[CPA soon]

So just a brief summary about me, I started studying for this exam last Jan/Feb 2013 basically few months after graduation. My attempts are below, I have been using Becker, tried multiple ways of studying. Did not study the same way every time, I tried multiple ways to switch it up and find success. Got Wiley test bank on the last REG attempt and I thought it was a great investment. I have Ninja Notes but used them only as back up in Weak areas and never really rewrote the notes 5 times as recommended because I felt I wanted to use more time for MCQ and learning more details. I used Ninja Audio for REG and I liked it, I might buy the FAR. I feel unorganized, down, burnt out, and considering going for a change and leaving Becker to Roger maybe. What are your thoughts? Where you in a similar situation? Like I just feel like I need a better structure to follow. I have OK scores but getting those extra few points hasn’t been successful. I have FAR scheduled 5/31 and considering restarting on FAR with a new way. I am exhausted of failing and having no life for 14 months without getting anywhere. I am not a quitter but I am at loss now. What do I do?

FAR 5/13 – 71
FAR 6/13 – 68
REG 11/13 – 67
REG 2/14 – 71
REG 4/14 – 71

Thanks in advance!

 

 

FAR - 71, 68, 74, (8/31/14) 78 ✔
REG - 67, 71, 71, (10/18/14) 78 ✔
BEC - (11/29/14) 86 ✔
AUD - 73, (4/4/15) 86 ✔

I can't believe this is over! 2 years and 3 months..

[Anonymous]

Just want to through something out there.

A professor in my accounting program told our class once that the CPA exam is 60% about the material and 40% about test taking ability/strategy. If you have a strong grasp of the material then maybe your going at the exam the wrong way. Here's a link to a great post that may help you out. Figure out was is causing your low scores and possibly change your strategy.

https://www.another71.com/cpa-exam-forum/topic/how-i-raised-my-far-score-by-23-points

[Anonymous]

Just want to through something out there.

A professor in my accounting program told our class once that the CPA exam is 60% about the material and 40% about test taking ability/strategy. If you have a strong grasp of the material then maybe your going at the exam the wrong way. Here's a link to a great post that may help you out. Figure out was is causing your low scores and possibly change your strategy.

https://www.another71.com/cpa-exam-forum/topic/how-i-raised-my-far-score-by-23-points

[CanIpassYou Aud]

@CPA soon

i failed audit three times so far. today after receiving fail score, i decided finally switched to roger review. maybe i need a new perspective to learn this. i have heard good things about him, so i decided to give a try. don't you ever give up!!! you will be a CPA soon

FAR-Passed
BEC-Passed
REG-Passed
AUD-Passed
Materials: Becker+Ninja Notes/Ninja MCQ/Ninja Flashcards
Click my name to view my LinkedIn account.

[CanIpassYou Aud]

@CPA soon

i failed audit three times so far. today after receiving fail score, i decided finally switched to roger review. maybe i need a new perspective to learn this. i have heard good things about him, so i decided to give a try. don't you ever give up!!! you will be a CPA soon

FAR-Passed
BEC-Passed
REG-Passed
AUD-Passed
Materials: Becker+Ninja Notes/Ninja MCQ/Ninja Flashcards
Click my name to view my LinkedIn account.

[jeff]

You can save a bunch of $$ with NINJA MCQ and studying with it vs $500+ lectures.

It has text explanations built in with each questions + Adaptive Learning.

The other MCQ packages you mentioned don't have Adaptive Learning.

https://www.another71.com/introducing-ninja-mcq-adaptive-learning-technology/

Jeff Elliott, CPA (KS) | Another71 | NINJA CPA | NINJA CMA | NINJA CPE

[jeff]

You can save a bunch of $$ with NINJA MCQ and studying with it vs $500+ lectures.

It has text explanations built in with each questions + Adaptive Learning.

The other MCQ packages you mentioned don't have Adaptive Learning.

https://www.another71.com/introducing-ninja-mcq-adaptive-learning-technology/

Jeff Elliott, CPA (KS) | Another71 | NINJA CPA | NINJA CMA | NINJA CPE

[Anonymous]

@CPAsoon: I used Becker for my first three runs at REG. Gleim for the 4th and 5th, before switching to Roger CPA Review. I attribute my passing REG score to Roger Phillip. I just got his stuff in December and have zipped through REG and BEC (and hopefully AUD later this month!). I did manage to pass FAR with Becker, but I still think they scored my test wrong. Hah.

