[accountingislife]

I am halfway through the BEC material (my exam is on December 9th). After reading through this forum, I noticed that people keep mentioning the written communication portion of BEC. This is a silly question, but what is that? I glanced through the remainder of my Becker CPA Review material and don’t see anything pertaining to that… Is it in the practice exam? What am I missing?

 

 

[Jimmy Dugan]

They are short, written essay response questions that are only part of BEC. I think there are two of them on the exam. Becker does prepare you for them, but there isn't a chapter specifically dedicated to them. Look at the simulation videos (SkillMaster), they have a bunch where they walk you through a full response to a written question.

[accountingislife]

Thank you!!

[aaronmo]

I think the best way to approach this would be an English class…or maybe communications. If memory serves, the key is reading what they're asking you carefully, deciding who your audience is, what the relevant information is (make sure you read carefully!!), and then structuring your response in a way that effectively communicates relevant information. It's not dissimilar to a journalism approach:

Who? Who needs to know this? Who is the stakeholder(s)?
What? What is the relevant data they need to know.
When – less relevant in this case, but there may be date thresholds.
Where – less relevant in this case
Why? Actually – this is the first question to ask…why does the audience need this…how is this relevant?

[bigstakk]

For BEC GLEIM has a sample practice written communication for each of the 20 chapters. It has a grading tool to give yourself an idea of what your score could be and it provides a “level 5” response as the optimal version. I found it very helpful in understanding not only the structure, but as you read over the GLEIM responses it is helpful in understanding how to summarize the information in a proper memo format. The actual exam requires you to complete 3 writing responses to hypothetical scenarios in a memo format. One of the three is non-tested sample question. A good response should generally be around 4-5 paragraphs starting with an intro and ending with a conclusion and a few paragraphs in between describing the topic. I personally found myself with only about 35-40mins left when I got to the writing section, which really is not enough time. You need to pace yourself for at least 45mins to give you 15mins for each writing question. I somewhat gambled and came to the conclusion that the one non-tested pretest question was a specific one and did that one last and made sure the other two more common topics I completed thoroughly. I am hoping I am right since I only had enough time for 3 paragraphs for the one I did last with just an intro conclusion and one body paragraph. Hopefully, I did enough to pass. . I figured even if I didn't guess right that I would get at least 50% on that one and if I get a 100% or close to it on one of the other responses I would still be able to about 11-12% in total for the writing section that counts as 15% of your total score. In general, format and structure as well as key words from the question itself are more important than the actual content of your response as long as you have proper writing skills. Hope this helps.

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