This week is the first week of on-campus interviews with accounting firms. Good luck to everyone! Interviews will be going on for a few weeks. Luckily, as a grad student I don’t have midterms in that time (except for Tax, which is run like an undergrad class), but the undergrads have both to worry about.

We all need to practice prioritizing this week, so here I am at 7 am, watching Roger CPA Videos (for REG part 4). I still have to do the multiple choice for REG 3, but it’s nice to switch it up between the types of studying. I am almost, not quite halfway through, after 7 weeks of studying, but I only have a month to go now! It’s also great to go from a section covering tax to one covering law, because it is so much easier for me to understand and remember law than tax. Go figure?

Tonight, I’ll be using this handy “Complete List of Behavioral Interview Questions,” from Emurse.com.

One of the big topics on the Regulation section of the CPA exam is Legal Liability. The legal liability section discusses under which circumstances an auditor can be sued for misstatements in a client’s financial statements.

Following GAAS (Generally Accepted Auditing Standards) is a good defense against any of these charges, so Regulation also tests CPA candidates on GAAS.

The Securities Act of 1933 regulates original issuance of stock, and governs auditors responsibilities as participants in that process.

The Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 regulates the subsequent trading of stock (ie, the financial statements companies issue to stockholders) and matters relating to fraud.

Conveniently, my audit class has been complementing my Roger CPA preparation, and we’ve been reading some cases about auditors getting sued for negligence (and losing). It’s a cool way to review legal liability, and the burden of proof for negligence. It’s also interesting to see cases where auditors got duped by clever clients, but the auditors were still held accountable because they could have found the fraud if they took their audit one step further. It’s a good reminder to maintain healthy professional skepticism.

Some interesting reading to relate Regulation studying to the real world is this article on Re: The Auditors that addresses a case faced by PWC and the auditor’s responsibility to find fraud under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002) rules.

When I named this site “AccountingElf” the creatures I had in mind were the elves from the story “The Elves and the Shoemaker.” While the Shoemaker slept, the elves did careful, beautiful work making shoes.

Unlike the elves in the story, I do not really stay up all night doing accounting. Sometimes I even have time for fun!

I have a lot to post about – last week was my university’s Accounting Career Fair, where I got to meet a few of the firms that are actually hiring this season. Over the weekend we had our first home football game, which means an abundance of craziness everywhere. This week it was back to school with some group projects, and luckily a few recruiting events in the wake of the career fair.

I’m in the middle of reading for tax class tomorrow, so I’m going to get back to that, but hopefully I can put some substantial posts up soon.

I’m quite happy with my levels of studying for the last couple of days. I just need to keep it up tomorrow, and we’ll call it a good week (despite the football weekend!)

I managed to study a bit more this week than I have so far. There’s still work to be done, but there’s a home football game this weekend and a lot of group projects due next week, so it’ll take a lot of motivation to keep increasing the hours!

I also made a little chart that shows the breakdown of what percentage of my time I spend on the different parts of the study process.

The process:

1. Pre-reading the chapter in Roger’s CPA Review book to get an idea of what I’m getting into!

2. Watching the Roger CPA videos related to that chapter, and marking up the chapter as I follow along.

3. Going back over the material and making notecards.

4. Doing the multiple choice problems in the Wiley CPA review book, one at a time, reading the answer explanation after each. Later I will go back and do the problems up to speed, or do the problems on the software that came with my Roger study kit.

This chart is a quick visual of how much time is spent on each. It’s a little skewed right now, because I’ve watched most of the videos for Reg-2, but I haven’t finished making the notecards yet. I suspect notecards and problem-solving will have a big jump after I get through that!

What is the hardest section of the CPA? According to Roger CPA Review, the average student finds the FAR section to be the most difficult part of the CPA exam.

I tried to schedule my CPA exam sections so I would go from hardest to easiest, so that if I passed the first one or two, I wouldn’t have to worry quite so much about passing the next two.

I judged that FAR would be the hardest, because it seemed like it covered the most information. However, once I started studying for it, I realized that even though I didn’t really remember much from my intermediate accounting classes, the fact that I had at least seen the material before made the review a little easier.

Now that I’ve safely passed FAR and I’m working on REG, REG seems like the most difficult section of the CPA exam. There are so many details they can test, and I’m not sure I’ve learned as much of this in school.

Sometimes I’m suprised about how much I already do know, despite not taking one course that specifically covers this exam. I’m working on part 2 of 6 parts in the Roger CPA review study plan. Part one was individual tax, which I actually did have a class on, and I think most accounting students have seen this in class. Part two is about the legal environment of accounting, which I never had  a class on, but I know a lot of the information already from different classes, such as audit class.

Some of the information is still new to me, such as the regulations about when you need to register with the SEC, but I’m hoping as I go through the book, I’ll know more than I think about the different topics on the REG exam.

Trying to fit in studying for the CPA exam around has been tough. When you have a homework assignment due the following day, CPA exam prep gets pushed back again and again, because it doesn’t have a due date.

This week I put some effort into finding a free hour earlier in the day to review for Regulation, and then reserve the later hours for doing my homework. If I wait until I have free time instead of just making some, studying never gets done.

I plan to spend labor day weekend trying to get on track. I just finished up the first section of Roger’s CPA Review plan, with 5 more sections to go. The first section took me 4 weeks to get through, but I only have about 8 more weeks to get through the other 5 sections.

Here is a little visual of how I spent the last 4 weeks:

As you can see, things really dropped off inWeek 3. This was the second week of classes, and I was still figuring out when I have free time (never) and recovering from a cold.

Week 4 is this past week, when I put more effort into squeezing studying in. I still only got 6.5 hours in, so my goal this weekend is to bring my average hours per week up as much as possible, since my average week from now on will probably look most like Week 4.

So, I was reading a post over at SmartCookie – CPA to Be about how she studies for the CPA exam. She mentioned spending time with a co-worker doing multiple choice questions and mentioned that they try to do at least 100 a night!

Now, I’m not sure how long that takes her, but I added up the hours I spent going over the first 100 multiple choice questions for the REG section of the CPA exam, and it took me over 3 hours to do those 100 problems! I definitely don’t have time to do 100 every night!

Now, I do what Roger suggested as a good CPA preparation tactic- I do the questions slowly and read each answer to understand the rules behind it, whether I got it right or wrong. I usually take some notes. I know I won’t remember it all, but I figure the notes will help a little bit of it stick in my head.

When I finally finished the slow round of multiple choice questions when I was studying for FAR, I never went back and did them over at a higher speed. (Roger suggests that you go back and do this, but I just didn’t have the motivation.) I did use the software to do timed practice questions, to make sure I could judge how quickly I needed to move on the real thing.

Anyone else out there who has a different approach to multiple choice questions?