Authority.
And you can see that I've got this question
up on the screen now. There's a temptation, when reading through the
question and approaching it, to start off reading all of the detail about this
regional authority. However, I would say that you don't need to do that at this
stage. You just need to read the first line or two to pick out the important
points and then you need to skip down to the requirement. So what I would be
doing is pulling out from this first introductory paragraph that I'm
looking at a government organization. So we're looking at a not for profit
organization and we're aware of the different objectives there.
They're providing a wide range of services so I have now got into my head
that I'm thinking about local authority. I can now dip into the three requirements
before I read the scenario in detail. When I read the scenario in detail, I
will know why I'm reading the information and what I'm trying to pull out.
So the first part of the requirement, part A, you can see is for 3 marks, and I've looked at the
number of marks before I've even read the question. So 3 marks, I'm not
looking for 'War and Peace', I'm not looking for a long answer. In fact, "describe
the main steps involved in preparing a zero-based budget". The first thing to
pick up on is that this is knowledge. These are some easier knowledge marks in the
exam. From the 'P', we don't need to worry about the application we're just looking
for the point and the explanation. The requirement doesn't ask you to list, it asks
you to describe, so it's not enough to just say, "outline the decision
packages, rank them". You've got to explain what is meant by that. But we're only
looking for 3 marks so we would be looking for a maximum of three steps and
we'd been looking for
probably no more than six sentences. The great thing about those marks here
then is if you know what zero-based budgeting is and what is involved in it
then you can get those knowledge marks. You could jot down your keywords in the
planning time and then when the exam starts you could write up the answer to
5a in definitely less than the five minutes that are allocated. What this
means then is that you've got more thinking time for some of the more
challenging areas of the paper. Moving on then to have a look out part B, we have
to, "discuss the problems which the Lesting Regional Authority may encounter
if they decide to introduce and use zero-based budgeting in the preparation
of their budgets for the forthcoming financial year". So to answer part B I'm going to
have to read through the detail of the scenario. But rather been reading through it
up front and forgetting what's in there and forgetting the detail, I can look
through and see what is happening right now in this region authority that is
going to have an impact on their ability to effectively introduce and run a
zero-based budgeting system. And before you start reading through to look for
the clews you know what it is that you're trying to answer. So we're reading through
this information to find out what is going on here that could have an impact
on their ability to introduced zero-based budgeting. So the question does
not ask just for the problems, it wants the application. So we're going to need
to use this 'PEA' approach. We're going to need to say,
"zero-based budgeting is expensive and time-consuming to introduce". If we just say that,
that's a problem that we could have recited out of a text book. Regurgitation
of textbook knowledge is not going to score well in this exam.
To go on and develop that point we need to say, "well, that's because they've got
that's going to be a particular problem for them because they've got all these
floods, they've got the additional burdens, it's unlikely that they're going
to have the finance and they're going to have the time to implement change within
the organization". So we've taken our point, which is that it's expensive and
time-consuming to introduce, and we've pulled factors from the scenario that justify
why it's going to be particularly problematic for this organization. And
because here we're giving well-developed
answers, the 9 marks that are available
mean that we're going to need a maximum of 5 points well explained in order to
score well. Now, if it comes to the exam and you're feeling a little bit nervous about one
of your points, you may well want to go in and add another point. What you'll notice
when you read the marking guide and you read the model solution is that
there are more points than that included within there. The reason for that is this
is meant to be a all-encompassing solution which could be used to score
different students answers. So, it will often say, "and any other sensible suggestions".
That's not something you'll get in a numerical question where you've got to
get exactly the right numbers in order to be correct.
The other thing I like to remind students as well at this point when we're
looking at these more challenging application narrative questions is that
you don't have to get 100%. If you can get 50% at least in every
question then you going to do well. So having a reasonable stab at everything
is a key to success as well within the exam. Finally then we need to look at
outlining the benefits of introducing zero-based budgeting within this
organization. So the first thing to say is it asks for 3 benefits. More than 3
benefits are a waste of your ink and a waste of your time because they're only
going to give marks for the first 3, after that they'll just be disregarded. The
other thing is it only asks for the benefits. It might seem really obvious but don't give any
drawbacks, don't give any disadvantages.
We're looking here at why this could be good. We've already discussed problems in part B. So here
we're looking for the benefits. And 3 marks again so we're only outlining them,
we're only giving a sentence or two on each of the potential benefits. But what we
are making sure is that is applied back to the scenario, that these specific
benefits, not of introducing zero-based budgeting, but of introducing it in this
particular organization. I want to demonstrate next with the examiner's
report extracts that it's not just me saying this, it's what your examiner
believes as well.
So your examiner then has repeatedly stated that students can do well in these
knowledge questions if they have the skills available. And she draws on the
fact that quite a few students then were unprepared for this. One of the reasons
she suggests is because of questions spotting, but another reason is because of
lack of knowledge. So going into your exam, it's got a very
broad syllabus, making sure that you know something about all of the different
areas so that you can draw upon that knowledge if you need to. What you don't want
to do is find yourself in a situation whereby you can't get those
straightforward knowledge marks, and there could be about 10 of them in the paper,
because you didn't revise that particular topic before the exam.
Question spotting then will never work in F5, but you also need to
make sure that you are applying your knowledge. So it's not enough to
regurgitate the text book, you need to think about the specifics of the
scenario. And that's something you're always going to have to do on the spot in the exam. Now
rather than doing it for the first time in an exam hall with the pressure of the
exam, use past papers use previous exam questions to think about,
okay, what can I take from this scenario to help me answer this particular question? And the more
you do that the easier you will find that skill will become. So lots and lots of
question practice can prepare you for the exam.
So in summary then from the examiner's report; don't attempt to question spot in
F5, it will never work.
Knowledge of all of the syllabus areas is absolutely essential, and answer the
question that's set, not the question that you wish was there or the questions that you think
you're better equipped to answer. So when it's asking you about the potential benefits,
make sure that you talking about benefits rather than drawbacks. If it's
asking you about the problems in a specific organization, make sure that you
just churn out or list the drawbacks that you think about applying it to the specifics
of the scenario, and answering your question within the context of the
information given in the scenario. I hope that you you found this presentation useful and I
would urge you to have a look at other past papers and have a look at
practicing pulling things out of the scenario and applying them in your answers.
I wish you the very best of luck in your exam. Thank you for listening.