What’s your study strategy?

Photo by Rotorhead

If you’ve been reading my posts about how much time I spend on each stage of studying, you know that notecards are a big part of my process.

Making notecards while I study for the CPA exam forces me to go over each chapter in close detail. It’s like taking notes, only because it’s in notecard form, I can use them as flashcards to study from later.

If you are short on study time, instead of making your own review cards, you can get some Wiley FocusNotes from Roger CPA Review. These look pretty different from my ntoecards, but are probably a more effective way to narrow down the important information. My notecards don’t really distinguish between topics that will be a big part of the exam and topics that will maybe show up in one question.

Has anyone used these to study from that can tell us a little more about them? I only have 2 weeks before REG, but I might order some to help me study for AUD and BEC.

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.

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.

I had a spot of trouble when I went to start watching my REG videos today. I just bought myself a Lenovo S10-2 for the new semester (since my old laptop has been having issues). However, I didn’t have Flash installed yet, and I kept trying to re-load the Roger CPA review video without realizing the problem.

Finally, I figured it out and installed Flash, but by then I  had used up my views. Luckily it was a quick fix. I used the live chat support option that the Roger CPA Review website offers, and they reset my views quite quickly. I had never used the live chat option before, but I am going to look into it more to see how else I can use it from now on.

In the meantime I started reading the chapter that goes along with the first videos, and I realized that I meant to study this way all along (read first, then watch, then re-read.) So it all worked out well!

I spent my first hour of studying for REG reading about individual taxation, which I think is the only part of REG I learned in school. It is just as convoluted as I remember! I’m confident it’ll make more sense the second time around though, especially since I have had a lot more contact with preparing tax returns than I had when I took tax class!

Ok, so maybe I won’t start studying for REG tonight. I could fit in an hour of video now, but I’m tired, and no point having too little sleep just 2 weeks before classes begin and I forget what sleep is for a semester!

I have plenty of time to fit studying in earlier in the day, I just have to avoid distractions, like long conversations with the neighbors or watching Jeopardy!

Now that I have FAR behind me (well, for now) I’m hoping I can use my study experiences to study better for REG.

I want to get through all of the Roger CPA Review videos and the other steps Roger suggests for CPA review prep and still have a few weeks to spare before the exam. I didn’t feel like I had enough time to go back and review all of the topics I wanted to review before I took FAR.

I also am going to try making notecards as I go through the process, rather than at the end. On the other hand, the actual process of making notecards is a good way to study for me, so it was a nice review to sit and make them. I’ll get that second review in the middle of the process this time around, but I’ll have the notecards ready to look through when I get closer to test time.

Other than thinking of ways to study better, I’m trying not to think about FAR for now. I’ve taken it, hopefully passed it, but I won’t find out for some unspecified amount of time. I might have to re-take it, but no point in worrying about that until I get my score!

Tomorrow, I will begin studying for the Regulation section of the CPA exam. I will still be using Roger CPA for my study materials, as I thought they worked really well for me on FAR review.

I spent the last weekend around my university, moving into my new apartment, and helping with the International Student Orientation. I’m back at home now, with fewer distractions and more constant internet and computer access, so let the CPA preparation begin!

Well, one more day to go before I take the FAR section of the CPA exam. I should be doing hours and hours of last minute studying, because there is a lot of material I haven’t covered yet, but I’m just all out of motivation.

I’ve never been good at convincing myself studying at the last minute will do any good, which is why I started studying 10 weeks ago. I passed the 90-hour mark this weekend, so if I had studied 3-4 hours a day every day, I could have studied the same amount in a month or less. But that’s just not how I work.

So, I spent Thursday-Saturday making note cards, and now I am reviewing them. It takes a long time to go through the whole stack! (But it’s a more effective way of really learning the stuff than just reading and re-reading it.)

I also took the day off work tomorrow so I can sleep in. That way, I won’t be too sleep deprived if I have trouble sleeping the night before the test. A big part of my CPA review study strategy is being well-rested! (Helps your recall!)

