f1-fab-examreport-d15-Examinersreport.PDFVIP

Examiner’s report F1/FAB Accountant in Business For CBE and Paper exams covering July to December 2015 General Comments The paper is divided into two parts. Part A consists of 46 objective test questions, each worth 1 or 2 marks. Part B had 6 multi-task questions, each drawn from one of the six parts of the syllabus. Questions in this part are worth 4 marks each. The time permitted for completing the paper is two hours. All questions are compulsory. Candidates were generally well prepared, and the majority completed a full set of answers in the time available. This suggests that the paper is not time pressured. However, some candidates did not answer some of the questions, and this is probably a result of poor time management, caused perhaps by spending too long on questions that posed them greatest difficulty or failing to plan time effectively. There was evidence of guesswork by some candidates. In an examination of this type, it is a legitimate approach to narrow down the available answers by eliminating distractors known to be wrong or improbable. Even if the correct answer is not known for sure, it may be possible to arrive at it by a process of deduction, or by reducing the choice to one answer from two. However, it is better to attempt questions on the basis of logic and reasoning than to rely on guesses or even sequences. For example, it is clear that some candidates used the latter based on repeated use of consecutive ‘A. B. C, D’ choices. In a minority of cases, some chose distractor D when there were only three choices available (A, B and C). Candidates performed adequately or well on questions relating to several topics. Questions on centralisation, non-executive directors, the Anthony hierarchy, Honey and Mumford, competence frameworks, Mayo’s theory and communication (attributes of the grapevine) all had high pass rates. This is encouraging, as some of these topics (non-executive directors and competence framewor