My CPA score for the FAR section came in the mail today. I passed with a 93! I owe a huge thank you to Roger CPA Review for making studying so much fun and giving me all those great mnemonics to help me remember everything! Roger’s website boasts an impressive 86% pass rates, and they definitely made me feel like I had a good friend (who knew their stuff) helping me study for the CPA exam.

I owe a lot of thanks to my professors too, for giving me a good grounding in the topics covered on the CPA exam. It is a lot easier to re-learn CPA material when you learned it very well the first time around.

Looking forward, I need to study even harder for REG because I am less familiar with the topics covered on the Regulation section of the CPA exam. It’s been hard to study, what with school, recruiting events, and so many social events going on, but I should have a little bit of breathing time starting tomorrow.

Okay, being back at school makes it hard to study for the CPA exam! I managed to get a few notecards done but I’m still on Reg-1 of the Roger CPA preparation course (that’s part one of 6 parts.)

When I do have time, I have more pressing assignments to do, and then there are a lot more social distractions than I had to deal with during the summer, when I was mostly living at home.

This week I hope to do better, but I have 2 recruiting events to go, which eats up time. Hopefully they’ll go well though! I’m excited to get to meet more people at the firms. I’d better get some of my business casual clothing ready to go!

The exam has come and gone! I took FAR today, and then came home, relaxed, went to dance class, and did my best not to think about it too much!

I have no idea how I did. The questions didn’t seem to get any harder (a bad sign) but they also didn’t seem to get any easier (a good sign?).

I raced through the multiple choice section to make sure I’d have enough time for the simulations, which ended up not taking very long at all, and so I left the exam with over an hour on the timer. That may or may not be a bad thing?

It seemed like most of the multiple choice were not questions requiring computation, which always takes up time, so I think that’s why I managed to get through it quicker.

On one of my simulation tabs, they seem to have left off half the information required to do the problem. I spent a long time re-reading the information and trying to find what I was missing, since I had all that extra time, but no such luck. Hopefully that’s one of the pre-test questions!

Well, I just looked up how long it’ll take to get my scores, and it seems I could get them in as little as a few weeks, or as long as a few months! So in the meantime, I’ll forget about FAR for awhile and start studying for REG! But that can wait until tomorrow.

In half an hour I’ll be on my way to the Prometrics testing center to take the FAR section of the CPA exam! (Leaving a little earlier than I need to, just in case, and because it’s raining. People drive slowly here when it rains.)

Trying to keep my list of things to remember to a manageable size:

1. Take several forms of ID to the testing center
2. Read the last sentence first of multiple choice questions
3. Do the written communication first on simulations
4. Take extra time on the first testlet, because it determines how difficult my questions will be on the second testlet.
5. Eat breakfast!

Plus, I have to remember how to do all that accounting stuff they’re going to ask me about .

I was doing great on my new, expanded study hours, until I switched my work hours around this week! I am now working 3 full days a week instead of 5 part-days. It works out to the same amount of work per week, but I get to save on gas.

My sleep patterns were not prepared for me waking up early though, and losing out on sleep absolutely destroys my ability to sit down and study, although I have some free time in the evenings I could be filling.

These three days have made me realize I should pay more attention to how much I sleep, even if I don’t have to get up for work. It could explain why some days I can sit down and focus on CPA review for 3 hours, and other days I can’t get past 15 minutes!

I’ve been studying for the CPA exam for a month now! It feels like I’ve barely started, but I’ve been picking up the pace.

My big accomplishment for week four was bringing my average hours studied per day (for the total time) up to 1 hour. It was really bad when it was below that! If I study 3 hours a day for the next 28 days, I can bring that average up to 2 hours a day.

Estimating Study Time Needed before CPA Exam

I have watched 6 hours of Roger CPA videos, so I have about 24 hours of video left. So far I’ve spent about 2.5 hours doing homework problems for every hour of “class.”

I estimate I have about 84 hours of “learning” still to get through. This part of the process involves watching the Roger CPA Review videos, plus going through the “homework” problems. In this stage, as I do each problem, I check the answer and read the explanation for how to do it. This is part of “learning” because reading the explanations teaches me how to do the problem properly.

