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!

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