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!

I’ve been neglecting my Roger CPA Review materials over the last few weeks, but I’ll be taking AUD in less than 2 weeks, so it’s back to multiple choice questions!

It’s the time in the semester where the first big tests are happening, and the first big cases are due, so there is plenty to distract me. Roger’s review materials come with software that simulates taking the exam though, so I’ll be sitting down with that over the next two weeks to complete my preparations.

In other news, apparently auditors have been noticing an increase in fraud recently. This article from WebCPA has some troubling statistics about the increase in fraud over the last year.

The scary part is when you stop to wonder how much fraud they’re not even finding. For every fraudster that is caught, how many are out there still getting away with it?

I (very luckily) have a position as a graduate assistant this semester, which means I get to help one of the accounting professors grade things and whatever else they need done.

So, the last final we have to grade was yesterday morning, and since then we’ve been in final-exam-grading-frenzy mode. I can only help with a limited amount, because grading problems can be pretty subjective sometimes. I have tried to help out as much as possible though, as the other grader has so much work to do!

Grading problems is actually kind of fun though. It can be hard to decipher what students are trying to say sometimes, but that makes life more interesting. And the problems I’m grading relate to some of the stuff on the AUD exam so I even get to review a little, although this test is much more in-depth on some points than the CPA exam is. We should be done sometime tomorrow, if all goes well.

Hope everyone else is doing well, and hopefully you’re all through finals (if you have them) and are looking forward to the holidays!

I’m happy with my progress on Audit studying so far. Audit seems like it’ll be a much easier section of the CPA exam than FAR and REG, because I already understand a lot of the material.

Unfortunately, the question-writers seem to agree that the material is easier to remember, and ask some pretty complicated multiple choice questions. The multiple choice questions for the AUD section that I’ve practiced so far seem to take me much longer to read than the FAR and REG questions, and then even if you are pretty comfortable with the topic, they throw in a lot of tempting distractor answers that all sound right.

I started working on the third chapter of Roger CPA Review‘s study materials for AUD, so I’m right on track for getting through my initial review on time!

I’m still waiting to hear about my CPA score for REG, but in the meantime, I’ve started studying for the audit section. I’m actually pretty excited to be studying for AUD, because it makes so much more sense to me than tax-related topics, and I just like Audit a lot. The questions require more thinking, and less memorizing – or that’s how it seems to me, because I find it all to be quite logical.

My goal at the moment is to complete one “chapter” of Roger’s CPA Review for Audit each week. There are only five chapters in the Audit review course, so if I can finish all the initial review in 5 weeks, I can actually follow Roger’s full study plan fully this time – ie, I can go through all the multiple choice questions a second time, and practice on the software that comes with the CPA review package.

I’ve made it through all of Chapter 1 so far, and have just finished up the Roger CPA Review Videos for Chapter 2. I feel really good about my progess so far.

Edit: I’m studying for my tax exam tomorrow, and I’m feeling even less confident about REG now. I wish I had studied for my tax exam before taking REG! The topics I’m studying now are reminding me a lot of the questions that were on my exam…

So, taking REG is over with. After all those hours of studying, it came down to a couple of hours of questions. I don’t feel very good about the multiple choice, but I think that the simulations went okay. According to Another71′s score release predictions, I might just be in the first wave of scores released around November 17th.

So, in total I spent about 87 hours studying for REG, and I felt pretty unprepared going in. I would’ve liked to have been able to practice the multiple choice several more times. REG felt like a collection of random factoids I had to memorize, so I would forget the first bits of information by the time I got to the end. Roger’s mnemonic devices really helped out – if I have to do it again, I’m going to spend a lot more time learning all of those.

Now I get to start studying for the Audit section of the CPA exam. I’ve switched my REG books out for my AUD Roger books. Starting the review for a new CPA section is always a little exciting, because I can plan how much more I’m going to study for this section than for the last!

Hopefully I can have a smoother graph than the one for REG – lots of hours in the beginning AND in the end. Also, I have a week off for Thanksgiving, so I plan to fit in as many hours as possible that week.