[ppierce]

I just took a look at my study materials and noticed a TON of forumlas. Looks intimidating if you ask me. What am i missing?

FAR 80
REG 76
AUD 85
BEC 85
Ethics 98
DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Anonymous]

@Jeff

That's great advice.

@CPAman

I was told that you have about 5 minutes of introductory screens and that is a great oppurtunity to jot down some formulas, or need to know stuff on the scrap piece of paper provided. But like you said, no one should try to write down a bunch of formulas and waste time before even starting the exam at the test center; ive heard some horror stories about different ways people didn't start, exited, or somehow didn't start/finish their exam, not good.

[kmwgrace]

Yeah I wouldn't necessarily use the scrap paper for writing formulas down but just knowing that I will have it available is good – I sometimes think better when I can write something down as opposed to looking at it on a computer screen.

~ Kate... MTX!
CPA exam on hold while I homeschool my 6 year old!

[NYCpat]

As one of the “old people” on the forum, I can say that I fully expect BEC to be my easiest exam and the others will take a much greater consistent study effort on my part.

I think it's because as someone who's been in the corporate world for the last 10+ years, all the concepts re: COSO, ERM, and IT (which seem to be some of the hardest parts for many folks) are all things that corporate America inundates you with every year. So, all of that was review for me rather than brand new concepts.

Meanwhile, all the hardcore accounting concepts that are on FAR and REG that I learned 15 years ago in college, I have forgotten, so those will take more repetition for me.

Like others have said, everyone has their easy exam and their “beast” and it's really not applicable to everyone's personal experience.

That being said, once you figure out what your easy exam is, know that you have to add about 30% more effort into your “beasts” to get the passing score.

BEC - 82
AUD - 65; retake Feb 2013
FAR - April 2013
REG - July 2013?

[Anonymous]

Here's what I did regarding the writing down of formulas.

I had every intention of starting my exam and then writing down a list of formulas. So what I did was that I kept a legal sized piece of copy paper and each time I ran across a formula while studying I wrote it down–along with the ratios on that master sheet. After my first run through, I started my day and ended my day (figuring that BEC would hammer these formulas) by writing the entire list. It takes five minutes and about the fifth day through I spiked it. There was no need to do it after those first days.

I found that once studying through the MCQ's I didn't even need to consult the list. The exam was weak and that pissed me off becuase I really hammered the very difficult questions and just knew I'd be one of the few who ended up getting credit on those difficult computations! 😀

I will say this for the new format of the exam. The computerized MCQ's remove the ability for them to give you pieces of multiple years worth of financial statements that omit the required information for specific ratios. I remember the paper exams where I had to work backwards through four or five years worth of income statements/balance sheets in order to obtain the numerator or denominator for a ratio for the first year. It sucked.

[makinthemagic]

I thought BEC was the easiest but it's probably because my undergrad was in Econ. I've also had plenty of IT experience. The only hard part was variance analysis. IMHO the hardest were either FAR (volume of material, much of it difficult) or REG (law was really hard and not logical).

Bec 4/11/11 91
Aud 7/11/11 75
Reg 8/31/11 80
Far 5/24/11 86
Ethics - 98
California Licensed CPA
Illinois Registered CPA

[Anonymous]

I thought BEC was the easiest too. I'm also an Econ major from almost 2 decades ago, and worked in IT. My MBA has a finance concentration.

[Minimorty]

@bob – You probably mentioned this before, but where did you get your MBA?

[Anonymous]

Minimorty: University of Illinois at Chicago, same for my undergrad in Economics. Thanks to a TA-ship I had at the time, I graduated with minimal debt, paid off within a year of graduation.

[Minimorty]

Nice, thats awesome. If I could go back and do it over, I'd probably get some sort of grad degree either concurrently with or subsequent to my undergrad. I know a bunch of schools have the undergrad/grad in 5 years programs. Something like that would have been good. Oh well.

[Anonymous]

If I had a re-do, I would have taken a GMAT review course, get my GMAT up a couple hundred points, and applied to University of Chicago or Northwestern. My biggest concern was graduating with a ton of debt which I would have done with those schools.

[Anonymous]

BEC was the hardest for me because none of the information is the slightest bit interesting to me. I had to really make myself study and take it seriously. None of it is “hard” just boring. I also got engaged a few weeks before the exam which really made me hate studying for BEC.

[Author]

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