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ATC's ACCA Exam Tips (June 2010) P5ENG

There are many articles on the ACCA web site relating to P5. It is recommended that you read them all, as the examiner often tests these.

Recently the examiner has tried to frustrate question spotters, by examining topics in consecutive exams. This makes it much harder to predict what may come up in the exam, so please be aware that the tips below are just for fun!

Exam Tips

The core topics that could come up as major questions are as follows:

• Performance evaluation- virtually every exam contains questions requiring candidates to assess the performance of an organisation, using both financial and non financial performance measures. There is no reason why this will not happen again.
• Corporate Failure- this has not been examined in any depth since Dec 2007.
• Economic Value Added (EVATM). Another area that has not appeared in recent exams.
• The Boston Consulting Group Matrix/ Ansoff’s Product Market Matrix- under the old 3.3 syllabus, these were a favourite of the examiner, but have yet to be examined in P5!

Other more obscure topics that may form a single discursive question in section B, or be included as a smaller part of a longer question are the following:

• Contingency theory of management accounting
• Management remuneration schemes
• The performance Prism- has never been examined!
Environmental management accounting- the examiner wrote an article on this in May 2007, but has so far only tested it once, and that was only for four marks!

By Nick Ryan

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