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!

When I got home from work today, the books that go along with my Roger online CPA review course had arrived.

It’s quite the load of books!

The package inclues books written by Roger to follow along with the online CPA review software as well as books of practice problems. Roger assigns “homework” in the practice problem books.

I am amused by the highlighter that is included along with the books, as Roger is always instructing CPA students to highlight parts of the lecture books while following along with the online classes. How convenient!