This is possibly the worst advice that anyone could give you towards your CIPS exams. In this short article, we will explain why this kind of suggestion could spell disaster for your studies and, while well-meaning, why you really should be doing the complete opposite…!
I was sitting in a senior examiner’s meeting for one of the country’s leading awarding bodies. The Director for Professional Development was keen on improving standards and [rightly] they wanted to try to move their profession away from learning-by-rote in order to pass exams in the hope of producing more fully-rounded, educated and informed professionals for the future.
“We need to get students to undertake more reading and research as part of their studies,” they said. “I want every student to know the advantage of reading around the subject. Every study centre should be encouraging this.”
Unfortunately, we do not agree. We think this advice is likely to distract you from the core syllabus and it is far more likely to lower grades and create disappointment. Why?
When awarding bodies create their professional standards, they develop a body of knowledge which they would like all professional members to know and understand - this is focused on the core technical subject-matter for the profession. They then prepare detailed syllabus documents for their professional qualifications that stipulate what learning content from the body of knowledge is required, together with the assessment standards. It is this that tells each student what they need to study in order to ‘pass’ the test and become a member of that professional body.
So why is reading around the subject unhelpful?
In short, it is a bad suggestion because it lacks focus. Reading around a subject leaves you undirected and open to the whims of whatever page you find next on an internet feed. It risks wandering off the subject and overloading you with unnecessary and potentially irrelevant information. As a result you waste your time by being inefficient and unproductive - and this is reflected in your exam grades.
We are all short of time, none more so than professional students and apprentices who are trying to hold down a job in the early stages of their career development as well as study for a professional vocation. Each qualification offers a guide on the number of study hours required to complete it, and this is one of the criteria that people take into consideration when deciding whether to embark on a study journey. This therefore creates a limit on the number of available study hours of most students and you don’t want to fill this time up with unfocused or undirected reading.
Each qualification has a syllabus document that stipulates what technical content is required to be studied and how it will be assessed, so the job of the both student and tutor is to stay focused totally (and only) on this as ‘core’ content, recognising that awarding bodies should only be examining you on the core content of their syllabus and not other random material found ‘out there’.
At Cordie, we provide study materials that are centred on the core content of the syllabus document. We use this as our primary guide as to what to teach you, because we know that your awarding body (CIPS) applies this as their primary guide as to what to examine you on. We have created some of the world’s leading eLearning for the CIPS Diploma in Procurement & Supply, as well as numerous question banks and guidance materials specifically built on the syllabus content itself.
The results speak for themselves with pass-rates continually over 90% at all Levels and 100% in many of the subjects - and all because we stay focused on the required learning content.
If you’d like to find out more about how we achieve such great results or how we can help you prepare for your next CIPS exam, do please get in touch via the contact form at the bottom of this page. We look forward to hearing from you!