[Anonymous]

Having taken both FAR and AUD in the month of February, I figured I would share my thoughts. My first section of the CPA exam was BEC, which I took and passed back in November. It was what I would call “appropriately challenging”, which is to say it wasn’t so difficult as to make me seriously doubt myself leaving the exam, but it wasn’t so easy that a monkey could do it. So going into my second section, FAR earlier this month, I was expecting an “appropriately challenging” exam, even though this time it would be adaptive. Now I usually start out slow and doubt myself at the beginning, so I “flagged” a decent number of questions in the first half of the first testlet, but when I got done with it, I went back through and gave the best possible answers I could, and so I felt good going into the second testlet. That’s when things got worse. The second and third testlets contained a good bit of long, somewhat confusingly-written questions. I don’t know about anyone else, but when I flip to the next question and I see that it takes the examiners five lines or more to ask it, I get a bit nervous. Topics ranged from the obscure to the obvious and everything in between. Anyways, I charged on through the murky swamp and gave the best answers I could in spite of the somewhat unexpected level of difficulty. These were not what I would call basic questions testing the basic knowledge of an accountant just entering the profession, but that’s just me. Flash forward three weeks, and I’m sitting for AUD. I’ll put it this way, if on a difficulty scale, FAR was a 10 (on a scale of 1 to 9), AUD was more like a 5 or 6. I’ve read several posts of some reporting having had an “easy” AUD exam with just basic questions and a stable level of difficulty across testlets, and some reporting having had essentially the same problem I had with FAR, but with AUD. I felt AUD was rather basic and tested very little that was outside of the range of the Becker materials I used to study for it. The simulations were also pretty fair and clearly written (unlike FAR which were more confusing), and the authoritative literature came in handy as well. (On a side note, make sure you keep scrolling to find the absolute right paragraph for your research tab. The wording in the question might match word-for-word the wording in the authoritative literature!) All in all, I have almost no doubts about passing AUD, but of course, I’m a lil nervous about FAR. I live in NC, so unfortunately, I’ll have to add about two weeks to the regular release dates to find out my scores. Good luck everybody, and sorry for the long read.

[HazeEastwood]

@shelleydee, I didn't notice the level of difficulty getting harder honestly. It may have but I'm not sure. I was so frustrated because of all the little details the test was asking. I prefered far because far is more concept driven than strax memorization. REG focused on little details about concepts when the review focused n the major part of the concept. I'm praying for a 75

FAR-81
BEC-84
AUD-91
REG-89

[HazeEastwood]

Jeff, I just saw that you called me out, LOL. I don't really have a prediction. I just don't get why they would wait so long. Doesn't seem to make sense to me. Or maybe its just wishful thinking on my part. I was honestly thinking they would start the middle of next week.

FAR-81
BEC-84
AUD-91
REG-89

[Anonymous]

So I guess most of us only left 1 hr for the 7 sims. The lagging time when you switch between tabs were really annoying. It kills about 30 second each time that I click on another tab. Did you guys also have this experience or is it just my computer was lagginh? I had to guess my way through all 7 of them because I didn't have enough time to read the all the information.

[Grizzly Hammer]

@anotherday:

Yes i hear you on the lag time issue. That definately wasted time. But, what I struggled with even more was the split screen. I though this was almost useless in some cases. I felt like my screen was zoomed to 1000%, so if I had split screen on, I had to scroll up/down, left/right. Becker had a useful split screen so I was hoping to rely on that.

I gave up on the using the split screen and just had to go back in forth from the fact pattern, which turned into a mess because I would start to forget what I needed since i couldn't look at both simultaneously.

BEC - 88
AUD - November 2011
REG - 86
FAR - 65, 71 67, 79

[Anonymous]

@ grizzy hammer

I also gave up on the split screen after I waste about a minute trying to adjust the screen to where I can see both sides.

[pshustler]

I obviously dont know anybody who has passed FAR in 2011 yet, but most of the people I know who passed in 2010 had similar experiences to what I am reading in here. My boss skipped an entire simulation (I think there were less Sims in 2009) and still passed. If you guys knew the content on the MC, I bet you did better than u think

BEC - 86
AUD - 94
REG - 88
FAR - 89

[Anonymous]

I took FAR on 1/6 and pretty much tried to forget about it until now. From what I recall, the first testlet was medium and my second and third where towards the medium-difficulty. I saw a bunch of governmental and NFP questions throughout and a sprinkle of IFRS. But each IFRS question I was unsure of and wound up giving a best guess-tamite. Hopefully those are thrown out, but who knows. I left about 1 hour for the simulations, which was a mistake. I went through each TBS before choosing one that I wanted to do first. Each one was more terrifying than the next and maybe one or two was seen in my Becker material. Not a fan of the research TBS. I was never good at them in the Becker software either.

Crossing my fingers! Good luck to everyone waiting on scores!

[Anonymous]

I read about somebody who didn't even touch his simulations on FAR (with the old format), did both of the WC and the MC, and still got an 80. Obviously, he didn't do a perfect test if he wasn't even able to get to the sims, so it shows that there's something screwy with the grading system. I myself felt that I bombed the sims, and got an 84 on the exam, and a “Stronger” on the sims. Think about it this way, if you skip a sim, it's not like you're really doing any worse than somebody who blew it off or guessed on it. You can't really hide from a fill in the blank format. You have to really know it, and do it carefully, or you might as well be skipping it.

[Author]

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