[yingzhen110]

Hello everyone,

Just want to share some personal tips for fellow CPAs and personal experience of each exam I have taken so far. First of all, everyone have their own method for studying so what worked for me might not work for you. Always find your own balance.

I used Becker as my study material, but I believe others are good too.

Study Tips:

1. Allocate enough time for each section – unless you are in a hurry to get your license, I recommend 3 months for each section. No need to rush.

2. Read the book first – I generally read the book once before seriously studying for the material just to get a general idea of what is covered in each section and if the material make sense. Not trying to memorize or fully understand the material. It like I am reading a text book, remember what I can and look at the examples. This should be relatively fast, each chapter should take about 3-4 hours.

3. Read the book 2nd time – this time seriously learning the material. Summarize what you learn in writing and look for patterns and keywords in the information. Do the practice problems after each chapter.

4. Only watch the video on areas where you need additional understanding – personal opinion: the videos are a waste of time.

5. Learn from the practice problems – Always attempt to use the method described in the book to solve the problem. There will be questions that give you additional information that you have no idea what to do with. Follow the method in the book and gather the information that you know how to use, then make an educated guess on how to treat the information you don’t know how to use. Learn from the answer on how to actually treat these information.

Exam Tips:

1. No matter which material you use to study, there will always be questions you never seen before. Make an educated guess based on what you know and move on. Don’t spend too much time on these questions (especially MC questions).

2. Do waste time double check your answer if you don’t have the time. What I meant is don’t go back to re-check every question, times are better spent elsewhere. If there are a few that you flagged and need additional thinking, that is fine. Otherwise, move on because next section will probably take more time.

REG:

Leave at least 75 – 90 mins for simulations (these take a lot longer than you might think), which give you 30 – 40 mins for each MC exam. I have 90 mins for my simulations and I feel the time was just about right. But I did struggle on the simulations because are a couple simulations that was on topics barely covered in the book. I just calculated based on how I think it should be calculated. Simulations are selected from the beginning so the difficulty is not based on your performance in the MC. There is always some luck involve in CPA exam so just focus on what you know and trust your intuition on the rest.

BEC:

Leave at least 60 mins for written part, which give you 40 mins for each MC exam. Format is more important that content. This part focus more on your written communication skill than on your knowledge of the topic. I know this because two of my topics I have no idea what exactly to write about. It is important to think of anything you can related to the topic and write about those. Use accounting jargon, the more the merrier, but make sure your communication make sense and stay on related topic. The general format to follow is introduction, 1-2 body, conclusion. It okay to only have 1 paragraph if you can’t think of anything else, the goal is to write something (anything) related to the topic.

FAR:

Not taken yet, will appreciate any advice.

AUD:

Same as FAR

Also you may feel like you failed given your performance on the exam (especially on the first exam), but don’t draw any conclusion until you got the score. I feel like I was on the border line after REG but I end up with a 95.

Please feel free to added any helpful tip that you find useful, thanks.

REG: 95 - 7/27/2015
BEC: 94 - 10/6/2015
FAR: 92 - 1/20/2016
AUD: 92 - 4/11/2016