13 weeks of Hell got the job done - Page 2

Hi all, seems as if Caro3line and I have very similar stories. Everybody is different and learns in different ways, but I guess I'll review my hellish 13 weeks of studying for the sake of anybody it helps. To answer STUDYMODE and krokofilen:

As I mentioned in my first post, I think being aware of how you learn best is crucial for success on these beasts. I knew I was a crammer, always have been and always will be. I used that to my advantage. I got one NTS with all four exams and spaced them at 2 weeks a piece and 4 weeks for FAR. Similar to Caro3line, I attended the fast pass lectures, but only for Audit as I found them to be a huge waste of study time. As far as the becker book goes, wasn't for me. Can honestly say I've never read any textbooks for more then a few specific pages. Some of you may learn best by reading text so by all means stick to that. I knew I am one to learn by doing. So I went into it with the mindset of burning through the entire becker homework's and sims and revisiting any that were problems.

I quickly found the sims to be another waste of time for me other then the fact that I could get used to the format. “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get.” So now I narrowed my study strategy down to homework's and then a massive amount of progress tests. This is by no means to diminish the vast amount of time and effort I exerted over those 13 weeks. I was getting through sometimes a becker section and a half in one day. The next morning I would run a progress test on the previous day's section to stay fresh. This always managed to leave me a week or longer for a review, which consisted, again, of dozens of progress tests. To answer krokofilen's question about the amount of hours spent, I honestly couldn't tell you. I would start studying at 8:30am everyday for 6-7 days a week and would quit when my eyes started to lose focus, which was typically around 7-8pm. Now, I did take breaks for meals and coffee of course. On average, I probably was studying for 8-10 hours a day with an occasional “off” day when I knew I needed one. (Do something fun on those days!!)

I think the single best thing I did was to spend time reading everything in a question and understanding why each answer is correct or incorrect. There was so many times where I wanted to be like ” yeah, I know this answer because I've seen this question 5 times already,” but The best thing you can do is read through it all again and commit the concept to memory and not the question.