I agree with sweazy in not going back to the basics but you do have to study it ALL over again< not AS much, but smarter, you already know some of the material and a *little bit* (not a lot cuz it probably will change A LOT) of how to tackle the exam next time. , the one thing is you did study enough to get into the 70's so you know the material DECENTLY but you need to know it WELL/REALLY WELL and REG has enough nuances in it to make me want to scream about the exception to the exception to the exception.
That is going to depend on certain things:
What material are you using? Does it work for you? Do you zone out on the lectures?
How much did you study for REG the first time? (how many hours per day) how long of stretches do you have taken off.
What are your weak points? (individual tax, corp, m-q, agency, etc?)
How did you study? (on weekends, every day for a couple of hours, in a distraction free location, etc).
Gonna be long so just so you know this is my experience and won't work for everyone.
My process that worked for me (even though I was an anxious little bit* for it cuz I was like I cannot fail this exam, I would just HATE myself) so when I first started studying, it was just hard to get back into school mode and I had to keep replaying lectures over and over because I kept getting distracted. (and like I said when I wasn't studying I was at least being productive cleaning, organizing, exercising..anything to just get out of it…and then I would curse myself later).
I budgeted like 3 days for Chapter 1: Individual tax but do you know how much info is in THAT chapter? I ended up taking a few days off because I got frustrated with it. And then when I did the MCQ what I didn't realize at first was it included was flow through questions (because partnership and S corps) flow through and I was like this is not in the book how am I supposed to know this stuff. And getting 50% on MCQS made me SO MADDD! I'm only one chapter in and I felt like I was failing.
So I ranted to friends/etc and discussed with them (that's also how I found Ninja- because they sort of recommended it as a supplement, and some of them had already talked about it before)…and decided to also supplement with just MCQ. AFter that I waited until I got done with the 1st 4 chapters in Roger before I actually attempted the MCQ and I did okay but Ninja once again was horrible and that made me horribly pissed off. So I also bought the book….Long story short in between a few times where I took “few breaks” that lasted longer than they should have, I realized this was only the 1st ONE. And that was when I was like okay, it's time to get down to business.
And after setting my ego aside, I rescheduled my test for like the 2nd or 3rd time and then I was like, I can't go onto the bus law material, I'm still weak on taxes.. so I went through it again! All the way through. So after going through the bus law material once (50% content for like 20% of grade…but hey easy poionts), I realized I might have forgotten some of the tax material so I went back through the tax material for a 3rd time.
Long story short I rescheduled and overstudied so much I was going to puke (in fact I can't even remember in the last week if I even studied at all..probably barely because I was so freaking SICK of the material) and I finally had ppl convince me to just take IT. It was budgeted on my custom calendar to take it in July, then August, and finally took it in September…
TLDR: You need to study enough to have a good enough grasp that you get around average 75% on MCQS (without having MEMORIZED them), 2- you need to study more- but be more careful this time, try not to over study (still better than understudying though), and don't take too long pouting cuz it just wastes valuable time.
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