It is very, very well organized. It's methodical and very thorough. It also uses what they call “Adaptive Learning Technology” which is that it pays attention to your answers and determines what your weakest areas are then it hits you in those weak areas over and over until you master them. It does break things up. Each exam is broken into 20 study units which are broken up into sub units. There's a study planner to keep you organized and on track. If you get behind in your planner, it will email you. There are personal counselors available to call. I called them ALOT for my first exam and they talked me off the ledge a few times.
For each unit it wants you to:
1. Answer 20 MCQ's on the subject – this is a diagnostic quiz
2. Watch/Listen to the Video lecture or Powerpoint lecture or Audio lecture (not all 3)
3. Do 30 True/False questions
4. Read the text (books or online)
5. Do 20 MCQ's
6. Do 2 sets of 20 MCQ's
7. Do 1 set of 7 Sims.
I found I learned the most when I did the first 3 steps one day then read the book and answered the questions for that sub unit when I finished it, then did the remaining 3 steps. They seem to think it's about 14 hours per Unit or about 280 hours. Then there is a week of “final review” that starts with an exam rehearsal set up identical to the actual exam (so about 4 hrs.) It will provide you with feed back about your weak areas. From there, I did 20 question sets of MCQ's. You CAN turn off the adaptive learning in the MCQ's. I usually would do that 1 out of ever 5 quizzes during final review. If a particular chapter was hard on me, I'd reread it and work through examples of troublesome areas.
Note that you're seeing the material in different ways: I used the Powerpoint lecture so I had that, plus the text, plus the MCQ's, plus the SIM's, plus the MCQ's in the text.
I've passed both parts of the CMA and all 4 parts of the CPA exam using this system. For the CPA – I planned about 3 mo of study time per exam which included either a long weekend or a week off in the middle I planned to study 14 hours per week because I work full time and did not want to be studying 24/7. All together it took me 14 months to finish including 1 or 2 weeks OFF between exams. My process is a longer process than others but I was able to pass each part on the first try (same as CMA – no retakes.) If you can devote more hours per week to it, you can certainly finish faster but at over 45, with a FT job, a husband, and something of a life, this is what worked best for me.
B - 11/11/16
A - 4/16/16 87!!
R - 2/17/17
F - 7/26/16 - Waiting for 8/23
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