Anyway, I think Roger's approach to the material is superior to Becker and the way he goes about solutions just made sense to me. Watch some of his old stuff on Youtube so you can get a feel, but I definitely recommend a new beginning since you're struggling like I did. The $1,350 investment was well worth it, I think. I spent way more than that on wasted exam fees. 🙂

[Anonymous]

@CPAsoon: I used Becker for my first three runs at REG. Gleim for the 4th and 5th, before switching to Roger CPA Review. I attribute my passing REG score to Roger Phillip. I just got his stuff in December and have zipped through REG and BEC (and hopefully AUD later this month!). I did manage to pass FAR with Becker, but I still think they scored my test wrong. Hah.

Anyway, I think Roger's approach to the material is superior to Becker and the way he goes about solutions just made sense to me. Watch some of his old stuff on Youtube so you can get a feel, but I definitely recommend a new beginning since you're struggling like I did. The $1,350 investment was well worth it, I think. I spent way more than that on wasted exam fees. 🙂

[MS811]

FAR and REG are relatively straightforward when it comes to the actual CPA exam; AUD might be a little tricky.

A few pieces of advice that really helped me pass my first 3 exams on my first attempt:

-Get the Becker Final Review books and NINJA Notes (you've already spent an absurd amount of $, worth spending a little more to pass): these 2 things really drill down the main topics you will definitely see on exam day. The regular Becker books/lectures give you way too much information that you will never need to know. Plan wisely, and drill down the hits.

-Use the AICPA recently released questions in lieu of Becker's Final Exams: these give great context as to what types of questions to expect on exam day.

-Use the Gearty/Olinto lectures only for topics for you don't understand after first reading the textbook. The lectures are incredibly long, and don't do much to help retain information.

-The CPA Exam is historically predictable as to what areas you KNOW will be covered.

-I didn't touch the Becker SIMS until my last 2 weeks of review. They are extremely daunting and overcomplicated; it would be pointless to work through those unless you have a great grasp of the material. Run through them after you've sufficiently covered the material and get a basic idea of the functionality of the AL; if you know your concepts, you should be fine.

-I don't think I ever got above a 60% on my first HW attempts. Don't let Becker mess with your confidence.

-Budget time for procrastination: Once the sun goes down, don't touch your books. Go out and live your life.

Becker Self Study, Becker Final Review, NINJA Audio, Ninja Notes
Starting at one of the Big 4 in June 2014

B- 80 I'm done!!! 5/31/2014
A- 84
R- 82
F- 76

[MS811]

FAR and REG are relatively straightforward when it comes to the actual CPA exam; AUD might be a little tricky.

A few pieces of advice that really helped me pass my first 3 exams on my first attempt:

-Get the Becker Final Review books and NINJA Notes (you've already spent an absurd amount of $, worth spending a little more to pass): these 2 things really drill down the main topics you will definitely see on exam day. The regular Becker books/lectures give you way too much information that you will never need to know. Plan wisely, and drill down the hits.

-Use the AICPA recently released questions in lieu of Becker's Final Exams: these give great context as to what types of questions to expect on exam day.

-Use the Gearty/Olinto lectures only for topics for you don't understand after first reading the textbook. The lectures are incredibly long, and don't do much to help retain information.

-The CPA Exam is historically predictable as to what areas you KNOW will be covered.

-I didn't touch the Becker SIMS until my last 2 weeks of review. They are extremely daunting and overcomplicated; it would be pointless to work through those unless you have a great grasp of the material. Run through them after you've sufficiently covered the material and get a basic idea of the functionality of the AL; if you know your concepts, you should be fine.

-I don't think I ever got above a 60% on my first HW attempts. Don't let Becker mess with your confidence.

-Budget time for procrastination: Once the sun goes down, don't touch your books. Go out and live your life.

Becker Self Study, Becker Final Review, NINJA Audio, Ninja Notes
Starting at one of the Big 4 in June 2014

B- 80 I'm done!!! 5/31/2014
A- 84
R- 82
F- 76

[nolan084]

@CPA soon

What's your study routine? I have used the Becker self-study course throughout and after making some tweaks to my initial routine, I became much more comfortable and confident heading into my exams. Here's what I've done:

General:

1) I planned my studying to do two chapters each week (take one day off – generally Fri) and leave myself 10-14 days of review after completion of the course before the exam.

2) I budgeted between 30-40 hours of studying/week – with FAR, it's definitely more the upper end.

During the Becker course for each chapter:

1) Watch the lecture: I don't necessarily make all the notes in my own textbook that they advise. Instead, I'll make occasional notations on items in the lecture where my knowledge isn't the strongest. This, of course, takes up to four hours.

2) After the lecture, I don't immediately go to the homework. I'll read through the chapter, using the Becker pre-annotated textbook online, and write down my own outline and notes in my notebook. Now, I don't read every single word and understand every single concept, so I'll skip over some areas and focus more on the annotated sections of the textbook. For each chapter, I try to budget my time spent reading/outlining each chapter to three hours maximum – probably four hours for FAR.

