Ask a sixteen-year-old why they want to take Business, says Vukašin Petrović, and the answer is usually a version of the same idea. You buy cheap, sell for more and the money comes in. Or you invent something people will pay for and enjoy the money rolling in. "Usually there are only two paths," Petrović says. "Be cheaper or be different."
Petrović has taught Business in private international schools in Belgrade for close to twenty years and Psychology since 2012, and he marks Business papers for Cambridge and the IB. Many students expect to take over a family firm one day and picture themselves running it. The family firm is a business already built, one they can study from the inside while still at school. It can also convince them that the exam result hardly matters and that the company will carry on growing by itself.
Petrović knows heirs who began at the bottom, behind the bar or waiting tables, until they had learned every job in the firm. "I guarantee that managers and owners like that will be far more successful than those who start straight in senior positions," he says. "You can hardly manage people whose job you have never done."
THE CHOICE
After IGCSE, taken in six to eight subjects, students narrow the list to three or four for AS and A level, and most universities ask for three A level grades. "That means they have to decide quite firmly what they will do and what they will specialise in," Petrović says. At sixteen, many are still undecided, and starting a subject in Year 13 is rare.
WHAT BUSINESS ASKS FOR
Within a month, most Business students discover that the subject takes serious work and that Cambridge is exacting about how a question has to be answered. Many find the mark scheme harder to accept than the theory. They write more than the question asks for and cannot see how one sentence earns three or four marks while five sentences earn two. The five sentences missed the point the mark scheme rewards.
Every answer is built in layers: Knowledge, the theory; Application, which ties it to the case; Analysis, which explains why it matters and where it leads; and Evaluation, which weighs what all this means for this particular case. Each question assigns a fixed number of marks to each layer, and Cambridge does not depart from the scheme.
Petrović remembers a question that asked students to define the public sector of an economy. The mark scheme gave "businesses owned and controlled by a government" two marks, one for owned and one for controlled by a government. A student who wrote "business owned and controlled by the government" received nothing. In the singular, the sentence describes a single state-owned business, which is a different thing from a sector. Petrović accepts the logic. He also thinks the student, who perhaps lost a single letter to haste or exam nerves, deserved at least one mark.
Short definitions are only part of the paper. Petrović describes AS and A level as close to university level in what they demand, with some answers running to more than two pages. Paper 4, the final paper of Cambridge International A Level Business, consists of two questions worth twenty marks each, to be answered in seventy-five minutes.
A longer question might ask whether the owner of a company should move from an autocratic style of leadership to a democratic one. Students define both styles, set out the strengths and weaknesses of each and, in the evaluation, which carries the most marks, decide what suits this company at that moment. Whether they answer yes or no matters little to the examiner. Marks go to a decision defended and then challenged: the company should become more democratic for these reasons, though in some situations autocratic leadership lifts results faster. The opposite answer can reach full marks too.
WHAT PSYCHOLOGY ASKS FOR
At the school where Petrović teaches, Psychology begins only in Year 12. Students arrive with little idea of what it involves or where it could lead, so those who are curious come to ask him at the end of Year 11. Most are drawn by how interesting it sounds; some imagine it will give them influence over other people and something clever to say among friends.
His first question is direct: "Why do you want this? Why are you here?" Unless they intend to study psychology or medicine, he advises them against it, and many change their minds. To those who simply find it interesting, he offers the textbook and the case studies to read in their free time.
In Year 13 most choose clinical psychology, with its schizophrenia, kleptomania and pyromania. It used to be called abnormal psychology, a name that sounds exciting to teenagers. Few will need it unless they go on to study it. They memorise details from research they consider pointless, including studies on elephants and monkeys, alongside studies that stay with them: Bandura's children copying the aggression of adults, Milgram's volunteers giving what they believed were dangerous shocks to a stranger because a man in a lab coat told them to. In the exam they must weigh such research: the sample, the procedure and setting, the ethics, whether the behaviour stems from the person or the situation. Even those with high grades are seldom satisfied with the subject, though many see it through to the end of A level.
THE OTHER OPTION
In both subjects, either side of an evaluation can earn full marks. Petrović thinks the method is right: it makes students examine a decision from more than one side and justify it, as they will have to every day. One of the first terms they learn in Business is opportunity cost, the benefit of the option given up.
"We all question our own decisions," he says. "That doesn't have to be bad, as long as we stand behind the decisions we've made. It isn't impossible to change a decision, to change our minds. But there has to be a good reason for it. Not too often, and not for just any reason."
Photographs: MChe Lee, Ojus Jaiswal, Camilo Rueda López and Andrew Ebrahim.
Vukašin Petrović is a Cambridge examiner for Business at IGCSE and A level and an examiner for IB Business Management. He teaches Business and Psychology at Prima International School in Belgrade, holds a PhD in marketing and consumer behaviour and is the author of Psihologija marketinga (2017).
