 Hello and welcome to the first study buddy webinar. This one we're going to be covering how to complete exams and assignments remotely. Often it's the admin side of doing the assignments and exams that students find as stressful as actually writing and putting together the and revising for exams or writing the assignments. So this is designed to help you with some of those queries that we get quite often about how am I supposed to submit my assignment and where do I take my exam. My name is Kieran Kapoor. I am the CEO of the Cambridge Marketing College. We're one of the CIM strategic partners and we've been teaching CIM qualifications for nearly 30 years at the college. So we like to think we know what we're doing when it comes to CIM. I'm also a CIM examiner. I was an examiner for over 10 years. So I have seen this from the examining side as well as the tutor side. So what we're going to go through is we're going to go through how to register for an assessment that's both assignments and exams. Then I'm going to specifically concentrate on assignments and we're going to look about how you choose a theme, how you submit your assignments and some general preparation advice. Then I'm going to go on to how we take exams and particularly at the moment the CIM has introduced online exams and so we have exciting things like online proctoring. So we're going to explain how that works as well because I know some students and learners are finding that quite a sort of scary prospect. But the first thing I wanted to do was start with how CIM assessments are marked and as I said I was a CIM examiner for over 10 years and I personally don't think the CIM shout out about enough about this and point out that the assessments are set and marked rigorously and consistently. And I can tell you that with an examiner hat on we are very carefully monitored and checked continually to ensure that we're marking to a consistent standard and that the standards and the mark schemes are rigorously applied. So you should be very proud that if you take and pass the CIM qualification you know that it has been marked to a really good and consistent standard and I think that's a very important message for you to be aware of. We always get asked what the pass mark is. The pass mark for every single module is 50%. You have to get 50%. You need to between 50 and 59% you'll be given a pass grade between 60 and 69%. It's a merit. Over 70% you get a distinction. Anything under 50% is a fail. 49 and under is a fail. It's worth pointing out that you get the actual percentage marks. So you will know where you came in those borders. I also want to point out that border lines, all the border marks between a fail and a pass, between a pass and a merit, between a merit and distinction, they are always marked by two examiners, usually the examiner and a senior examiner. So sometimes people come back and say well I got 49. Is it worth asking for a remark? It's already been remarked. You have actually convinced two examiners that it shouldn't pass. So that should be a reassurance that everything is rigorous. Sometimes people don't want to believe that if they applied for a remark they would get something different. The chances are very unlikely because of the rigorous quality that goes into those marking. So remember border lines are marked by two people. I think it's a really important message for you to be aware of. Right. Add them in considerations that you need to be aware of for any assessment, be it an assignment or an exam. There are three key things you must have. You must be a CIM member. You must be studying through an accredited study centre. The CIM does not allow you to study without a study centre, without that tutorial support. You also need to register with the CIM for the correct assessment session. That means the CIM knows how many examiners they need for each module for each assessment. That's why it's so important to do. The assessment sessions are April, July and December every year. However, for 2020 because of the pandemic the CIM has introduced a very special September session and I'll come on to that a little bit later on. You need to check with your study centre. Do you register for the membership in the assessment or does the study centre do that on your behalf? Some study centres do one, some study centres do another. The important thing is that you have checked and you know what you need to do. Right. For September 2020 only, the CIM has introduced an assessment session for assignment modules, not exam modules and they are assignment modules for the revised syllabus. Because that can be a confusing concept I've written out on the slide and you can read it yourself exactly which modules are being covered in September. This is unusual and again I think the CIM hasn't really blown its own trumpet on this one. They reacted very, very quickly to the COVID crisis, sorting out exams, sorting out assignments and this has been brought in to help people who got caught out, couldn't do the study and couldn't access information. So there is the complete list of assignment modules that will be assessed in September. Right. I'm going to look specifically now at assignments. We will run through some assignment details and then we will move on to looking at exams. So I mentioned there was the revised syllabus. There's also a previous syllabus. Now the previous syllabus came in in 2014 and it's the final assessments for the previous syllabus are done in December 2020. So again in case you're not sure, here are the list of the previous syllabus assignment modules. There is a reason why I've put the digital ones in blue. Remember that you will need that in a minute. Then we have the revised syllabus. The revised syllabus came in in 2019 and again here is a complete list of the revised syllabus modules and again notice that we've got the digital ones in blue. That will become important in a moment. So hang on to that. I've also put the marketing leadership program in green. That's because they are also assignment modules but you actually hand them in in a very slightly different way. So some of the information I'm about to give about assignment modules does not apply to the marketing leadership program. So for the revised syllabus all assignments are based on theme. This is one of the changes and innovations that came in with the revised syllabus. So for each revised syllabus assignment there are four