Two exams, two registers, and where the marks are
◈ 5 cardsThe grade table, what each exam covers, the three question styles the papers use, and which instrument in this course rehearses each one.
The grade table
AFM 182 is marked in five pieces: Top Hat content questions 10 %, PBL session participation 10 %, a team case assignment 20 %, a midterm worth 25 % (90 minutes, e-text chapters 1–5), and a final worth 35 % that covers chapters 6–11 and that you must pass to pass the course. Sixty of the hundred marks sit in two sittings, and the two sittings do not ask the same kind of question. That is the one fact that shapes everything in this course.
Two registers
The midterm is a discriminative paper. It asks which: which framework a rule belongs to, which director counts as independent, which account takes the debit. Around those choices it asks for a set of entries — the LCNRV write-down and its reversal, an inventory-error correction, a disposal, an impairment, a share issue, a dividend, a provision — and for short written explanations of a few marks each.
The final is a worksheet-and-writing paper. You are handed a statement pack and asked to produce: the ratio set, the indirect-method operating cash flow, the cash conversion cycle, a budgeted line, a relevant-cost differential, an NPV from a discount table. And then it asks you to explain, recommend, or justify in four to eight marks — what the cash-flow statement says, whether to drop a product line, what a covenant breach would mean. Students who have sat it describe the course as more than half memorisation and qualitative, with far more writing than AFM 191 asked for.
Worked example — one topic, two prompts
Take PP&E impairment (Module 3). On the midterm the prompt reads like this:
> Cobalt Ridge Mining Corp.'s crusher has a carrying amount of $500,000, a value in use of $380,000 and a fair value less costs of disposal of $370,000. Record the impairment.
The answer is an entry, and you either produce it or you do not. On the final the same topic reads like this:
> Cobalt Ridge is private and reports under ASPE; its lender wants IFRS statements. Explain why the crusher would be impaired under one framework and not the other, and what that does to the lender's debt covenant. (6 marks)
The answer is two paragraphs, and it is marked against a rubric — one mark for each idea the marker expects to see. Same asset, same numbers, two completely different skills.
The three question styles, and how this course rehearses them
| The paper asks for… | The instrument here |
|---|---|
| a fact typed in a few words (a definition, a list, a rule) | recall |
| a choice among plausible options (which framework / which perspective / which cost) | mcq — the difficulty lives in the distractors |
| an entry or a number you must produce | journal / numeric — graded on the entry or the value |
| a paragraph or two, marked on a rubric | exam — you write, then tick the points you hit |
One caution: the syllabus fragment this course is built from gives the weights, the timing and the must-pass rule, but not the number of multiple-choice questions, the calculator policy, or whether the final is formally cumulative. This course works on the assumption that the final covers chapters 6–11 with chapters 1–5 assumed — a ratio question can still turn on an IFRS-versus-ASPE point — and supplies a four-decimal PV table in every prompt that needs one. If your syllabus says otherwise, believe your syllabus.