Mia – it's possible, and then I'd be praising a different one. Most folks I talked to said Becker was the best, so I went with Becker.
I had a very bad taste with Wiley from college…their stuff had a lot of poor wording and questionable logic. Becker ended up having some of that too.
As far as studying…I worked my ass off in many of these sections. I'm a liberal arts background and took accounting classes at community college a few years before my exam prep, so I definitely think I had a much weaker background than most. I started with FAR and felt completely and totally overwhelmed. There were things I had never even learned in class…and far more I couldn't remember. I was studying 60 hours/week the first 3-4 weeks in FAR. Not exaggerating. Where others were re-learning, i was learning for the first time. It got easier after about lesson 4. What really bothered me was that I poured my soul into learning the tough stuff…dollar value lifo, pensions…etc…and then my exam was much simpler, but in INCREDIBLY minute detail. TONS of questions about IFRS, and document titles. My guess is that I DESTROYED the SIMS and was weaker on the MC.
Audit was the only class where I had a 4 year degree course, and I found Audit to be highly intuitive. I didn't work very hard on audit…maybe 15 hrs/week for a few weeks. For me, it just made sense, and was less memorization reliant.
REG had parts that were insanely easy for me and others that were hard; I had a very weak tax class, and no experience preparing tax. I found it very difficult to remember what went where and what the different forms and schedules were. I've done tax as a job now for 6 months, and had that been the case then…all of REG would have been pretty easy. Since I had no background, I did 60 hour weeks on the tax and entity areas. The contracts and law part I found easy, but I have more legal background than most.
BEC was a serious pain in the ass for me…I didn't have any of the BS business classes, and BEC was largely the non-sense business classes. Theory of non-sense with arbitrary definitions. It was fluff, and I hate studying fluff. The IT section was just painful…and I still have COSO cube nightmares. What manufactured horse pokey! I thought that Becker's organization of this area was also very poorly done.
My study habits and prep varied depending on the material; for FAR, it was just REPETITION. ENDLESS REPETITION and re-reading the same material until I got it. I didn't emphasize the basics as well as I should have. For Audit I honestly didn't do much at all. I read the book/watched lectures…did the questions and that was that. For REG I had to develop detailed spread sheets charting the different entities and their differences, the different forms…etc. BEC I had to heavily rely on flash cards and re-reading. The cost accounting portion I handled like FAR.
I had strengths and weaknesses. I don't mean to be arrogant, but in terms of book intelligence…and testing…I'm smart. Very smart. I'm usually good at concepts and strategy, and I'm an excellent reader. Sometimes that is a disadvantage, because I'm reading something in a more focused way than the guy who wrote it…and he intended a simpler interpretation. I found that more the case on practice exams than the real ones. My legal/liberal arts background was both good and bad…I was less prepared than most others, but I'm also better at critical thinking.
As far as weaknesses, I'm older…and my memory banks just aren't what they were. Memory was never my strength anyway. Memorization is very tough for me, and takes a lot of time and repetition. I also find it hard to get things in long term memory. This becomes more of an issue with things that are rote memorization rather than conceptual. Stuff like BEC, and REG forms, were really challenging for me. I probably do better on SIMs than M/C.
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