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Wooaa. I came, I saw, I conquered. It honestly felt like I nailed this one, a feeling I haven’t had since AUD.
First testlet – very straight-forward, flagged 4 and spent 23 minutes plus an additional 4 minutes for review of the ones i flagged = 29 min in total. Lots of theory-oriented questions.
Second testlet – complexity increased, by means of longer questions and also a few calculation-oriented questions (nothing extreme though). Spent 24 minutes, flagged 10, and spent another 5 minutes going back to these (and actually did change a few – I recommend this technique to everyone – it’s better to go through quick, and spend those few minutes saved for going back & review the flagged questions). So in total 29 minutes spent, on time and quite confident all though I guessed on a few questions. What surprised me with this testlet was that it kept coming back to questions very very similar to the ones I had in the first testlet – at first I thought that this is probably not a good sign, but on the other hand it could also be away of “tricking” you. Some questions were so similar that it could be that they are testing me “twice” to make fsure I really know it. Not sure if that theory is logic, or just wishful thinking?
Third testlet – complexity increased again, flagged 14 (!!) questions and some of them were pure guess. There were no “simple” questions anymore, all of them required thinking and knowing the topic in order to have a chance. Ended up spending 42 minutes on this testlet, but since I had spent only 2×29=58 minutes on the first two testlets, I was confident time wise.
Sims – I didn’t practice more than 10 sims prior to the exam, so not sure if they were “standard” or not, but in any case about half were on topics I was somewhat familiar with, the other half on stuff that was out of my comfort zone. For the latter, I felt that I knew what I was doing (i.e. not completely lost), but not sure I was following the right path and since calculations were involved, that could mess up the whole thing for me. These sims were very “specific” and that made it difficult to get a few points out of pure luck. With 80 minutes for the sims, I had just enough time, and ended up with about 8 minutes for review. Approach here, which I recommend, was to click through each of the sims, start with the “confident topic” ones (including the research one), and go through as quick as possible, saving up time for a quick review in the end. Ideally, I should have allocated 10 more minutes for the review, that would probably have helped me by means of researching the AL. One thing I noted, is that each of the sims are “labelled” – look for that label, it can help you significantly if you need to research AL to get guidance, since it tells you the particular topic of the sim (sometimes very specific topic, which you can use as a search string).
Anyways – to sum up, I feel alright about the test. Now ready to hit BEC, with a 2.5 days of total study time! Just bought me a beer, sitting in the lobby at the hotel waiting for the pizza to arrive. After that, I will go through the BEC material like I’m running a marathon, to hopefully have a decent chance on Monday.
Big 4 Audit Manager from Europe here to pass the CPA in the U.S. of A in 2014! Niiice!
AUD - 95 / Jul 15 / 130h over 4 weeks
FAR - 86 / Aug 14 / 240h over 4 weeks
(11 week break)REG - 81 / Nov 14 / 200h over 4 weeks
BEC - 87 / Nov 17 / 30 h over 2.5 days
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