I managed to pick up the studying pace a bit this week. Roger CPA Review has really helped me study more, and I feel like I’m getting more out of the time I spend studying.

My first week, my average hours studied per day was a little under 1 hour a day. After the second week that dropped to under 3/4 of an hour, but it’s back up to just under an hour this week. I’m going to keep working on it, and my goal for next week is to have that way up!

The online CPA review I’m using is a series of videos of Roger teaching classes. So this past week, I watched the first section of videos on FAR. It was about four hours of “class time” covering the basic definitions and accounting for marketable securities and a little bit about derivatives.

Then I went through the first section of homework questions. I watched the first four videos before I got the accompanying Roger review book, which explains which homework problems to do, so I didn’t realize there was assigned homework after each hour-long video. I have finished the required homework from the first hour of “class” but still need to work on the homework assignments for the other 3 “hours” I have completed so far.

The exciting news from this week is that I started using the Roger CPA Review online software, and it is great! It is so much better to watch someone teach exactly what I need for the exam rather than have to read through a book.

Also, Adrienne (from Jr. Deputy Accountant) who works over at Roger explained that while the Wiley books I have are good for practice problems, they are useless for explaining the subject matter.

I’m glad she pointed this out, as I was struggling to get much out of their explanations. The Roger review program is much easier to focus on, and I feel more confident that I am covering the topics I need to know for the exam.

I am already logging more study hours now that I am using Roger, but the bad news from this past week is that pre-Roger, I did not study nearly as much as I had planned to. I put in only 4.25 hours in the past week. I’m trying to see this in a positive light, as the time spent trying to get anything out of those Wiley explanations would probably not be a good use of CPA study hours anyway!

Also, Roger suggests a completely approach to using the questions to help study, but I’m not sure if I want to completely abandon using the multiple choice questions as a diagnostic, because they are a good preview of the topics, despite being super frustrating. I’m also almost done with those, so I would feel uncomfortable leaving it unfinished. I guess that’s the mark of a true accountant-personality right there, haha.

So, I’ve been using a Wiley book to study from, but you can’t go wrong with more studying, so I’ll be using Roger CPA’s online review software from now on too.

I’ve had access to the software for a couple of days, but I haven’t had a chance to sit down with it yet and see how the experience compares to using books. I have read a lot of good stuff about the Roger CPA review though, especially about how engaging it can be.

I wish I could say I’ve been silent for the last several days since I’ve been so busy studying, but honestly, I’ve been studying so little that I was embarassed to write! The four-day weekend was too relaxing, I guess!

Sitting down and studying is definitely a struggle for me–one that I need to win, especially before the school year starts and I have even less free time to squish studying into. I forsee my various tactics of re-learning how to focus (because I haven’t had to sit and study for long periods in months) to become a pretty big topic as I make my way through the CPA exam review process!

I’m going to sit down right now with the Roger CPA review software and get some studying done before it’s time for bed. I’ll have some opinions to post soon!

I officially began studying for the CPA exam 7 days ago. So far I have logged 6.5 hours of study time, which is nowhere near my goal of 2 hours per day.

A summary of my thoughts at this point:

• Doing the multiple choice as a diagnostic is frustrating, so today I started to mix in some basic studying too.
• I think I should come up with a schedule that gives me one day off per week. Or, have a day where I only study for half an hour, instead of whatever I decide on as my goal (I’m sticking with aiming for 2 hours a day for now.)
• The study outlines seem to have a lot of excess information in them. I started out copying out notes on the outlines, but I think I should maybe just read it straight through the first time around, then re-read and highlight, and then re-read and take notes. (I might skip the highlighting step, because I learn best by re-writing.)
• I have been keeping track of my scores on the diagnostic. I will make a table later, after I study and then do more multiple choice questions, to track my improvement over time on different sections.

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?