3) Homework: For the multiple choice questions, my goal for each subsection of questions was to get 80% right on the first try. Of course, I didn’t always hit that mark, but I made it my goal, especially for the subsections with more questions that will likely be an area of emphasis on the exam. I went about my homework like this. Since I made it my goal to get 80%, I only did five questions at a time, hoping to get at least four correct. When I used to try to do them all at the same time, I would get two or three questions wrong in a row, and it would hurt my confidence, and I strongly believe having higher confidence has a non-zero positive effect of some sort in doing better on the questions. For each question that I got wrong, I would jot down in my notebook the concept I wasn’t quite sure of or what other reason I may have gotten the question wrong. I can’t stress enough how helpful it became to me to write everything down, and I believe studies back up that writing things down is better for memory retention than is reading or even typing something on a Word document – others, please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. So, I would do the questions five at a time until completion, and even skip around to try to get myself “ahead of schedule” in terms of remaining above 80% for my confidence. Also, I generally didn’t do the optional questions. The reason I did this is that those questions generally showed up on the Progress Tests I would take during the final two-week review and didn’t mind testing my ability to get “fresh questions” right with what I had learned so far.

I had a somewhat similar approach with the Sims except I would do one sim at a time and then take down notes accordingly in my notebook. I didn’t really stress too much about getting a certain percentage of these right.

Final Review: 10-14 days prior to the exam

1) The day after I completed the study course, I would take a Progress Test of 30 questions with the scope being of all sections to kind of gauge where I was at.

2) Then, I would proceed to read through to take down notes again of each chapter once. Except this time, it wouldn’t take me as long given I had somewhat of a knowledge of the material heading in. I generally tried to limit myself to two hours or so for each chapter – for FAR, it might be scaled more to three hours.

3) After reading/taking down notes for each chapter, I would take a Progress Test for just that chapter, writing down notes for questions that I missed and for what reason(s). So for FAR, I would do:

a. Read/take down notes for F1

b. F1 Progress Test

c. Read/take down notes for F2

d. F2 Progress Test

e. F1-F2 Progress Test

f. And so on…

4) I would attempt (attempt being the key word) to then take the two Practice Exams on consecutive days, taking the first practice exam five days before the exam and the second practice exam the day after that. And, again, writing down (sorry for the ‘writing down’ repetitiveness during my post!) notes from questions I got wrong. The Becker practice exams are generally harder than the real exam from my experience, so I learned not to get discouraged if I didn’t do well on the practice exams. In fact, I failed one of each of the FAR and BEC Becker practice exams before I passed the actual exams themselves.

5) For any remaining time I had, I did Progress Tests until I was sick of them, and then did more. Since I had obtained pretty much all the knowledge I was going to during the X weeks, it became important to me to just do questions because it’s not only a more efficient way of studying, but it gave me a good opportunity to work on my test-taking skills.

Sorry for the long post, but now that I have taken AUD and hopefully passed (fingers crossed), I wanted to share my thoughts and advice with you and others that helped me along the way. Keep at it and don’t give up!

FAR (Oct 2013) - 78
BEC (Dec 2013) - 88
REG (Feb 2014) - 92
AUD (May 2014) - 98

DONE!

[nolan084]

@CPA soon

What's your study routine? I have used the Becker self-study course throughout and after making some tweaks to my initial routine, I became much more comfortable and confident heading into my exams. Here's what I've done:

General:

1) I planned my studying to do two chapters each week (take one day off – generally Fri) and leave myself 10-14 days of review after completion of the course before the exam.

2) I budgeted between 30-40 hours of studying/week – with FAR, it's definitely more the upper end.

During the Becker course for each chapter:

1) Watch the lecture: I don't necessarily make all the notes in my own textbook that they advise. Instead, I'll make occasional notations on items in the lecture where my knowledge isn't the strongest. This, of course, takes up to four hours.

2) After the lecture, I don't immediately go to the homework. I'll read through the chapter, using the Becker pre-annotated textbook online, and write down my own outline and notes in my notebook. Now, I don't read every single word and understand every single concept, so I'll skip over some areas and focus more on the annotated sections of the textbook. For each chapter, I try to budget my time spent reading/outlining each chapter to three hours maximum – probably four hours for FAR.

