FNCE20005: Corporate Financial Decision Making

• Mid-semester test (20% of total)
• Final exam (80% of total)

Note that the final exam is a hurdle - 50%+ required on the final exam itself in order to pass the subject

Both assessments were open-book and non-zoom supervised.

The mid-semester test in this subject is tricky. It's not hard - you can easily answer all the questions (it's 20 MCQ), but the answers were very detailed and you really had to be on top of your game to get a good mark here. Answers would often have two phrases within them - for example, say the question was "What's 1+1?". One of the answer choices would be "1 + 1 is 2, but only if 2 is a negative number". Obviously the first part is correct, but the second phrase is false! Just imagine this in a finance context and you can see why this gets really tricky. This wasn't even the worst part - you always had "none of the above is true" or "more than one of the above is true" answer options to choose from. This meant even though one answer was obvious - you have to check for the others to see if it they were right. As such the average mark for this MST was 11/20, and it has been around this level historically. I don't think it gets better in level 3 subjects as I've heard haha.

The 80% exam is a bit scary, but honestly I found it a lot easier than the MST. It features 20 MCQ (similar to MST in terms of difficulty and style), around 8 true/false questions (where you had to explain why as well - this was the bulk of the exam as it was worth 40 marks), and 3 short/long answer questions (which were almost all mathematical based). New edit: this exam was scaled by 17 marks! Wow!

Chander only gave us one sample exam, which served us well. The questions were on par difficulty to the real exam, and the last question of both exams were similar. Still though, I couldn't get a sufficient answer here. You'll have to make sure you have a decent scanner/or use a tablet here, since Chander and the tutors only accepted handwritten answers. Make sure you upload early onto Gradescope!

In terms of the content tested, Chander mentioned 60% of the exam would be on weeks 6 onwards, and 40% in the first half. He definitely lived up to that, so be prepared to check closely on notes from weeks 1 - 5. As this exam was open book, you didn't need to remember much, but having organised notes will help you immensely and is the sole crediting factor to (potentially!) my exam success. I also recommend making "cheat sheets" - notes on how to tackle problems with formulae.

Whilst this subject isn't actually directly needed for the finance major, it is needed as a pre-requisite to the major level 3 finance subjects, Investments and Derivatives. In addition, this subject used to be a level 3 subject back in the day.

Pretty interesting subject - if you want to do this as a breadth after PoF, then it's a departure from the formulas and more onto developing intuition and understanding the underlying theory about how companies work financially.
P.S. I MESSED UP THE FORMATTING SO THIS [list LSIT TING] DOENST GO AWAY[/list][/list][/list]

Yes, with screen capture. Lectures were all pre-recorded (i.e. no live lectures)

Chander Shekhar

CFDM goes into the depths of how big corporations finance and what decisions they make regarding their financing decisions. This subject focuses on public companies (any company with stocks you can buy basically) so considering the recent trends, this subject is pretty useful!

Lectures were just your typical finance lectures - pretty long (albeit they never exceeded 2 hours) and for the most part, pretty boring. Chander reads mostly off the slides but does add some important comments occasionally, so bear-the-boredom and watch the lectures! With that being said, he is a pretty cool guy and a lot better than the PoF lecturers.

Let's talk about content: in twelve weeks, you'll learn about:
Introduction & Options

None, only a sample exam. More on this later

3.5/5

Business Finance12e (Peirson et al 2014). Not needed at all - in fact, the online tutors didn't even help those who had problems with the questions in this textbook! Lecture slides are already comprehensive. I'd suggest you search up topics you are not sure about instead!

This was one of the many subjects that re-introduced in person tutorials. They were great - especially if your tutor was good. My tutor was great and could easily explain concepts that Chander/slides could not. Really recommend that you try to get an in-person tutorial (if you can). Definitely grateful that I went to all tutorials since the tutorial answers can be tricky, albeit the head tutor does upload his video solutions every week on LMS/Canvas. There is no hurdle requirement/participation mark here, so feel free to drop-out of tutorials. For the most part though, the tutors were nice and knew what they were talking about...

With that being said, it seems like semester 2 2021 CFDM does have a 10% participation mark in tutorials - meaning a 70% weighted final exam. Not sure if this will be the case for future years.

1x 2 hr lecture, 1x 1 hr tutorial per week.

2021 Semester 1

TBA