themes to choose from. These themes change annually. So what you have is an April, July and December assessment and then there are four themes that you can write about for each module in the assignment. You choose the most suitable theme for your organization and the reason there are themes is because the CIM qualifications are taken around the world and they are taken by people who work for wildly different organizations. So you can have an organization, you can work for a huge global multinational company with multiple brands and multiple geographic locations or you may be working for a tiny startup firm. And the assignment themes are designed to help people in both those different scenarios and people that work for nonprofits or work for governmental organizations work in business to consumer or business to business to choose a relevant theme and be able to write their assignment based on that. So the theming is very important. The other thing about it is as I said the themes change annually. That does mean if you were in pretending to do an assessment in April but for some reason we are in a pandemic you needed to then apply that to July or September provided you are registered with the CIM and they are expecting your assignment provided you have cleared it with your study center so your study center is aware what you are doing you may use the same theme for the next assignment session. So it actually gives you a huge amount of flexibility. Now all assignments require you to choose an organization and it usually is described as an organization of your choice. So most people that's easy they write about their current organization that they are working for. But we all know that you sometimes are between companies or sometimes you just can't get access to information. So if you don't have an organization please don't just think oh well I know about Coca-Cola I can I can research it on the internet and write my assignment on that. You simply won't have enough inside knowledge of how things work at that company. You do need to find an organization that you have some connection with. So it's either your current organization a previous organization you can approach a company an organization that perhaps one you might like to work for and say please can I can I spend some time with you can I get some information that I need can I write my assignment on you. I've even had one or two students who have said I want to go and work for that company I will use this as an excuse to get my foot in the door and get them to understand who I am. So you can you can be quite imaginative about the organization that you choose. You could also volunteer for a charity and write about your assignment on that. So there are lots of ways of being innovative but make certain that you do have a connection in some way with the organization. You do need access to it you need information of how they are actually running on a day-to-day basis. An increasing issue that I've seen with my own students is companies are getting quite uncomfortable about you writing about your firm in case they feel that you're releasing information perhaps something that's commercially sensitive. Ninety-five percent of companies do not have this problem but if you're in the five percent where it is an issue here are some things to think about. So if your line manager turns around and says I'm not comfortable about you writing about us because of confidentiality you can be assured that CIM examiners sign confidentiality agreements and they are very strong they are as strong as you would expect a confidentiality agreement to be. It's taken very seriously. Your study center will also have confidentiality agreements and requirements for the tutors and the people that comment on your draft and again you can ask to see those if that would reassure your organization. It's perfectly acceptable to approximate data so rather than give actual physical figures you might like to say actual physical amounts of sales you might like to give a percentage market share or you might like to approximate the data in some other way. That is perfectly acceptable. You're not taking a finance exam you are taking a marketing exam so so long as the information is in a looks is supporting your argument you can approximate it to the way that you need to. As a last resort you may change the organization name please do not call it company X or company ABC. You are doing a marketing qualification try and be a little bit more imaginative don't flag up to the examiner that you've changed the company name come up with something interesting. Call it something different the examiner will just accept that and will not then challenge it but as soon as you flag it up as company X as an examiner I tended to get quite intrigued as to which which company it was. It's also worth pointing out that examiners mark a huge number of assignments at each sitting. After a while we sort of we don't notice the individual company details and we're looking for specific things for against the marking scheme. So again companies can get far more worried about the information they're releasing actually examiner isn't looking at that they're looking for the quality of your argument and the quality of your analysis. So assuming you have now written your assignment and you've got through that and you've selected your theme and you've worked out the organization you're going to write on you've done all the hard work how do you now submit that assignment at the end? So it depends whether it's a digital or a non-digital module if you remember on the slides I gave you of the revised syllabus and the new syllabus I put the digital modules in blue. So this is the reason for that digital modules are submitted to the CIMs platform and I've given you the URL there. You need to go on to the platform and register then there are some very clear on-screen instructions to follow and you upload your assignment. You must do that by the deadline. Please do not leave it until midnight of the deadline day. We've had students that have done that I should warn you that computer clocks do not always run the same. The awards platform may not be open exactly until midnight it may close five minutes earlier. Don't leave it and if you leave it till an evening there will be no one at the CIM to help you should something go wrong with the loading. So try and get your assignment in at least 24 hours before