[Anonymous]

Taking BEC tomorrow, and wondering how much attention I need to give to time management on the exam? For FAR, I was very careful to watch the clock so I’d have 90 minutes for sims. I would ideally like to have an hour for the WC, so is it realistic that I could allow 40 minutes per section for the mcq’s? Some of the calculation problems I’ve encountered in Wiley take me 5-10 minutes to complete. Also in FAR, if I couldn’t think of how to do a calculation problem within a minute or two, I’d just pick an answer and move on. But I’m wondering if I shouldn’t do this for BEC b/c you can pretty much BS the writing section and an hour is overkill. Any suggestions on how to manage my time? Thanks in advance.

[Anonymous]

Continued from above…

I ended up having 45 minutes left for the WC. I went through and wrote a rough draft for all 3 and that took me 30 minutes. Then I had 15 minutes left to fine tune them. They were not great by any means, but hope it was enough to get that magic 75. I have read other places on the forum about the WC topics not being BEC related… all 3 of mine were BEC topics. However, there is some overlap in BEC w/ FAR and AUD (and maybe REG, too but I haven't taken that yet). But like I said, all 3 of mine were covered in the BEC textbook.

I got hung up on 2 calculation problems. One of them I'm convinced wasn't solvable – it didn't give enough information. Plus it was like no other problem I had seen in the Wiley book so I'm hoping it's pretest. It makes me wonder if the AICPA throws those types of problems in there to make you burn a lot of time. I wasted about 10 minutes on that problem alone trying to approach it from different angles. There was also another calculation problem that I knew the 2 formulas inside and out, but kept coming up with an answer in the thousands when the answer choices were all in the millions. Again, I wonder if none of the answers you could choose from were correct and the AICPA just threw that in there as a trick. Anyone else experience this on their exam?

@jokami – So sorry you didn't finish! How much time did you have when you started the WC? What did you think of the rest of the test?

[shiggity80]

I took the test this past saturday. I think I ended up with about 45 min for the WC and used every minute of it.

I knew what the WC topics were asking, but I had some brain farts on how to get the intro going and how to roll into the main topics.

Plus, the damn keyboards SUCK. Sticky, laggy, etc. Made me lose about 5 min total over the 45 min time frame from backspacing and retyping stuff.

FAR: 87
AUD: 86
BEC: 86
REG: 84! Officially Done!

[NYCpat]

I see a lot of folks saying keep an hour for the written communications. I have to disagree slightly.

Keep in mind that WCs are only 15% of your score, so I wouldn't allocate 33% of the exam time to them.

I'd say no more than 45 minutes and only if you feel VERY shaky on being able to crank out a 3 paragraph memo in 15 minutes. Remember that it is the format, spelling, punctuation, syntax that are you being graded on moreso than the content of your memos.

Block out 2-2.5 hours for the MCQs.

BEC - 82
AUD - 65; retake Feb 2013
FAR - April 2013
REG - July 2013?

[rmm91909]

I ended up averaging about 40 minutes per testlet yesterday. That left me with about and hour to do the written communications. I didn't plan on having an hour I was trying to pace myself to have about 45 minutes. However, I am glad I had the hour. It allowed me time to think out my responses and have well written communications. I don't think an hour is necessary but I think it was helpful. I guess if you have an exam that is heavy on calculations I would take the time there instead! Good luck!!

[Tina82]

There are pretest WC?? I had no idea. Thought these were all graded and only mcqs had pretest questions for BEC.

R - 74;88
A - 84
B - 74;89
F - no study = 67; May 15 = 87 & done

[mveno48]

I took BEC yesterday and like apbandj I ran into trouble with time management. I felt like I was doing really well through the first 3/4 of the test but there were just too many wordy problems involving calculations. I knew all my formulas cold and I went in hoping to keep my average to 1.5-1.75 min per multiple choice but that didn't happen. In hindsight I wasted too much time running different calculation checks on some of my answers. I should have trusted myself a little bit more I guess. When I got mid way through the 3rd MC testlet I too got panicky because I knew I could not grind through the heavier problems. I had less than 30 min for the WC which was just enough time to slap down a few generic sentences for the body of each WC while more or less using the wording from the problem itself as my opening and ending. Timed out before I really had a chance to give any of them a second thought. Just waiting and hoping now that my MC performance was enough to get by.

Study mat: Yaeger/Wiley
FAR 2/29/12: 78
AUD 4/18/12: 87
BEC 5/31/12: 76
REG 8/31/12: 82

[Anonymous]

@mveno48-We had the EXACT same test experience. I had 30 left for the WC. I did fine on the first one but by the time I got to the last one, I think I managing 1 maybe 2 sentences for the body and my standard ending.

Time (or lack thereof) was my enemy!!

[mveno48]

Just got my score. Consider myself very very lucky to have scraped by on this one. 76, phew.

Study mat: Yaeger/Wiley
FAR 2/29/12: 78
AUD 4/18/12: 87
BEC 5/31/12: 76
REG 8/31/12: 82

[Author]

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