April 2024
There are many critical success factors for passing APM, so here are a few suggestions from Brigita Petrova.
Time management
Ensure you always practise questions under the limited time you will have in the exam. Set aside 50 minutes for a 25-mark question and 95 minutes for a 50 marker. Next, when doing the question, donât split your time per requirement, using the average minutes per mark technique. Given the nature of the subject and the professional marks in the exam, youâll benefit more from having a holistic approach thinking about all the requirements and how it all links together, in the big picture for the organisation in the scenario.
So stick to the time per question and for the 50 minutes you have for a 25 marker, aim to do as much as you can on any of the requirements within it, writing the easiest points within the whole question first.
Be balanced
It will be far better if you have points written under each question requirement, even if not as many to give you the maximum marks. Your job is to respond to the CEOâs request for work and theyâve given you a few tasks. Imagine how disappointed theyâd be if you overloaded them with information on some of those and ignored the rest!
Plan
Invest quite a bit of your time allowance at the start in brainstorming the question and planning your answer. Use the requirements and the tasks from the embedded requirements to give you some structure. If at this stage you ensure you drop some good ideas under each requirement, when you start writing your answer, you can easily achieve the spread, mentioned in my previous point.
I know many of you feel reluctant to spend much time on planning but this could pay off massively. Thinking properly about the matters in advance helps you get relevant points, better structure and improve your professional marks output, too.
Apply
Just knowledge and general points about topics would score you some marks but unlikely to give you enough to pass. Indeed, these could be very useful at the initial brainstorming stage, to get you started and give you some initial structure. Then, while still brainstorming and going through the scenario, look for case clues that you can use. There will be some to support the general points you have made and there will be others you couldnât have thought of in advance, as they will be scenario specific. If you want to do well, make sure you marry the general ideas you had with the case points you found!
Justify
Remember, if you simply state things, even if they are correct, you could still be scoring nothing, due to lack of justification. You canât just tell the CEO that some things are good and some are bad: theyâd need to know why. So, for example, you might think that writing something like âThe performance report is good, because it contains KPIs regarding the companyâs objective of achieving XXXXâ. Thatâs a good start, but why does the report need such KPIs? Maybe adding something along the lines of ââŠand thus can show the companyâs progress towards itâ or âit can indicate if some corrective action is neededâ â could help you round up that mark.
Mind the numbers
There will be some calculations in your APM exam, so watch out! Thereâs often a temptation to start with those and try to get them perfectly right. However, while most wonât be very sophisticated, there will be some that can be quite tricky and chances are that, especially with exam pressure on, you donât achieve the perfection you hoped for. The result? The marks you gain donât match the time invested, youâre left with very little time to think and write any other good points, you start to panic and the overall question becomes a failure.
Obviously, there will be some easy and straightforward marks there, so donât ignore the calculations, but do them after planning and doing all the easy written bits within your answer (unless you have an EVA calculation, which you could do first).
Show your workings, keeping them neat for your marker. If a number is too hard to get, just do something and get one, even if itâs wrong. Use it to go further and complete the calculations, and comment on the answer. Youâll keep scoring!
- Brigita Petrova is an accountancy tutor and a former PQ magazine Lecturer of the Year
