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April 2019 Q6 i)

J

Jonathan

Member
In this question, I had used the environment as an example of an external factor that will affect the relative attractiveness of investing in a particular industry over time. I then expanded on this to say that the environmental impact of certain industries may result in relative unattractiveness and changes to the environment could lead to shortages of natural resources and difficulties (such as water for utilities companies, poor crop yields and poor reception to unethical oil and gas companies that cause a lot of pollution) that would affect certain industries.

Neither the IFoA past papers or the ActEd ASET solutions listed this as an answer but I do think that this is a relevant external factor. The ActEd solutions also mention that the examiner was willing to give additional marks to students that could explain a concept using a real world example.

I have three questions on this:
1. Would my answer have scored marks in the exam? I can't see how it isn't a relevant external factor despite not being in the answers. It also had real world examples that backed up my point.
2. Do all questions have an element of examiner discretion to award additional marks? I note that only some marking schedules mention that there is discretion and others are completely silent on this.
3. If my answer would not have scored any marks, what from the question should I have focused on to take me away from mentioning that as an external factor?
 
Hi,

There's a myriad of possible factors you could include here and I think it's fair for you to pick out environmental factors. Neither ours nor the institute's solutions will feature all possible factors. Hence, the capture all comment of something like "any sensible suggestion would score".

Not all questions will have an element of examiner discretion but most will. Sometimes the examiners are looking to test a small section of bookwork and that's where they'll be expecting the answers to come from. However, if the question is open-ended then markers will have discretion to credit sensible alternatives to the answers that the chief examiners suggest. Where you see comments about that specifically in the examiners report is probably for questions where they expect to see the most deviance from their answers eg in this question or in "suggest" type questions.

I know it can be frustrating when you feel you have a valid point that the examiners haven't explicitly mentioned. My advice as you attempt past papers would be to try (such that you can) to hit the main points the examiners are looking for (and specifically crediting). It would be rare I think for you to score full marks if you go completely off schedule, as a team of examiners would have to have missed everything that you see as being most relevant to the situation. But then you should trust in the marking process that if you do make a few off schedule comments you'll be able to top up your marks with those.

Does that help?
Joe
 
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