November 2023 Case Study exam: a quick review

The November 2023 past paper (on Fulsome Digital Marketing) was the second exam under the new marking approach introduced at the July 2023 sitting. (Under the new marking approach, candidates do not have to individually pass the Executive Summary, R1, R2 and R3 as the pass/fail decision is instead based on the total scored across the paper, as with the other ACA modules.)

Overall, this was a very standard paper with no big surprises.

Here is our review of the key learning points from the markscheme. 

Executive Summary

As with many recent papers, there were quite a few specific Recommendations that the examiners wanted to see (in contrast to older past paper markschemes where any "Commercial recommendations" would get credit).

So ensure that you fire in as many Recs as you can in the ES to maximise your chances of matching something!

Requirement 1

There was no Extra Task (some other tuition providers call this the "twist" ... basically, something extra to do in addition to the financial performance review). So this was good to see. Quite a few past papers have had no Extra Task, so the trend seems to be towards easier R1s. 

There were a lot of marks for comparing revenue performance against the various targets of the business but the Advance Information contained a lot of different targets (more than usual), so a well prepared candidate should have been fine with this. 

Requirement 2

There were 2 Boxes for Assumptions which is fairly standard (some past papers have had more, but that is unusual). 

Commercial, operational and Ethics issues were all squeezed together into the same 2 Boxes so that is unusual as normally Ethics is given its own space on the markscheme.

So perhaps don't go overboard on Ethics in R2. 

Requirement 3

There were 2 different models to perform here, which is more than normal. But don't panic because all the narrative evaluation of the calculations was generously marked: any "qualitative comment" would have attracted credit, even if your figures were wrong!

So be brave and add confident narrative ... even if you are not confident about your numbers!