QCAA Business General Senior Syllabus (2025 v1.3, first assessed 2026)
Units 3 and 4 are assessed through school-marked internal assessments plus one external assessment: an examination in combination response format, worth 25 per cent of the subject result and held in Term 4. QCAA publishes it as a question and response book. The paper runs in two sections, a short response section followed by an extended response section, and the extended response carries most of the marks — in 2023 the paper set three short response questions worth ten marks in total and a single extended response worth twenty-five.
Past papers on this subject span more than one syllabus. Papers written under an older one still work as practice, but the units and topics they test have changed — the index labels every paper with the syllabus it was set under.
2019 v1.1 syllabus (Business General Senior Syllabus) · 2020–20252025 v1.3 syllabus (revised Business General Senior Syllabus) · 2026–present
The units and topics, one by one
Each area below lists the concepts named in the syllabus, what the QCAA exam asks of them, and the mistake that most often costs marks.
Area 1 of 4
Unit 1: Business creation
Unit 1 covers the seed stage of the business life cycle, before there is real revenue to manage. It starts with legal and business fundamentals — the structures a new venture can adopt, the obligations attached to each, and the basic finance and record-keeping a start-up needs. Planning follows: how a business plan is built, and how strategic planning approaches such as SWOT and PEST analysis are used to test an idea before money is committed. The unit then moves to where ideas come from and who is affected by them — the creation of business ideas, the stakeholders with an interest in the venture, the competitors already present, and the wider business environment. Entrepreneurship closes it, with ideas evaluated against the four criteria used throughout the course: competitiveness, effectiveness, efficiency and stakeholder satisfaction.
What the syllabus lists under this area · 4 points
- Legal and business fundamentals (seed stage of the business life cycle)
- Business planning and strategic planning approaches (SWOT, PEST analysis)
- Creation of business ideas, stakeholders, competitors and the business environment
- Entrepreneurship and evaluating business ideas against competitiveness, effectiveness, efficiency and stakeholder satisfaction
What the exam asks
Unit 1 is a Year 11 unit and is not externally examined. Internal assessment usually takes the form of a feasibility report or examination in which you apply SWOT or PEST to a supplied business idea and recommend whether it should proceed, with marks tied to linking each analytical point to case evidence and to one of the four criteria.
Where marks go missing
Listing SWOT items as isolated bullet points. Marks come from what the analysis means for the decision — a threat only earns credit once you explain how it affects viability and what the business should do about it.
Area 2 of 4
Unit 2: Business growth
Unit 2 takes an established business into the growth stage, where the constraint shifts from finding customers to serving them reliably. The internal environment comes first: choosing a business and legal structure that can scale, and designing the operational processes and systems behind it — facilities, inventory, scheduling, capacity and customer service. The external environment is analysed through PESTLE, adding legal and environmental factors to the political, economic, socio-cultural and technological ones, and applied specifically to market entry. The unit then works through the human resources, marketing, finance and operations strategies that support growth, and how they interact. Finally it develops the analytical habit the whole course depends on: identifying relationships, patterns and trends in business data rather than simply reporting the figures back.
What the syllabus lists under this area · 4 points
- Internal business environment in the growth stage (business/legal structure, operational processes and systems, facilities, inventory, scheduling, capacity, customer service)
- External business environment for market entry (PESTLE analysis — political, economic, socio-cultural, technological, legal, environmental)
- Human resources, marketing, finance and operations strategies to support growth
- Analysing relationships, patterns and trends in the growth stage
What the exam asks
Unit 2 is assessed only internally. Tasks typically supply financial and operational data for a growing business and ask for a strategy recommendation, with marks going to candidates who identify a trend in the data, explain what is causing it, and select a strategy that addresses that specific cause rather than a generic one.
Where marks go missing
Recommending growth strategies that ignore capacity. If the data shows scheduling, inventory or staffing already stretched, a marketing-led recommendation that lifts demand without fixing the operational constraint will not be credited as sound.
Area 3 of 4
Unit 3: Business diversification
Unit 3 is externally examinable and deals with a business at maturity, where growth has flattened and competitors have caught up. Topic 1, competitive markets, examines business situations in the maturity stage: becoming an employer of choice, building and managing a diverse workforce, strategic human resource planning, and identifying and managing risk. Topic 2, strategic development, covers leadership styles and the expansion strategies they suit, strategic planning in a competitive market, and diversification strategies as a response to a saturating core market. Running across both topics is the evaluation requirement: any diversification strategy you propose must be judged against competitiveness, effectiveness, efficiency and stakeholder satisfaction, and you need to be able to say which criterion matters most for the business in front of you.
