First post. Sorry for the wall of text, kind of just venting.
BEC on 3/10 was my first exam. I feel terrible about it, but for all the wrong reasons. I won't say it was easy, but it was not at all like I expected. I used exclusively Ninja products to prepare and spent 95 hours studying, completing 2,400 questions, trending high 80's. The day before my exam I did the AICPA 2016 questions Jeff posted. Out of the 20 “difficult” questions I got 12 correct and out of the “medium” difficulty questions I got 19, so I felt fairly confident going in.
The first testlet didn't seem insanely difficult, I don't remember how many I flagged, maybe 4. I'm not sure if it was because I felt all the Ninja MCQ questions were much more involved and detailed but compared to questions I practiced with most of the questions on the exam seemed fairly straight forward. Therefore, I'm really not sure if my testlets were getting harder or not. After my second testlet I was convinced I wasn't doing well, not because the material seemed foreign, but because it seemed like it wasn't getting harder. I basically decided I had failed when in my second testlet I got a question that seemed way too easy. An example 2015 AICPA released “difficult” question asks, “According to COSO, the 4 categories of entity objectives in the enterprise risk management framework include each of the following except”. This makes me feel better because the question I was referencing was that straight forward and apparently that is still considered difficult.
Like I said I apologize for ranting, overall I think I just put to much thought into what classifies as a “difficult” testlet and how indicative that is of passing or not.
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