In all honesty, it wasn't as bad as I was expecting. There were a good mix of questions. The sims were ok too. Going into the test, I didn’t feel prepared. I actually knew a lot more than I thought. I’ve been on this journey since July. I half studied in the beginning. Couldn’t stay motivated. I spent a lot of time trying to find the perfect study plan. In October I decided to schedule the exam hoping it would motivate me to study. So I went through the motions of completing the review course (Becker). I had a solid 2.5 weeks for final review. I did not use my time wisely. I was so disappointed by the fact that I had forgotten the previous 8 chapters that I lost my motivation yet again.
With that said, I won’t be disappointed if I didn’t pass. I know I didn’t give this process 100%. Moving forward I will make sure to include progress test on the previous chapters. I took for granted that I would remember governmental since it was the last two chapters I completed. Not so much. The one thing that truly helped, was going through each chapter page by page and reading my handwritten notes. There were a few questions I know I got right because of that.
I’m taking a few days off and will resume studying FAR again on Sunday just in case a retake is needed.
Good luck to anyone else taking the exam over the next few days.
@msquared17 – Your post – made me feel like I wrote it myself – except my test is Saturday. I have been going through, page by page too. I am so burned out between work and studying. It's my last one, and I feel like I have no gas left. Ugh.
Took it yesterday, lots of calculations on the mcq which took up way to much time and my Sims where insane got 4 of the new sims with too many document attachments. Nothing like Becker Sims or Surgent Sims!! Simply not enough time to finish. How they can give a test with time consuming MCQ & SIMS is completely unfair. I’m sure I failed and I was very prepared don’t know how to pass a test like that one with the time we are given. I would have needed another hour….
Took it on tuesday after getting a 74 first attempt and studying probably another 250+ hours..
Finished all the MCQ in 1.75 hours and then the first two sims took my 45 minutes in total.. The next 3 sucked but were doable and the last three were impossible.
Hello All! Taking my first CPA exam (FAR) tomorrow – any last minute advice on the content I should focus on? I've been using Becker and I'm starting to realize that I've forgotten a lot of the material from the earlier videos..
Took FAR yesterday for the second time…this time I was trending 80s on ninja (trending 54% first time I took it and got a 66) and all of my areas between 75-90, yet I feel like failed again. SIMS were all hard and most of the time it's hard to know what they are really asking. My 2 cents definitely hit Govt and NPF's, that has not gone away and lastly…anyone else bothered by how huge the font is on the test screen?? -____-
I took FAR on Tuesday 12/5. I feel ok about the MCQ but didn't notice the 2nd testlet getting harder, so maybe I bombed. -_- The SIMs were okay, but I don't feel good about my performance on some of them. I got 3 DRS SIMs. Two of the SIMs I didn't know at all what I was doing and guessed my best on them. I finished pretty early, though. Not sure if that is a good sign or not. I'm just hoping for that 75 on 12/19 *fingers crossed* (somehow). I'm not sure how I feel about it, but I certainly don't feel confident, and not expecting a 75 which really irks me because I wish I'd spent more time knowing the basics of every concept instead of the details. I'm fully planning to retake in early 2018 but taking a bit of a hiatus until I get my score since this is my first section, I can afford to lose 2 weeks I guess.
holy crap. i took far today for the first time and i feel terrible – good sign? 2nd MC part didn't get any more difficult than the 1st which kind of screwed up my morale mid-exam. 3 !@#$ing DRs with 3-4 different tabs of info.
good thing is we'll know in a couple weeks. in the meantime, i'll continue studying.
@spiritmate – I took it today and thought that I have to change the way I study. I can't even contemplate how someone would decipher the SIMs with all those documents. I don't think there's any prep software out there that can prepare us for the SIMs I took this morning.
I'm so sad my exam didn't go well today. I couldn't tell the difference in difficulty in the MCQ's between the first one vs the second one, although there was a handful on the second MCQ testlet where the answers were obvious. This makes me think that I performed poorly on the MCQ's. Ughhhhh.
That is not my understanding of how it works. It is known that not all questions are weighted the same. They weight the questions based on how everyone else works.
Also if you get close to a 75 but don't pass, your test is manually graded (which is why contesting scores almost never works)
Also at one point the Sims were manually graded but I am not sure if that is still the case.
@another72 That governmental sim just looked scary so I left it blank. I'm still fairly certain its pretest. Out of the other 7 sims they were all doable.
I think (hopefully) I did good enough on the MC to balance out my poor sims. Out of the 8, I had 2/3 memo sims which wern't hard concepts but just time consuming. That + my other sim that's 50-50 chance of 100% right or wrong (PV of 1 on OA) I felt good on.
The remaining 3-4 sims hoping for partial credit here and there. My research sim was vague and not even GAAP so I had no idea where to look..
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