the deadline or at the very least during the working day of the deadline bearing in mind that a good hundreds of other people are going to be trying to load it on the same day at the same time. So it's part of being a marketer is having control of your time management and not leaving it literally until the 11th minute of the 11th the 59th minute of the 11th hour is actually part of a good time management skill. For non-digital modules you will submit your completed assignment to your study centre and your study centre will submit it to the CIM on your behalf. And again all submissions are now electronic and this was something the CIM moved heaven and earth to bring in when the pandemic originally struck. They were still officially at testing stage but they went live just to make certain that this all worked. So all submissions are now electronic. Marketing leadership program there are four modules on that they are submitted differently. You submit those to your study centre and your study centre then does the marking. So that's a slightly different process which is why if you remember marketing leadership program modules were in green on my previous slide. So I hope that's clear. Digital modules go to the awards platform. Non-digital modules go to your study centre electronically. Follow your study centre's specific instructions on how they want you to do to submit those. Some general assignment advice based on watching literally hundreds and hundreds of students over the years take CIM assignments and also with my examiner's hat on having marked assignments that have been handed in. The most important thing is to read the question. It's incredibly easy to disappear off at a tangent and write about what you want to write about rather than what the examiner has asked for. So make certain that you read the question. There is always a command word in the question that tells you the type of description, the level of detail the examiner is looking for. And we'll look at command words more in the next slide. The CIM very kindly gives you the number of marks per section of the question. That is a clue to how much detail they are looking for. Clearly twice the amount of length and detail in a 10 mark question than a 5 mark question. That is obvious, but it's surprising how often people forget when they're actually drafting the assignment. There are detailed layout instructions in the assignment brief. These are mandatory. There is a specific font size, for example. This is to save the examiner's eyesight. The examiner does not need to be marking, pulling out some sort of magnifying glass to try and read what you've written. There is a specific font size, you must follow it. There are specific word count requirements, you must follow them. There is no leeway on those. Deadlines are mandatory. You will be told when things have to be submitted. You have to meet that. It's quite simple. Please submit a draft to your study centre and your tutor, assuming your study centre allows it. As far as I know, every study centre allows that. Your tutor will have a draft date, a date that you can submit a draft to and your tutor is allowed to make one set of comments on that draft. They can't keep seeing draft after draft after draft. They will be able to see one draft and make comments on that to help you with your final submission. It makes a huge difference to the quality of your outcome if you use your tutor's advice. Command words. There are a lot of command words that the CIM uses, but I wanted to keep this very simple. There are basically two main types. There's another type at a higher level, but for most of the modules, you get two different types. One is the describing words, which means you are just going to tell the examiner what is going on. It's literally describe it to me. Paint me a picture. Tell me what your organisation does here. Then there are assess-spile words, which means that they want you to use your judgement. Describe just means tell me. Assess means actually think about it. Is that good or bad? What are the pros and cons? It might under-describe you would just tell me that your organisation's new product development process was this. With an assess, you would say the new product development process is this and this is good or bad because examiners love the word because. At higher level qualifications, so diploma and postgraduate diploma, you're often asked to justify. That means you use your judgement and you back it up. You back your views up with sources, with models. That's why we teach you tools and models with examples and with case studies. Don't just say in my view this, in my view this because and use sources, tools, examples from real life that's always good to use. It's always good to have examples. The one command word I often see which seems to panic people is recommend. It was amazing as an examiner how often I would see people writing very confidently and then when it got to the bit where it said recommend a course of action, recommend something, they would immediately sort of panic and not sound so confident or actually just not make a recommendation. Your marketers, we recommend things all the time in real life and at work. The recommend isn't difficult. Recommend just means be confident, be brave and say this is what I believe. This is my recommendation. The final thing that I wanted to just stress is that the first task for every assignment on both the revised syllabus and the previous syllabus is a five mark organisational background section. Those should be five easy marks for you. The reason that it's there is it helps the examiner understand your organisation's context. As I said, people can be taking it with multinational firms or with a small startup or anything in between. So it just helps the examiner. You're giving the examiner clues as to what type of organisation you are working for and therefore writing about. There are five marks for that. You are told very clearly exactly what to include and I'm always amazed by the number of people who then don't include that. It tells you what to do so include it and get those five marks very, very easily. Okay, that's what I wanted to cover on assignments. Let's have a look at exams. So because of the pandemic, strategic marketing and global marketing decisions were exams where you actually went to an exam hall and you sat in the exam hall for three hours writing your answer. Obviously with the