I'm just curious – and certainly I'm not pointing fingers – but are there any known liars on this forum? I don't know quite how someone could go about figuring out who is being truthful and who isn't but judging from some of the posts I read, like that dude who lives in some other country who claims to be passing them all without studying and who started a thread that now has 100+ posts on it, well……I don't believe everything I read on here. I think some people just post stuff with the intention of seeing how much envy they can draw out of everyone else. Reddit and other forums are notorious for that. I'd like to think that this forum is better, but there are people on here (I'm sure) who aren't as “blessed” as they claim to be. Personally, I don't think you can leave four SIMs blank and still pass FAR with a score in the 80s. But there's no way to prove it. I also don't think you can pass these exams without studying. But…there's no way to prove that someone who just took one or more parts *cold*, with no studying, actually DIDN'T study. Which is to say, they probably studied just as much as the average person.
Yes indeed, there is a certain very small percentage of people out there who take these professional exams and say “Oh they're not bad at all, don't believe all the hype about how hard and impossible they are to pass.” The fact of the matter is that for the vast majority of people, these exams take a tremendous amount of effort to pass, even if you've studied it all before. If it was so easy to do that, a lot more people would be doing it. And a lot more people wouldn't be having trouble getting the magic 75 and NASBA wouldn't have nearly the balance they have in Retained Earnings and/or having such lavish holiday parties at the Ritz Carlton, or both haha.
One of my accounting instructors many moons ago told our class “Am I smarter than any of you? Absolutely not. What I am far better at than most people is getting things done efficiently. The year I passed the CPA exam was the *one* year that they really made it easy. The previous few years had a very high failure rate and they watered it down for just that one year. That's why I took it when I did, and why I passed. I probably wouldn't have passed otherwise.” He wasn't kidding about the ‘smart' thing either. If you talked to this guy, you'd probably think he grew up in the ‘hood! He was in fact a millionaire though. Not from teaching, but from his career in the securities industry, in the days when the market wasn't so volatile.
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