What the syllabus lists under this area · 3 points
- Topic 1: Competitive markets — business situations in the maturity stage, employer of choice strategies, diverse workforce and HR strategic planning, risk management
- Topic 2: Strategic development — leadership styles and expansion strategies, strategic planning in a competitive market, diversification strategies
- Evaluating diversification strategies using competitiveness, effectiveness, efficiency and stakeholder satisfaction
What the exam asks
Unit 3 subject matter is examinable. Short response items ask you to explain a concept such as employer of choice or a leadership style and apply it to the case supplied; extended items ask you to select a diversification strategy for the business described and justify it against the evaluation criteria, acknowledging the risk it carries.
Where marks go missing
Naming a strategy without weighing the alternative. Justification marks require you to show why the chosen diversification beats the obvious rival option for this particular business, using case evidence — an unopposed recommendation reads as assertion.
Area 4 of 4
Unit 4: Business evolution
Unit 4 is the second externally examinable unit and it deals with businesses in trouble or in transition. Topic 1, repositioning a business, covers the post-maturity stage: the internal, operating and macro environmental factors pushing change, sustainability, corporate social responsibility and ethical standards, mergers and acquisitions, public relations and crisis management, and the drivers of change including corporate culture, management styles, organisational structures, competition and legislative compliance. Topic 2, transformation, adds the change management theories — Lewin's force field analysis and Kotter's eight-step model — together with the financial, human resource, marketing and operational strategies used to execute change, including redundancy, retraining and development. The analytical toolkit is explicit: SWOT, STEEPLE, force field analysis and Porter's Five Forces, used to reach decisions and recommendations evaluated against business criteria.
What the syllabus lists under this area · 4 points
- Topic 1: Repositioning a business — post-maturity stage, internal/operating/macro environmental factors, sustainability, corporate social responsibility, ethical standards, mergers and acquisitions, public relations and crisis management, drivers of change (corporate culture, management styles, organisational structures, competition, legislative compliance)
- Topic 2: Transformation of a business — change management theories (Lewin's force field analysis, Kotter's eight-step model), financial/HR/marketing/operational strategies for transformation, workforce redundancy, retraining and development
- Analytical tools: SWOT, STEEPLE, force field analysis, Porter's Five Forces
- Evaluating repositioning and transformation outcomes using business criteria to make decisions and recommendations
What the exam asks
Unit 4 supplies most of the extended response material. Expect an unseen business case and a task requiring you to analyse the drivers of change, apply a named tool such as force field analysis or Porter's Five Forces, recommend a repositioning or transformation strategy, and evaluate the likely outcome against the business criteria.
Where marks go missing
Reciting Kotter's eight steps or Lewin's model as a list. The marks are in applying the model to the case — naming the actual driving and restraining forces in the business given, or what each step would concretely involve for that organisation.
Common questions
Which units are on the QCE Business external assessment?
Units 3 and 4 — Business diversification and Business evolution. Units 1 and 2 are Year 11 units assessed inside your school and are not examined externally, though the four evaluation criteria and the analytical tools introduced there are used constantly in the Year 12 questions and in the exam itself.
What does the QCE Business exam actually look like?
It is a single examination in combination response format, published as a question and response book and held in Term 4. It runs a short response section followed by an extended response section. In 2023, for example, that meant three short response questions worth ten marks in total and one extended response worth twenty-five.
Do I need to memorise a business case study for the exam?
No. The external assessment supplies an unseen business case, so preparing a rehearsed company profile does not help. What transfers is fluency with the tools — SWOT, PESTLE, STEEPLE, force field analysis, Porter's Five Forces — and the habit of justifying a recommendation against the four evaluation criteria using the case evidence.
What changed in the 2025 Business syllabus?
It is a revision rather than a rebuild. The unit titles and the Unit 3 and 4 topic titles carry over unchanged, so the course structure a student sees is continuous, but subject matter within the topics was refreshed. It applies to students completing the course in 2026 or later; earlier cohorts sat under the 2019 version.