3) Homework: For the multiple choice questions, my goal for each subsection of questions was to get 80% right on the first try. Of course, I didn’t always hit that mark, but I made it my goal, especially for the subsections with more questions that will likely be an area of emphasis on the exam. I went about my homework like this. Since I made it my goal to get 80%, I only did five questions at a time, hoping to get at least four correct. When I used to try to do them all at the same time, I would get two or three questions wrong in a row, and it would hurt my confidence, and I strongly believe having higher confidence has a non-zero positive effect of some sort in doing better on the questions. For each question that I got wrong, I would jot down in my notebook the concept I wasn’t quite sure of or what other reason I may have gotten the question wrong. I can’t stress enough how helpful it became to me to write everything down, and I believe studies back up that writing things down is better for memory retention than is reading or even typing something on a Word document – others, please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. So, I would do the questions five at a time until completion, and even skip around to try to get myself “ahead of schedule” in terms of remaining above 80% for my confidence. Also, I generally didn’t do the optional questions. The reason I did this is that those questions generally showed up on the Progress Tests I would take during the final two-week review and didn’t mind testing my ability to get “fresh questions” right with what I had learned so far.

I had a somewhat similar approach with the Sims except I would do one sim at a time and then take down notes accordingly in my notebook. I didn’t really stress too much about getting a certain percentage of these right.

Final Review: 10-14 days prior to the exam

1) The day after I completed the study course, I would take a Progress Test of 30 questions with the scope being of all sections to kind of gauge where I was at.

2) Then, I would proceed to read through to take down notes again of each chapter once. Except this time, it wouldn’t take me as long given I had somewhat of a knowledge of the material heading in. I generally tried to limit myself to two hours or so for each chapter – for FAR, it might be scaled more to three hours.

3) After reading/taking down notes for each chapter, I would take a Progress Test for just that chapter, writing down notes for questions that I missed and for what reason(s). So for FAR, I would do:

a. Read/take down notes for F1

b. F1 Progress Test

c. Read/take down notes for F2

d. F2 Progress Test

e. F1-F2 Progress Test

f. And so on…

4) I would attempt (attempt being the key word) to then take the two Practice Exams on consecutive days, taking the first practice exam five days before the exam and the second practice exam the day after that. And, again, writing down (sorry for the ‘writing down’ repetitiveness during my post!) notes from questions I got wrong. The Becker practice exams are generally harder than the real exam from my experience, so I learned not to get discouraged if I didn’t do well on the practice exams. In fact, I failed one of each of the FAR and BEC Becker practice exams before I passed the actual exams themselves.

5) For any remaining time I had, I did Progress Tests until I was sick of them, and then did more. Since I had obtained pretty much all the knowledge I was going to during the X weeks, it became important to me to just do questions because it’s not only a more efficient way of studying, but it gave me a good opportunity to work on my test-taking skills.

Sorry for the long post, but now that I have taken AUD and hopefully passed (fingers crossed), I wanted to share my thoughts and advice with you and others that helped me along the way. Keep at it and don’t give up!

FAR (Oct 2013) - 78
BEC (Dec 2013) - 88
REG (Feb 2014) - 92
AUD (May 2014) - 98

DONE!

[CPA soon]

Thank you all for the advice.

Since I failed everytime, my routine was changing every one of those times. My last REG attempt was mainly ditch the lectures, use the final review and use the Wiley Test bank to do questions after each chapter's or sections final review. I did this because it was my third attempt and I was familiar with the material.

@BaeBae Great post, I was also told by one of my friends that just passed FAR to write down all the Journal entries and to put more effort in understanding concepts over MCQ. The weird thing is that my first FAR attempt, I scored comparable on SIMS and weaker on MCQ. Second was weaker on both.

FAR - 71, 68, 74, (8/31/14) 78 ✔
REG - 67, 71, 71, (10/18/14) 78 ✔
BEC - (11/29/14) 86 ✔
AUD - 73, (4/4/15) 86 ✔

I can't believe this is over! 2 years and 3 months..

[CPA soon]

Thank you all for the advice.

Since I failed everytime, my routine was changing every one of those times. My last REG attempt was mainly ditch the lectures, use the final review and use the Wiley Test bank to do questions after each chapter's or sections final review. I did this because it was my third attempt and I was familiar with the material.

@BaeBae Great post, I was also told by one of my friends that just passed FAR to write down all the Journal entries and to put more effort in understanding concepts over MCQ. The weird thing is that my first FAR attempt, I scored comparable on SIMS and weaker on MCQ. Second was weaker on both.

FAR - 71, 68, 74, (8/31/14) 78 ✔
REG - 67, 71, 71, (10/18/14) 78 ✔
BEC - (11/29/14) 86 ✔
AUD - 73, (4/4/15) 86 ✔

I can't believe this is over! 2 years and 3 months..

[hzhao0802]

@CPA soon

Buddy, I know failures sometime make people lose directions. But try to bring some positive energy to yourself.

I am assuming your clock hasn't started. If I am wrong, I am sorry. So I think at least you don't have time pressure to wrap up the exams. Compared to those who get passed one expired because of another failures, you are better off… Aren't you?

FAR - 88
REG - 88
AUD - 99
BEC - 87

[Author]

Replies