Hi guys,
Long time lurker but finally registered for an account to share my thoughts/experience on ILBOE and their scoring process/controls.
I definitely find myself in the same camp of candidates that score well on the exams they thought they for sure bombed, and fail the ones they thought were for sure a slam dunk. For example, REG was by far the most difficult subject matter for me to grasp as I do not have a tax background. I also barely got enough study time in for that exam as I took it right after busy season in Q2 and did not feel comfortable with many of the concepts (calculating basis, S-Corps/Partnerships, etc) and definitely left multiple sims blank. I scored a 84 on the first try.
On the other hand, I took audit in Q1 and walked out of the exam over an hour early after plowing my way through the exam, only leaving a handful of MCQ’s flagged and feeling super comfortable with my responses for the sims (I am a senior audit associate and much of the content was stuff I deal with on a day to day basis). I somehow scored a 70 on the first try. I retook the exam during Q3 and scored a 94 with minimal review.
I also took FAR in Q1 and received a 73, then after spending 6 weeks re-watching lectures, re-doing MCQ’s and sims, and feeling a million times better about my performance on the re-exam just found out a got a 74. There are people on here claiming they left multiple sims blank on their FAR exam and managed to earn a passing score.
Call it a mystery but I’m calling foul play on ILBOE’s part. Now I know that nationally, our scores get checked and re-checked multiple times before they are finally released to CPA central, OR to the states that choose to report scores via their own candidate portals. What happens during and after that process of communicating/releasing scores to those state boards seems to always wreak havoc and there is seemingly no way of knowing for sure that our scores are thoroughly double checked before getting posted to the state portal.
ILBOE has managed to royally mess up the score release so many times at this point that I am seriously doubting the quality of their control process at this point. As I’m sure many of you are aware they have mentioned they manually enter some of the scores in to the system as well… hello potential user error, management override, and lack of consistency. Coupled with that, their communications person never seems to have the same story as NASBA (nor do they bother grammar/spell-checking their posts). Not sure about you guys but I have no confidence in their preventative and detective controls whatsoever.
At the end of the day, there’s really nothing that we can do about it, they are never going to admit it if they truly did mix up people’s scores, but it makes me so mad to think that this is potentially what is happening and it doesn’t help that there is virtually no transparency on the process either.
Oh well. While I’m hanging on by a razor thin thread between trying to pass my last exam and in charging 4 never-ending jobs from hell, I’m determined to not let this get the best of me. I’m not married, no kids and have a roof over my head. I have two more quarters to get this done before I lose a section and FAR is still fresh on my mind.
It just really pains me to think of other candidates in more erratic situations that have been royally screwed over by this board and their lack of care and transparency.
/rant
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