[Michael Ruth]

Hello fellow ninjas,

I have just passed my last CPA exam and feel as if I “learned” how to take the test towards my last exam and wanted to share my experiences. As a note, I passed all of the exams first time except REG (AUD – 75, BEC – 78, FAR – 78, REG – 89). The last exam I took was my REG retake, but this was after six months from my original retake and had studied AUD and FAR between the original fail and retake in December. This REG retake was my highest score, and also one that I studied the least (granted it was a retake) but felt as if I had a better idea of questions that were going to be asked (and I don’t think it was because it was a retake).

If I were to retake the exam this would be my strategy:

Materials:
– Wiley CPAexcel book (very cheap on amazon ~$50)
– NINJA MCQ
This book can be substituted for any book, especially if your employer pays for your materials. I actually used Roger CPA for FAR (which was nice because it was way shorter than Wiley). I only used lectures for the beginning part of FAR, and think that they are a terrible way to study, UNLESS you are not familiar with the material at all.

Study Plan

1. Go through Ninja MCQ section by section and hit approximately 15-20% of each section
a. Don’t worry about your score this is just to get an idea of the questions that are often asked
2. Next read the book QUICKLY
a. What you want to do here is just read the book at a quick pace and just highlight important topics that you think will be asked
b. Occasionally you may want to write things down, but DO NOT write everything down in the book
c. Examples of things to write down vs what not to:
i. Things you SHOULD write down – Things like “The following are services that are prohibited by an auditor performing an audit”
1. You know to write this down because you probably saw quite a few problems when you went through a small % of the MCQ
ii. Thing you SHOULDN’T write down – Things like dates, small laws that may only have one bullet point by it or something like that
d. When I was doing REG I quickly read through all of the B-Law stuff, but took my time more on concepts that are calculation/concept base (basis, property transactions, etc.)
3. After finish reading the book (or you can do some reading some MCQ if in a time crunch) you want to now hammer out a good amount of MCQ
a. It is often repeated on this forum that you should just repeat MCQ , MCQ, MCQ until you hit 2,000+ MCQ and I don’t think this is necessarily a great idea
b. At this stage you want to hit close to 80-100% of all of the calculation/concept based questions and then less for items that have a ridiculous amount of questions such as B-Law, ethics, etc.
4. On the day of the test/day before/week of you want to reread the whole book but go even quicker this time and do not take notes. Just use a highlighter and let the concepts sink in.
a. You will be surprised how many questions on test day you will remember from this quick read through and I honestly think this is what made me pass the exam
b. This readthrough should take you ~4-7 hours so you will be skipping certain sections that you are familiar with
5. This strategy took me between 50-75 QUALITY study hours per exam. Most of the prep for the tests were closer to 50 hours but that means studying 90-95% of that hour and not on the phone/internet/etc. Be honest with how much you have prepared and what you know and you will pass.
That’s all I can think of right now, just wanted to share my experiences since I have lurked on this forum and never posted. Feel free to disagree or add your own suggestions.

Sorry about the format of this post, I typed it in word and then pasted it in here and it looks bad now.

[Tncincy]

What was your study plan for bec?

It begins with a 75
Been here too long as a cheerleader....ready to pass

[Author]

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