Are you a student or lecturer who has tried to find Profex material by googling ‘Profex books’ or ‘Profex study material for CIPS exams’ or similar? If so, you may well have found yourself on this following page of the CIPS website.

Screenshot as of 25 March 2021

On this page CIPS hint at an entirely spurious and unauthorised claim that their books are somehow connected with Profex. It is understandable that they want to do this – after all, their own books ‘enjoy’ a deserved reputation for being unreadable, incoherent drivel, barely related to the exam syllabus, while the Profex books are the acknowledged Rolls Royce of publications for CIPS exams. But to say that their motivation is understandable is not to say that it is ethical, or professional – or even legal. Indeed, if you have studied the legal concept of ‘passing off’ you may wonder whether this qualifies as a good example.

But if you are feeling let down by your masters at Easton House you are failing to grasp an important point: ethical, professional and legal standards apply to little guys – like you, and me – not to our overlords.

Many of you will have seen our Facebook post about a question in the July exam for L4M8, covering a topic not on the exam syllabus. On Facebook I promised to provide the whole world with coverage of this topic (financial ratio analysis) free of charge. Here it is!

You can of course download as a PDF to read offline if you’d rather.

How ready are you for attempting the L4M2 exam? Our quiz will help you to diagnose whether you have mastered the study material … or not!

The references in the answers are to chapters and sections of the Profex Study Text.

So how did you do? If you found any worrying gaps in your knowledge, you should refer in the first instance to your Profex PassNotes. And if that’s not enough, you will find full details in your Profex Study Text.

Just a brief blog today to say that Profex are now on Facebook, so please do give our page a like and share within your networks.

As promised in my most recent blog post, I am now posting improved coverage of Gantt charts and baselines. If you have purchased the Profex Study Text for this module you should print out these pages and use them instead of page 187 of the May 2020 edition.

Some harsh words have appeared on Twitter in relation to the CIPS Study Guide for this module:

@cipsnews all of your new syllabus books are pretty terrible but this is the worst one I’ve come across yet. A lot of words to not say very much. Massive chunks of text (this is a textbook, not a novel) that go off on irrelevant tangents. It’s tiring to read. Do better. pic.twitter.com/ohD70wxBpZ

— manf (@manfykelly) August 15, 2020

I would not disagree with this at all. But by a nice irony a Profex customer has criticised our own Study Text for the same module. He complains that the coverage of a syllabus topic on Gantt charts and baselines is too skimpy. And I agree with him – it just shows that publishing is not an easy discipline, and definitely not for amateurs!

If you have purchased the Profex text for this module, keep an eye on this space during the next few days. As always when I receive a justified criticism of the content of the books I plan to post an improved version for anyone to view free of charge. I will be posting new coverage of that specific syllabus topic very soon. Oh, and good luck to you if you have purchased the official Study Guide and are expecting a similar response from CIPS!

Apologies for the long silence everyone. It’s been very hectic finalising the Level 5 books and launching into work on Level 6, not to mention keeping up with the return of football and test cricket. Bear with me for a few more days and I’ll post some more MCQs or news items or maths teasers or technical explanations … or whatever you ask me for. In the meantime, good luck to all of you who have been sitting exams in recent weeks. I’m getting feedback about questions that were set despite not being covered by the syllabus or the official Study Guides. Feel free to contact me in private if you have anything of that kind to report: Ynherapr.abbar@cebsrk.pb.hx. I will then take a view about whether to cover the ‘rogue’ questions in later editions of the Profex books.

I like puzzles, so I’ve decided to include an occasional teaser in this blog. This first one was presented at school to my daughter’s eight year old niece but caused widespread bafflement among older readers.

I’m looking for a fraction where the numerator differs from the denominator by 19. The fraction must be greater than ⅛ but less than ¼.

The first person to post a correct answer as a comment on this post is entitled to a Profex book of their choice, delivered free of charge anywhere in the world.

You can get two Profex books of your choice if you give me the complete list (not a very long list) of possible answers.

This is much easier than many of the questions you will meet in your exam. At least there is a definite answer!

We had a message this morning from a student about to begin studying Level 6. ‘I really don’t want to use the CIPS textbooks. Using them for Level 5 has scarred me for life. When will your Level 6 books be published?’

We wish our Level 6 books were already available. (They would have been if CIPS had not kept the syllabus secret from the whole world so as to give their preferred publisher an 18 month start. CIPS are strongly in favour of fair competition.) But the good news is that our books are coming soon. L6M1, M2 and M3 are scheduled for end August to end September. For the mysterious L6M4 – no publication coming from CIPS on this one – we will be sending an aid for lecturers to selected Study Centres in the next week or two. And we will be launching as many of the elective modules as we possibly can by the end of 2020. In the meantime, we have undertaken medical research on behalf of all students and lecturers worldwide and the advice is simple: keep taking the painkillers.