[Wannafree]

Congratulations to all those who passed a section or all done.I am reading all those threads and liked your success stories.It would be nice if you all can share your experience or things you feel did lead you to pass ,things you could have done etc.
Looking forward to hearing from you about your stories.

[jevans189]

Do MCQs. Once you finish doing MCQs, do some more MCQs. After that you need to be doing MCQs. Once you think you've done enough MCQs do some more MCQs. Get a good night's sleep before the exam. Right before the exam, make sure you EAT something so you are not thinking about food. I eat a sandwich. Try not to take breaks during the exam if you can help it.

Also make sure you do lots of MCQs.

[waffle_house]

Understand what you are studying or what the material is trying to teach you. Going through the motions won't help.

Don't cut corners. Get a good review course (Becker, Roger or Gleim). Have a study plan and stick to it and have flexibility in case a hard chapter takes longer than usual.

Every experience is different. Some get done in 6 months others take longer than 2 years so do not compare yourself to someone else's experience or study plan because it might not work for you.

[Anonymous]

I am in absolute vehement opposition to the mindless, just doing multiple choice questions till your eyes bleed.
I understand everyone learns differently, and YES doing some multiple choice questions are beneficial. But I read on here, people doing 3-5000 mcq in multiple test banks.I mean are you effin kidding me? Who has that amount of time.

It's hard to get around the fact that reading is essential. Learning concepts is more beneficial. Yes sometimes doing MCQ can highlight certain points, but doing mcq from sunup to sundown, is in my opinion just absurd.

Drill the concepts home. Because the exam tests some real minutae..

If you have the time, study intensely for 2-3 weeks and take the exam. Do not drag out the studying for months…Maximize your study time and knowledge retention.

That's my 2 cents.

[Ryan – Just Another Dollar]

+1 to cessnapilot30's tips RE: intensity. Don't settle for the common (mis)belief that you can't crank this thing out in 6-9 months, even working full-time. Full immersion made a huge improvement in my study/score results.

I started out kinda slow and failed my first section with a mid-60s score after 10 weeks of review. After that, I got intense (2-3 hours/day & 6 days/wk) and finished the process in 5 months with only one fail.

Accept the fact that statistically speaking, you'll probably need more than 4 attempts to pass. Build retake contingencies into your schedule so you don't have to adjust your entire study plan when you fail a section. What worked for me for retakes was to check my Ninja MCQ score reports and re-watch all the lectures for my weaker topics over 2-3 weeks, then dig back into MCQ for 30 hours in the week before the retake.

Lastly, use this forum as your motivation. Realize that there are people out there with easier (and much, much, more difficult) situations than you, but everyone's fighting the same battle. Good luck!

B - 88 (2/16)
A - 84 (4/16)
R - 73 (6/16), 82(7/16)
F - 67 (1/16), 84(4/16)

Ethics - 93

Roger course & Ninja MCQ - HiYa!

[Char143]

rewrite your notes.. in your own words. When I take notes I just write what they are saying in their complicated words and dumb it down. For example, I had never heard of a CIO (from BEC) Chief information officer and in the text it said he/she was in charge of 3 departments, and I thought “how will I remember what departments he runs” so I created a narrative of my old CFO, the departments he runs and I wrote down “you see it makes sense, if John is in charge of these departments than the CIO must be in charge of information departments, and those departments are…” I just write stories to make sense of the information because it all kinda mixes together and I forget what goes in what section…and MCQ until you die LOL.

AUD (2/16)-84
REG (05/16)-69 Retake (7/16)-79 (ty ninja MCQ)
BEC-TBD
FAR-9/8/16

[sallybreann]

Jevans189 great advice on the eating. I was pretty hungry by the end of my exam and it was distracting me.

My advice? Use your review book. Those examples they give you in the book? The ones that are usually a page long and our instinct is to skip over them because you will just do the MCQs anyways and it looks too complicated? Do them!! Write them out slowly multiple times if you need to and think about the answers, those examples are review gold and I never wanted to read through them because I knew they were overly complicated then what I’d see in the MCQs. For example on the bonds, I wrote out the entire 6 pages of journal entries/amortization schedules Becker gave me and by the end of that the MCQ’s on bonds were easy for me. Before I did that I was consistently getting 40% or lower on my bond MCQ’s.
I used Ninja MCQ’s three weeks leading up to my exam and was trending 69% but I never re-worked a mcq I got right the first try and I never hit the review phase. I’m happy to share my methods now, I had no idea if what I was doing would work until I got my score last night

[curlyhare]

Do the mcqs, do the sims, do the sims, then do more sims. I realized you can get a lot of mcqs right but that doesn't always translate to getting sims right and they're now 50%. So use the mcq to cover a wide amount of material quickly and learn the base, then sim like crazy and read the AICPA standard (yes, the actual standard, not only the review material you bought) if you find you are not grasping a particular concept. And @rtalfson is totally right, submerge…get rid of your life as much as much as is realistically possible (and maybe unrealistically at times). Do not stretch these things out if you can help it.

[Author]

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