Chalk and Cheesy - A Tale of Two Examiners?

On one corner of the desk there is the tale of Hamster Hilton, a case study so bereft of genuine business studies content, it is hard to see why OCR Business students bothered studying Unit 2871. In the other corner, the story of Albion Cheese Company, a well-researched and challenging business strategy case study that will stretch the A2 Unit 2880 students.

We’ve just finished preparing our OCR case study support resources and, having looked through those two cases several times, I left wondering how there can be such a divergence in quality between the two.

Of course, the cases will be written by different examiners. And a relatively short AS paper on business objectives (unit 2871) is unlikely to be anywhere near as demanding as the final synoptic paper (Unit 2880).

However, in my view there have to be questions asked about the Unit 2871 case study, particularly when you compare it with the detailed and interesting cases set by AQA (Mobeen) and Edexcel (Ikea).

The Hamster Hilton case study contains almost no content that is relevant to a modern business studies curriculum. I wonder how many OCR AS students will have been left scratching their heads when they first read the case - the gripping story of a woman who looks after pet hamsters in a farmhouse outbuilding during the holidays. A woman who is now faced with a complex business decision - whether to buy and sell some homemade hedgehog boxes from a friend. Wow. Inspirational stuff. Not.

Albion Cheese Company, by contrast, is a clever case study. Plenty of relevant data, careful examination of which yields some useful insights into the strategic problems facing a business in “turnaround” mode. A case study that can be approached in a variety of ways and which, for students who can see beyond the detail to the big picture, should result in a successful exam in June.

We all read these case studies differently, and maybe I have misjudged the simplicity and irrelevance of Hamster Hilton. But here’s to some much more challenging and realistic case studies for the new 2008 AS cohort.