Should I be worried about changes to SBL in September?

The new ACCA SBL exam launches in September 2023. Here, ACCA SBL expert tutor Sean Purcell explains how it’s different to the old one

From September 2023 the format of ACCA SBL will be changing. If you studied for SBL a while ago and are coming back to it, or fear you might have to retake after the June 2023 exam, should you be worried about the changes?

The short answer is no, and let me explain the main changes to you clearly.

Essentially, the ACCA, being a professional organisation, wants its exams to be as relevant as possible and they do that by taking on board lots of feedback from industry and from the profession and constant internal review. The result of this review and feedback is that they believe that the SBL exam could be brought closer to a real-life workplace experience through the introduction of a pre-seen element.

The old form of SBL gave you a four-hour exam. Within those four hours you were provided with detailed information about a fictitious organisation and then had to develop strategic advice and applied recommendations straight away. In a real-life workplace you would normally have more time to familiarise yourself with an organisation before your first meeting and before any advice is given. So, the SBL exam has been adapted, should we say, to better reflect real-life by giving you pre-seen information to familiarise yourself with before the exam. This familiarity should make it easier for you to work through the new information that will be provided in the exhibits on exam day.

This change will help students that are not familiar with the industry in which the fictitious organisation operates as well as those students that have English as a second language.

The new pre-seen element

Changes from September 2023 mean that you will get some pre-seen information, which is going to be released two weeks prior to the exam taking place. So, because you now get pre-seen material to familiarise yourself with before the exam, there will be fewer exhibits in the exam day case study exam. Because of this the exam length is being reduced from four hours to three hours 15 minutes, which is the same time length as the other strategic professional papers.

But it is important to remember that the preseen material is not designed to provide hints as to what the potential questions will be in the case study exam. It’s purely there to enable you to absorb and understand all the information about the fictional organisation that will feature in your exam and the industry in which it operates.

Three separate response sections

The other change relates to the structure of the exam in the CBE environment. In the past you answered all of your questions (or tasks) to SBL in one response section. Going forward, there will be three separate response sections, in which you will answer each of the three tasks.

But that is the only change; you’ll still be required to answer tasks using word processing, using spreadsheets and slides as you would have done in the old format, and the areas of knowledge required by the updated SBL exam are the same as they were for previous SBL exams as there have not been any large syllabus changes. You can practice the new format on the ACCA Practice Platform using the SBL Specimen Exams. So that’s it, nothing to worry about. It's purely an improvement to better reflect real life and facilitate more reflection and understanding before the exam starts.

In my opinion it is a really positive change to what is already a fantastic exam.

• Sean Purcell is a former PQ Lecturer of the Year, as well as a PQ ‘tutor in your pocket’. He works as the ACCA expert tutor for SBL