[Wen]

Took far this past Monday (8/28). I want to add a few points here to help others. Generally speaking, time management is very important as you can’t see all sims at the same time and then decide how you want to allocate the time. Also once the testlet is submitted you can’t go back later. Another suggestion I would give people is that, when you practice MCQs at home, use scratch paper and marker instead of calculator or excel. I know it sounds dumb but please trust me, if you are doing everything in excel like me, you will freak out with the barely working marker and plastic sheet.

So bear with me and here we go..

MCQ1: Not too bad, very average questions. I think as long as you’ve done enough NINJA MCQ you should be able to identify the concept quickly.
MCQ2: Honestly I did not notice a significant increase of difficulty. (Well, I have to admit I did cumulatively 10k NINJA MCQs + 3 times Becker All questions are very similar to me. Hopefully I did them right) There are quite a few questions on NFP and Government. I can’t emphasize enough on these 2 chapters. I would suggest all review courses put those 2 as the first chapters so people will learn those from the beginning of the review.

I finished both MCQ testlets in 100 minutes. Now here comes the real fun…

SIM1: I got 2 super super long questions. Each had a ton of information/documents attached. At one point I had to make the call to sacrifice one question. IMHO Questions themselves are not that hard, you recognize the concepts right away. However under limited time and 6 additional sims waiting for me, I had to say “screw it” and move on. I believe I had 1 hr 50 min left on my clock.

SIM2: The next 3 questions were much more manageable. Again, each of them had a ton of documents in it. Oh, I got 1 DRS in this testlet.

SIM3: Finally saw the research question and spent 3 min on it. The next 2 sims are not too hard either. By the time I finished review these 3 questions I had roughly 25 min left on the clock, which was super annoying, even till today I felt that I should have spent more time on the first SIM testlet. Ohh well, you never know what is going to hit you later…

I passed all other 3 using Becker and Ninja and scored well (BEC91, AUD97 and REG93). However this time I felt so under prepared (regardless whether I did 10k MCQs and read the book at least 7 times). This FAR exam could be my last or my BEC expires.

God help me…

[BBHYX]

Uhh do you mind me asking how long you studied? Are you studying while working or full time? 10k ninja + 3x becker is like 16,000+ MCQ total. Wow!

[Wen]

I started around March and fully devoted to the review material in April. So in all I reviewed FAR for the past 5 months. Both my wife and I have a full time accounting job. It was not easy to do 16k MCQs but doable. My biggest issue was that I did not put enough time to practice SIMs. I did maybe 10 if them in total before the exam. But like many others say, if you know how to solve MCQ you should know SIM.
However we will see if all these hard work pays off in the end or not…I can't imagine with BEC expiring I either pass all 4 or back to 50% done. I know a few states give extra 3 months for candidate with Q2/Q3 expiring dates, however MA state board seems not aware of the whole situation.

[Anonymous]

I have been going at it since July and instead of doing so many repetitive MCQs, I go by each topic and do each MCQ one by one. There are about 1,600+ MCQs in FAR and I don't think I will even get to all of them. I'm going to be skipping over a bit of the NFP section so I can go back and do a final comprehensive review and start practicing as many SIMs as possible. Fortunate for me, I have a bit of NFP tax/audit experience, so I'll skim over the section in the book and hope for the best.

But over 10k+ MCQs + 3x Becker…that's insane…not sure how effective that is, but I'm sure it takes a lot of focus and energy to do.

I am hoping my tactic of going through each MCQ one by one works (it has worked for my previous sections passed). I will go through them one by one and make note of the more difficult/complex questions and keep them on tab for when I do a final review.

However, I'm completely at a loss with the SIMs. I don't think NINJA has very good practice SIMs so I'm signing up for Wiley/Gleim free trials to get a bit of those in for practice.

I missed REG by a few points because of the SIMs, I really don't want to have that happen again with FAR.

[Wen]

The reason I use this strategy is that it worked for me for the previous 3 exams with great results. All I did was going through MCQ Hell for a month or two and then went for the test. I hope this method still works this time…
And you are right, the energy involved was insane. Imagine a full time job during the day and another job after dinner every night for 3 months. Thank god my son doesn't cry a lot during night.

[Author]

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