After that stage, I still need to:

• Review all this information, because I definitely don’t have it down very well yet for the parts I’ve already completed the homework problems for.
• Practice the simulation problems
• Drill-go through practice tests and get up to speed.

I’m not sure how long the next parts will take me, but I have about 25 or so days left before I take the exam, so studying for only 2 hours a day from now on will just barely get me through the learning stage. Therefore, I’ll be studying a lot more hours a day from now on.

FAR seems to be the longest section to study for, judging by the fact that Roger has more video hours for this section than any other. At least for the next section I take I’ll know earlier how many hours of study I need to budget for!

The first part of my studying process involves answering a whole lot of multiple choice questions, pre-studying, to get a feel for which areas I need to work on the most. This is super frustrating, because I am struggling to remember all topics, so I would rather just get on with the actual studying part.

However, I think there is some benefit to this exercise. At the very least, I’m getting a quick and dirty overview of the questions that will be asked, and I can get a feel for how much of the information I’m familiar with, even if I don’t remember the specifics of how to solve the problems. Also, sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised with how well I do remember some topics.

In the meantime, I am trying to come up with ways to motivate myself to study each day. I have a study goal, although so far I haven’t been sticking to it (too many excuses).

I am also still trying to figure out the best time and place to study in my house. I originally planned to study after work, but I often find I’m too tired to focus. I think I am going to try setting my study time after I have had a chance to fit some exercise in.

Finally, I am trying to motivate myself by “paying” myself per hour. For every hour I study, I put a bit of money aside to save towards buying a netbook. This is the best motivational tactic I can come up with, and it’s working pretty well!

While reading over my CPA study book’s suggestions for how to score well on writing sections of the CPA exam, I was struck by how similar their advice is to the rules I have learned about blogging.

They suggest that you use short sentences and short paragraphs. I have read many articles about blogging that promote this same writing style, as it is easier to read on a screen. This style of writing also makes it easier to present your points clearly.

The book also suggests using keywords throughout your writing. In blogging, you do this because it helps search engines know what your post is about. For writing on the CPA exam, I suppose using consistent keywords forces you to have a a very clear main point.

So, hopefully blogging will make the writing part something I don’t need to worry about too much. Then again, just because I know these are rules, it doesn’t mean that I actually follow them!

Note about my writing style:

My natural inclination is to be concise. I like to keep things short and clear. Warring with that is the fact that almost all the writing I did during college was for Spanish class. In Spanish, run on sentences are encouraged, haha, so sometimes that can creep into my writing in English. I think it’s an interesting mix of influences.

I finished up my essays to get course credit for my internship yesterday! Woohoo, about 22 pages of accounting-ness. I feel bad for the professor who has to grade all of these.

I haven’t cracked a CPA book yet, but after the comments on my last blog post, I thought I would look into getting some CPA review software. I know that when I was studying for GMAT, having a good electronic simulation of a practice test really helped me prepare for the real thing.

The review software I can find is all in the range of $1,500 to $2,000 though. Becker made me a little angry because they don’t list their prices anywhere. You try to click through and they ask you for your name and billing information without showing you a price tag anywhere. I think I saw once that they are over $4,000 though, so if they won’t display it on their website, that’s the number I’m going with for comparison purposes.

So I’m still undecided on whether I need software. I might just get some 2009 books instead. Any comments?

So, as I begin preparing to take the CPA exam, I’m making an assessment of what CPA review materials I can get for free, and what I still need to get.

Lucky for me, a family friend gave me this whole box of books for free! I almost couldn’t even carry these books up to my room. I’m small, but there are still a lot of pages of study material in this box:

The dates of the books range from 2004 to 2008. I know that the CPA exam changes a little each year, but I’m guessing the majority of what’s in these books will be good study materials. Looks like I’ve got Becker, Wiley, and Gleims in my big box. Now I just need to figure out what has changed on the exam since these books were published!