Hopefully the CPA exam will soon be behind me! I sat for BEC on Monday. As usual, I really didn’t feel that good about it, but I’ll just have to wait and see.

Here are my practice question results for BEC:

I felt pretty comfortable with most of the practice questions by the time I went to take the exam. I think the most frustrating part is that even if you have all of the practice questions DOWN, they come up with new things to fling at you on the test itself. Plus, there are only 90 questions on the test – there are so many questions I could have answered easily but they weren’t asked!

Does anyone have any insights on BEC? Did it seem more difficult than you expected? It did for me…

So, this basically has nothing to do with accounting, but I just spent the day reding “The Girl Who Played With Fire” by Steig Larsson (sequel to “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” I loved both books, although I found they had slow bits in both.

“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” dealt with a lot of financial chicanery, and I was impressed by how Larsson could come up with convincing complex financial frauds. He worked in the news industry for many years, but not in the financial area like his main character (Blomkvist) does. I guess he picked up his instincts for financial scandal through strong interest in politics?

The book is fiction, but there are plenty of financial fraudsters operating out there who are just as devious as the villain in this novel. Sometimes I think the only way we find out about frauds is when someone on the inside informs, or when the fraud reaches the end of its natural life and collapses.

Does being a CPA qualify you to detect these schemes? Sometimes I wonder how many really smart people are committing fraud out there that never get caught. I hope that after some work experience, I’ll be able to answer yes to that question, but I suppose there’s a reason why we have specialized forensic accountants.

To write a book about a financial criminal, you need to be able to think like a criminal. As an auditor on the alert for fraud, you need to be aware of how fraud can be perpetrated. I’m not sure that the traditional accounting education really prepares anyone for that, so I suppose you’re supposed to pick it up mostly from experience?

For those of you who have been paying close attention, I posted my passing AUD score on here last weekend. I intended to write a post then, but it somehow got put off amid studying for midterms and for BEC.

So, I’m a little surprised at how close together my AUD and REG scores are, because I felt least confident about REG and most confident about AUD. I suppose it has something to do with being graded against how everyone else performs. Maybe REG is just harder for most people than AUD is?

So, I wrote a post awhile ago of my AUD Practice Results, which I tracked so I could compare my practice test scores to my actual AUD score.

I got an average score of about 69% my first round through all of the Wiley question, and an average of 73% the second time through. That translated to an 87 on the actual exam.

I wish I had tracked my practice results for the other exams too, because it’s interesting to compare. I’m pretty sure for REG, my average scores on the homework questions were far worse that on AUD.

I am keeping track of my BEC practice questions, but I’m so busy at the moment that I’m not sure I’ll have time to run through them twice. BEC is in about a week!