[Anonymous]

SHORT VERSION: So I keep hearing the term “the stem of the question”. What’s that mean?

If you want the LONG VERSION explaining my concern… Read below… otherwise just give me the short answer…

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Found something interesting about the MCQs…

When I do them I immediately jump to the question to look for the unanswered subject… this I call the * Target *… some people seem to indicate what I call the target is the stem, but I’m not 100% sure on that… I just know the target is almost always *verbatim* going to be the subject of the answer… so that’s what I call it the target…

Then I look at the givens and wonder if the stem occurs in the givens…

Why?

First, the givens are often messy… literally a syntactic jumble of facts… so I get lost as to where to begin… but maybe that’s the stem… because a stem seems to kind of branch off..

For example, I was just doing a Retained Earnings problem which involved some possible treasury stock ramifications… So to get to Retained Earnings, you’d first have to determine whether the treasury stock transactions would have an impact on it (it didnt, btw)…

I’m wondering if that would make the treasury stock issue the stem of the question? because that seems to be where the answer begins… and so in this case the stem would be where the answer *begins* to take shape…

Am I making sense?

Any help much appreciated.

Ty.

Liam

[Tripin93]

This is just a guess, (because I don't use this term,) but maybe “stem” means that actual question. For example, there's a lot of word problems on the CPA exam. At first, they give details to explain the situation. And then usually the very last sentence has the question (and providing an answer for this question gives you the correct answer.) Stem probably means the question at the end. Stem is the main point of the task. But this is just my guess…

Motivated by JC. I do it to make God proud.

FAR: 91 July 2015
AUD: 83 October 2015
REG: 81 January 2016
BEC: 83 February 2016

[Anonymous]

I'm not familiar with the “stem” term, but if they mean what Tripin explained, then I would find the “stem” method advisable (read the last sentence or so of the question first in word problems so that you know what the question is, and know what information you need from the problem).

From the OP's description I'm not sure if he's saying the same thing or not…so not sure if I agree with the OP too or not. Given that neither Tripin or I are familiar with the “stem” terminology, guess neither of us can really answer the question. 😀 But as far as a best practice for wordy MCQs, yes, I do think that jumping to the end of the problem (whichever sentence ends with a “?”) is a good way to find out what you need before reading through the details. That way, you don't get bogged down in details that you'll never need (like a problem that gives full financial statements for a sample company and 10 financial statement notes, and all it's asking you is EPS).

[Author]

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