pandemic the rules have had to change so for now strategic marketing and global marketing decisions are assignments. It is possible that in future global marketing decisions will go back to being a formal written exam that you go to an exam hall to do. So if you are taking global marketing decisions and that is at level seven postgraduate diploma, keep an eye on your study centre's information and the CIM information and as the situation changes that may change. So strategic marketing which is a previous syllabus, sorry existing syllabus module that will actually finish in December 2020 so it will be assessed in July 2020 and December 2020 and both times it will be done as an assignment and then from 2021 it will cease to exist as a module. But for now both of those are assignments so you should be following the assignment instructions not the exam instructions. That leaves us with three modules that are still examined and they are marketing principles and applied marketing and they have now become online exams called remote proctoring. I think slightly confusingly but remote proctoring is just an online invigilation system. You book these exams via your my CIM portal in exactly the similar way and there is a remote proctoring charge of £45 so beware of that. Sorry before I go on if you were due to sit an exam in April and it was forcibly moved and you obviously couldn't because CIM had cancelled exams you will be moved to online exams free of charge for July but for everybody else there is a proctoring charge. There is a requirement for remote proctoring. You need a desktop computer or a laptop for some reason tablets, Chromebooks and mobile phones don't meet the requirements so you need a desktop computer or a laptop. You need somewhere quiet to take the exam for fairly obvious reasons but it's worthwhile stating obviously with people being caught up at home that can sometimes be hard so you need to find a space to be able to do this. You will need a built-in or an external webcam and a microphone that is to allow the online proctoring which means that they can check you through the webcam to see what you are doing. You will need an internet speed of at least to MPPS and you will also need photographic ID that is to prove who you are. I have taken the next slide simply directly from the CIM's own instructions so I'm just going to run through these carefully but you do get given these. You may only run the examination software for the exam itself. Don't think that you can run it up at other times it's just for the exam. Don't run any other applications for any reason while you are taking the exam. That's an obvious invigilation quality control. You will need your photographic identification and it will be checked and verified before the exam starts by the invigilator. When it comes to actually taking the exam you will obviously start your web browser that's a good start and you will enter the URL that you've been given to access the online exam. You'll enter your username and password which the invigilator will give you and then you pause for a moment and then press enter when you are asked to do so. You then do not do anything else until you are instructed to do so by the invigilator. Do however check that you have the exam that you are expecting to do listed on your screen. If it isn't the exam you're expecting that is the point where you raise that with the invigilator. So some hints and tips for preparing for an exam. Assignments are a test of you being able to apply your knowledge. But obviously if an exam is testing your memory. So you will therefore need to revise quite carefully for an exam. Remember they are multiple choice exams that means you will be asked detail. So it's not enough to have a broad sweep of understanding. You need to be able to recall the detail of modules and the detail of the series that you have been taught. So make certain that you know and are comfortable with the models, the tools and the concepts. However you will also be asked to apply these. So you may well get a series of questions that relate to an example that you are given an example organization and then you'll be asked questions around that. So you need to know your models but you also need to check that you can apply those models to an organization. Not necessarily an organization that you know, an organization that you are given a few details of within the exam. So if you normally work for a B2C company make certain that you can apply models and tools to nonprofits and to B2Bs because that may be the type of question that you get in the exam. One of the best ways to ensure you are prepared is to go back to those basic revision techniques that you did when you were at school or college or university and creating your flashcards, getting people to test you, saying models out loud or sticking pictures of models up around those walls, those techniques. You were taught them to do them. You know they work. These are the ones that you use to get yourself ready for the exam. It is detailed memory that you need. The other thing is the CIM have produced practice papers. Your study centers may also have produced other practice papers. Make certain that you do those. Do some non-timed and do some to time. So go into the exam knowing that you are fully prepared. General exam advice. Oh it's the same as I said for the assignments. Read the question. Read the question carefully. Then read the question again. Make certain that you have understood what the examiner is looking for. Don't go herring off answering a question that you wanted the examiner to ask. Answer the question the examiner has actually asked. You are doing this to time. There is a timer in the corner of your screen so just keep half an eye on that. Standard multiple choice advice applies. Go through the paper. Come back to questions that you are not sure about so that you know that you have had a crack at all the questions that you can do. Come back to the ones that you are struggling on. That's always a good advice on any multiple choice. But the most important thing is read that question carefully. That's the areas that I wanted to cover. Finally and ultimately good luck with assignments and exams. And I'm just going to finish off by saying who the companies that I work for. So as I said I'm the CEO of Cambridge Marketing College and there's the details of how to get hold of us should you wish to do so. Thank you.