MCS May Exam Week - Let us know how it went...

Hi,

I sat mine on on Friday, and to be honest i was kind of thrown off from the first question that i got in my variant. It was them into going into a partnership and i believe the question itself didnt have enough information and was very confusing. Also my variant had a lot of things from F1 and obviously i didnt expect that to come and didnt do much revision on it. Dont know if anyone else felt the same but i doubt i have done enough to Pass :-(

I had the R&D variant. It really knocked me off my stride as well, barely touched on anything I had prepared in depth and I was glad I'd gone a bit wider rather than taking any hints from the case study.

Honestly not sure how I've done. It was probably the worst variant I could have had based on what i;d prepared and was strongest in, but I pulled in a lot of relvent case study material. Though I was light on Theory on some areas - when I checked after the answers I gave were actually in line with the advantages, disadvantages etc. under them so hopefully marked well.

Did you find the exam easier or more difficult than you anticipated?

About as hard as expected question wise, they were pretty easy when prepared, difficult if not.

How did you do with your time management?

4 Questions, 45 minutes each, 2 tasks each. Time wasn't an issue. 10 minutes reading and prep, 25 minutes writing and 10 minutes review/correction. (I type fairly fast which helped).

What exam techniques did you find worked well in the exam?

Standard. Read, plan answer, write, review. Good to know report format. Don't accept a broken keyboard either!

Which of our materials did you find most useful?

The strategic Analysis and Industry Analysis, big time savers and great for cross checking your own prep. I expected the top 10 to be useful but they didn't really come into this variant. (ethics excepted). General pre-seen videos were useful to get a real feel for the case. (I have a feeling they helped it stick in the exam, I never had to refer to it which saved time).

Overall I've been recommending it to the 2 in my office on CIMA. Could really have crammed my case study specific study into 5 days without them.

Do you have any advice for students taking the exam in the future?

More than studying each topic, really getting to know the case study inside and out through ratios, analysis tools (SWOT, PESTLE, 5 forces, value chain etc. etc., general industry etc. I was able to pull a lot of relevent information into the answers just from my knowledge of the case and industry unrelated to any specific theory. That combined with common sense might have saved me on knowledge gaps.

I'd definitely say better to prepare lightly and widely that really revise each and every theory in depth, don't focus on those only expected to come up. My variant really didn;t use much of the case study or any of the hints at what might arise. A general sense of an topic (for example Change Mangaement, Project Management, perforamance appraisal etc.) is as useful as depth knowledge of author specific models. Nothing specific was asked so it was left to you to pick the best model/theory and come up with solutions. (Perhaps my variant, but it not once did it ask on a specific theory).

This makes it much less daunting, entire chapters can be drilled down to core concepts and your preferred tool to address them.