There are a few areas I haven’t reviewed too much that are worrying me: Pensions, Deferred Taxes, and Derivatives. I think I’ll be fine on pensions and deferred taxes, since I learned those in school. I just haven’t looked at them in a couple of weeks. I re-studied the Derviative section of my Roger CPA Review book, but I think I’ll have to do a few practice problems to really remind myself how to do them!

However, right now I’m focusing on something simple: Ratios. Ratios are one of those things I was never tested on at school, but showed up in a lot of my FAR practice questions. The great thing about ratios is that you can memorize them in about 5 minutes, and they can help you answer an entire question. With something like pensions, you could spend 2 hours studying it, and only half-understand it, and therefore not be able to answer the questions anyway. I like to get the easy points first!

Along with my Roger CPA preparation materials came a Wiley CD with CPA practice exams on it.

So on Monday I sat down for an hour and a half and went through it. The results? 75% on the multiple choice, and 0% on the simulations because I didn’t type commas into my numerial answers.

Analyzing practice test results

I’m a little concerned about only scoring 75% on the practice questions, but I have hope of being about to study to fix this, because it is only a couple of areas that I got almost entirely wrong that cost me that 25%.

It is much easier to improve if there are only 1 or 2 sections I need to study hard (namely, nonprofits and governmental accounting.) On many other sections, such as liabilities, I feel quite confident and don’t think that I need to spend a lot of time studying that.

Suprising weaknesses

It makes sense that I would miss the governmental accounting and nonprofit questions, because I had never seen these topics before I started studying for the CPA exam. I learned these entirely from my Roger CPA Review materials, which are just that–a review.

However, I was suprised at how poorly I performed on the assets questions. I think I struggled with the questions about the time period over which to amortize intangibles and things like impairment loss.

Complicated questions

It seemed to me that the topics I had studied the most in school had the most complicated questions. I guess the test-makers know what we learn, or our professors know what to teach us to do well on the CPA exam?

However, some areas like consolidation I never learned in school, and just studied from Roger’s exam prep materials, and I did really well on that section. Partly because Roger explained that topic exceptionally well in the review videos, and partly because the practice questions I’ve seen just aren’t as difficult as they could be in that topic.

Computer Adaptive Exam

The CPA is computer adaptive. If you do well on the first 3rd of the multiple choice questions, you get harder questions in the second section. Difficult questions are worth more points than easy ones, so you can get fewer of them right than easy ones, but still get a higher score.

The practice tests I have taken can’t duplicate this, and I wonder which of my practice questions are the “difficult level” or if they’re all easy and moderate perhaps. It would be nice to practice on sets of only easy, only moderate, and only difficult CPA review questions to get a feel for the different levels. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to see some difficult ones on the exam!

This week I studied for about 12 hours. I felt like I started to get through the homework a bit quicker than average this week, because I knew how to do the questions, and didn’t have to spend as much time reading the answers to figure out how I should have answered the question.

So, Krupo asked me on my last Progress Report to “add value” by explaining more about the exam. So, here are some specifics about what topics I covered in the last week.

Topics in FAR

Right now I’m studying for FAR, (Financial Accounting and Reporting), which covers what I learned in 3 semesters of “intermediate accounting” classes, as well as some topics I will not cover until next year in the “advanced accounting” class that is part of my master’s program.

This week I covered accounting for and reporting intangible assets, bonds, leases, liabilities, receivables, and pensions. I still have to do the homework problems for liabilities, receivables, and pensions, but I have reviewed the topics.

How Studying Went

I struggled with bonds when I initially tried a few homework problems, although I have always felt fairly comfortable with bonds. After watching Roger CPA‘s review video for bonds, I managed to make it through the bond homework problems with very few errors. I think an important factor in this improvement is becoming familiar with how the questions are written and the best way to approach them on the CPA exam versus how I would approach this problem in a regular class.

We’ll see how the pension questions go when I start on those. I had a very good grounding in them in Intermediate Accounting 3, but before watching the CPA review video, I probably couldn’t have remembered enough to make it through a single question. The review covers just the right amount of the topic so I think I’ll remember the steps to account for a pension when I get started on those problems.