AQA A2 BUSS3, 13 June 2013

lol I love business studies, we did the Out & About plc Jan 2010 past paper in class for a mock, the teacher wanted to put me in my place since my attendance to class has been about 40% this year. Out of laziness and lack of general content knowledge I decided only to answer questions 1 and 4. Funnily enough I ended up getting 40% overall mark haha, that's one mark off a D grade however in comparison to the others in the class who attend all year, answered both the 18 markers as well and actually bust a sweat scribbling down their stuff and only ended up with fewer marks than me; not bad! .

Anyway moral of the story, this exam is all about how you can play with your words and dare I say it.. chat rubbish!

Think of building up a chain in your opinion since majority of the marks come from a reasonable argument and analysis, which basically means taking a point and playing with it as much as is humanly possible.
- E.g we have a case study of Company A, whose primary concern is to make profitability.
- So we read further into the case study and find that Person X in the company wants to carry out Operation B.

These little pieces of information you can glue together and make a whole argument out of it! How?
Remind yourself of BUSS1 and BUSS2,

Take your point (in our case Operation B) and compare it to the companies corporate objectives (in our case increasing profitability). If we see that it is something that isn't likely to increase it, (or possibly the other way round) take it, grab onto it and murder the essay with it!

E.g within an e.g - "Operation B is may not be the best thing to go with as it may cause employees to feel such and such way about the company and their work, this could cause lack of motivation which could then lead to an increase in employees absenteeism, taking time off work. This would then cost the business as efficiency will be reduced as well as the fact that they pay the employees whilst they are off and no work is being gained from them. (If you are given information about 'person X' then you can bring that in too for mad marks and application!) Furthermore since Person X was recently not in any kind of business sector relating to Human Resource management s/he is most likely to not be well seasoned in terms of handling the affairs of employees with the correct interests in mind. All these costs are highly likely to slow down the company's corporate objectives of increasing profitability so perhaps it will need to be reconsidered. (If you have another suggestion you could add that in too)".

So basically in a nutshell you can see that there really isn't that much knowledge required, it's more based upon how well you can build a chain in an argument and then ultimately LINK IT TO THE CORPORATE OBJECTIVES which is on fo the most important parts and this is what distinguishes BUSS3 from BUSS1 & 2, going that extra bit in your argument to wrap it up.

Also bear in mind that you don't need to write in extremely sophisticated English either, there are marks available for quality of written communication but that can be achieved with even the simplest of words so don't kill yourself trying to sound nice for the examiner. I've just gone through reading some past papers all of which are A - A* grade work, the candidates can barely string together a sentence which makes sense however it's the correct use of the case study and a few key terms here and there which accompany the ability to build a chain of arugment that score the marks! Be straight to the point and avoid mentioning pointless things (save that for BUSS4) that don't relate to the case study.

The reason the case study is so long and takes years to read is because all the answers are given to you in there!



p.s even though there is a hugeeeeee amount of stress on using calculations, if they freak you out too much and cause you to lose time, avoid them. There is still plenty of other points in the case study you can use - even if they are numbers, just state the obvious rather than doing calculations with them. E.G 'As you can see the company has a high absenteeism rate in comparison to the others so clearly the staff are probably not as motivated due to.....' - and so on!

can you send me the a* paper you've been going through

can you send me the a* paper you've been going through

lol I love business studies, we did the Out & About plc Jan 2010 past paper in class for a mock, the teacher wanted to put me in my place since my attendance to class has been about 40% this year. Out of laziness and lack of general content knowledge I decided only to answer questions 1 and 4. Funnily enough I ended up getting 40% overall mark haha, that's one mark off a D grade however in comparison to the others in the class who attend all year, answered both the 18 markers as well and actually bust a sweat scribbling down their stuff and only ended up with fewer marks than me; not bad! .

Anyway moral of the story, this exam is all about how you can play with your words and dare I say it.. chat rubbish!

Think of building up a chain in your opinion since majority of the marks come from a reasonable argument and analysis, which basically means taking a point and playing with it as much as is humanly possible.
- E.g we have a case study of Company A, whose primary concern is to make profitability.
- So we read further into the case study and find that Person X in the company wants to carry out Operation B.

These little pieces of information you can glue together and make a whole argument out of it! How?
Remind yourself of BUSS1 and BUSS2,

Take your point (in our case Operation B) and compare it to the companies corporate objectives (in our case increasing profitability). If we see that it is something that isn't likely to increase it, (or possibly the other way round) take it, grab onto it and murder the essay with it!

E.g within an e.g - "Operation B is may not be the best thing to go with as it may cause employees to feel such and such way about the company and their work, this could cause lack of motivation which could then lead to an increase in employees absenteeism, taking time off work. This would then cost the business as efficiency will be reduced as well as the fact that they pay the employees whilst they are off and no work is being gained from them. (If you are given information about 'person X' then you can bring that in too for mad marks and application!) Furthermore since Person X was recently not in any kind of business sector relating to Human Resource management s/he is most likely to not be well seasoned in terms of handling the affairs of employees with the correct interests in mind. All these costs are highly likely to slow down the company's corporate objectives of increasing profitability so perhaps it will need to be reconsidered. (If you have another suggestion you could add that in too)".

So basically in a nutshell you can see that there really isn't that much knowledge required, it's more based upon how well you can build a chain in an argument and then ultimately LINK IT TO THE CORPORATE OBJECTIVES which is on fo the most important parts and this is what distinguishes BUSS3 from BUSS1 & 2, going that extra bit in your argument to wrap it up.

Also bear in mind that you don't need to write in extremely sophisticated English either, there are marks available for quality of written communication but that can be achieved with even the simplest of words so don't kill yourself trying to sound nice for the examiner. I've just gone through reading some past papers all of which are A - A* grade work, the candidates can barely string together a sentence which makes sense however it's the correct use of the case study and a few key terms here and there which accompany the ability to build a chain of arugment that score the marks! Be straight to the point and avoid mentioning pointless things (save that for BUSS4) that don't relate to the case study.

The reason the case study is so long and takes years to read is because all the answers are given to you in there!



p.s even though there is a hugeeeeee amount of stress on using calculations, if they freak you out too much and cause you to lose time, avoid them. There is still plenty of other points in the case study you can use - even if they are numbers, just state the obvious rather than doing calculations with them. E.G 'As you can see the company has a high absenteeism rate in comparison to the others so clearly the staff are probably not as motivated due to.....' - and so on!

can you send me the a* paper you've been going through

here's the A* paper again for those who didn't get it before - if it still doesn't work i'll email it to you if anyone really wants it that bad

Operating profit is the same as net profit (technically there is a different but they conflate them for A2, and assume them the same).

Gross profit margin is revenue minus cost of sales and net profit margin is revenue minus cost of sales and other expenses.

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FOR THE NPV

YEAR NET CASH FLOW 10% discount factor NPV
0 (£750,000) 1 (£750,000)
1 £142,500 0.91 £129,675
2 £192,500 0.83 £159,775
3 £252,500 0.75 £189,375
4 £252,500 0.68 £171,700
5 £292,500 0.62 £181,350
Net present Value £81,875



SO how do they work out the 10% discount factor exactly..?