Part b – The easiest marks on the T4 paper?

Part b – The easiest marks on the T4 paper?

Possibly the easiest place to earn marks in this paper is in the part b requirement. The reason stems from the way examiner wants you to answer this which makes it both quick to do and easy to score good marks. Let’s take a step back though – what is part b?

Part b is a “communication requirement”. You are expected to show you can communicate a point from the exam quickly and well, in a letter, memo, email, notes to presentation slides or indeed presentation slides themselves. It may include a requirement to produce a graph based on numbers you should have calculated earlier in your appendices.

So what makes this the easiest place to earn marks in this exam? Well the key lies in the way the examiner wants you to answer this section. The aim is that you are making brief, clear points of roughly two lines each, with each of those lines representing a mark in the exam. This means that you can easily score 8-10 marks in writing no more than a page on part b, whereas on other sections you would probably need nearer to two sides of full report writing style.

The second element that makes it easy is that it is often based on one of the main issues in the report that you should have already discussed. This means you should have already thought about this so there is no new thinking to be done. This will help to speed up writing of this section. Indeed, I’ve known many students doing the PC exam cleverly rewriting and rearranging material from their report to do superb part b's very quickly indeed.

My final message is one of time management. One of the examiner’s favourite comments in Post Exam Guides over recent years is that the Part b section was not completed by many candidates. While it does appear that this seems to be improving over recent sittings, it’s vital that you don’t fall into the time mangement trap – do leave yourself enough time to do part b as it’s such a quick and easy way to score good marks that doing it well could easily be the difference between a pass and a fail!

If you have not read it yet, the best guide to what the examiner wants from part b is in the guide written by the examiner. This is an excellent summary of what you need to do for part b – do digest this, and make sure you practice lots of part b’s prior to the exam so you maximise your marks in what is often a very easy section.

CIMA T4 | Ethics

Ethics – Don’t let it be an afterthought for you!

Ethics is 10 marks in the exam, and significant enough that it is a whole section in your report, yet it is often the forgotten element of T4, which people treat as an after-thought – something to do at the end if they’ve got time. In our post-exam research of over 200 CIMA T4 students, over 20% did not complete this section, meaning an almost certain failure. The examiner has noticed this problem too. In the September 2011 Post Exam Guide it was noted that many students did complete two ethics issues, and two is the minimum you need. In my experience, the people that get good marks in this section tend to cover three issues.

There are two parts to ethics, the first of these is the analysis of ethical issues. Marks are awarded for recognizing each of the ethical issues and explaining why that is ethically right or wrong.

In my experience, people are good at identifying ethical issues, but poor at saying why they are ethical issues. Ethics is about doing the right thing. Bribery is wrong because the person taking the bribe doing what is right for them personally rather than the organization they’re working for. Take care to ensure you focus on why something is wrong thing to do given our moral values and cultural norms.

The second element to ethics is to make solid ethical recommendations. Remember there are just as many marks for the ethical recommendations as there are for analyzing the issue, so you should be writing just as much on these as you are on your analysis. This is a common mistake in scripts I mark where the recommendation ends up being a single line or two at the end.

One key to success in ethics is to ensure you have a standard structure for every ethics issue. I recommend using the following sub-headings every time to make sure you’ve never missed this out: What are the facts, Why is it an ethics issue?, Business consequences, Recommendation 1 (short term), Recommendation 2 (Long term). To see some excellent examples see our ethics sections in our mock exams or if you really want to master ethics in your exam work through our comprehensive guide and examples in our ethics e-book. All of these materials are also available as part of our full T4 course.