I finally got the notice of my REG score! I passed! I guess that just goes to show that it’s true what they say about how you can feel like you’ve failed when you did just fine.

On the other hand, the online score checking option definitely didn’t work for me. I don’t know why, or if I should contact anyone, or if it’ll work for the next two sections because I scheduled those with a different NTS. Mysterious.

Anyway, good luck for anyone studying for the CPA exam now, or waiting for your scores! If you put in the study hours, and study the right material (which Roger is great at pulling out for you) you’ll do great!

Also, a photo of my dog in a RogerCPA shirt: (it’s a little small for me, and it’s a good color on her no?)

On Monday, I have my only final exam for the semester – TAX. (My other classes had time-intensive projects which are all done!)

So, I’m working on studying that. It’s hard to sit down and focus on tax. I’d much rather be watching Roger’s CPA Review videos and learning about Audit.

Roger’s blog had a nice little summary of some changes that’ll be coming to the CPA exam over the next few years. It’s interesting to see how they’re changing the simulations. I wonder if it’ll make it easier. I wonder if it’ll make it a better test?

A few years ago, you had to take the CPA exam all at once. From what I’ve heard, you had a two day window and took two parts each day. That wouldn’t work very well for my study style, so it seems easier the way they present it now. But I’m sure there are other students who don’t like to drag out the studying the way I do! So, I wonder if they have shifted the difficulty from endurance to more difficult questions since then?

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.