Brigita Petrova explains how you should tackle the ACCA exam which consistently has the lowest global pass rate – Advanced Performance Management.
Reaching the ACCA options level, APM seems to be the least popular choice among students. Here are a few reasons why students avoid it and why you should not:
Relevance
Many are left with the wrong impression that APM is not relevant to their career, as they are not management accountants.
Did you know that…
…APM is one of the most interesting and practical subjects across the whole ACCA qualification? Focusing on achieving objectives via decision making, planning and control, while managing various stakeholders, it is incredibly relevant to everyone both in a professional and in a personal context.
Don’t we all have plans for the year ahead and beyond? Don’t we aim to reduce and control our costs, improve our reputation, care about the environment and aim to maintain positive relationships? Don’t we all have to deal with subjective matters, have goals and measure in some ways our progress towards them?
Try this
Open up for the essence of the concepts and relate them to real life.
Take value for money, for example. Say you are a cyclist and need a high-visibility, waterproof jacket. Wouldn’t you:
- shop around and buy what you like in a sale, rather than pay full price (Economy);
- be unhappy if it doesn’t keep you seen and dry (Effectiveness);
- prefer to use it for a few years rather than a couple of seasons (Efficiency).
If you start spotting various APM concepts around you, you’d easily see them and their implications in exam scenarios. Plus, one day you might choose to run your own business or become a strategic level manager – then you’d be grateful you chose APM!
PM dislike
PM tends to be the least favourite subject of most students at Skills level. The fact they didn’t enjoy it makes them believe they’d hate its advanced version and be very poor at it.
Did you know that…
…despite their very similar names, APM is examined very differently to PM? The focus is on understanding those popular concepts and your ability to use them in work simulations. You are required to think strategically and are past the need to recite definitions, create payoff tables or spend ages wondering whether to select answer a) or c) in your objective test question.
Even the brought-forward knowledge in APM comes from a number of previously learnt papers.
Concepts such as cost behaviour, budgeting, performance measurement and investment appraisal are introduced at the lowest ACCA level (in paper MA) and you keep seeing them as you progress through PM and even FM. You should also have the accounting knowledge by the time you get to APM.
Finally, the APM syllabus is relatively small, with little new knowledge, and most calculations are unstructured so you could do them even if not studying APM.
Try this
Use ACCA’s ‘knowledge refresh’ tool to brush up on the key topics. Ensure you understand the reasoning behind them, what they try to achieve and when they could be useful. Then take that into an APM case, read what the CEO wants from you and based on the case clues (there are always plenty) and your commercial acumen, provide the required advice.
Lowest global pass rates
APM sits at the bottom of ACCA’s global pass rates – not as a one-off, this has been a fact for the past 33 exam sittings! Scary statistics, making many students write off APM instantly, without even trying to find out what the subject is about and why students fail.
Did you know that…
…a lot of those who pass actually do so at their first attempt? And the majority of the sixty-something percent who don’t are students relying on self-study (having worked well for them with previous papers), who do not get much guidance on how to use the subject knowledge for answering questions, get no feedback on their performance and are not even able to understand what the questions in the exam were asking or why they have failed, despite writing a lot.
Try this
Don’t take the plunge on your own. ACCA offer a wealth of resources – use them wisely. Also, make sure you reach out to an experienced APM tutor, who can help with structured study, understanding and exam technique, and very importantly, give you continuous feedback on your question practice.
APM is a subject where it is hard to know whether what you are doing is what scores you the marks, and is definitely one to focus on quality rather than quantity in your answer.
- Brigita Petrova FCCA is an APM expert and former PQ Tutor of the Year
