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 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.