CPA Exam Prep – Exam Study Tips

On August 25th, 2011 by dave bryant | No Comments | Posted in CPA Exam Prep

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1. Get in the Right State of Mind

The CPA test is well-known for being very hard to successfully pass. It’s quite a difficult test and you will need to study a lot to be able to pass. A lot of students have failed multiple times on various sections before they eventually pass. Because studying for the exam is very hard, you should congratulate yourself for having the determination tackle it. You should also think of your previous achievements to motivate yourself. It’s important to remind yourself that whilst the exam may be very hard, lots of other people have passed, so you can too.

2. Purchase a Great Review Course

A lot of the review courses that can be purchased usually include some lectures in the format of DVDs; using DVDs can make confusing concepts much easier to comprehend than books can. The best CPA courses tend to look carefully at exams in the past to find out what questions actually appear on a more common basis than others, enabling you to study much more efficiently. If you think that you may need some extra help from instructors, make sure that you choose an exam course that lets you contact instructors by phone so you can ask them any questions you may have regarding your study materials. Personally, I can’t overstress how important it is to invest in a great CPA course. It can even mean the difference between passing your final exam with excellent marks and failing completely, and it can really help you save huge amounts of time by enabling you to concentrate on the areas that are more likely to appear in the final exam.

3. Form a Revision Plan and Keep to It

There’s a large amount of work that you will need to learn before you’re prepared enough to sit each part of the exam, so pulling a couple of night long revision sessions just before your final exam will not be enough. Most people believe that you will need to spend around three months of near constant studying for each part of your exam. When you are forming a revision plan, make sure that you program in some time off to keep the plan realistic. It is far better to study for a couple of hours each day rather than trying to shove in so much revision time into your plan that you soon become discouraged and give up.

4. Get Help from Your Friends and Family

Getting ready for your CPA exam definitely isn’t easy, but there’s no need to go through it all by yourself. Now is a great time to get help from friends or family. Explain to them how hard it is to complete the exam, and hopefully they will do as much as they can to help you whilst you’re preparing for the exam itself. They might even start letting you get away with not attending family gatherings or cleaning, cooking and doing other chores around the house.

5. Keep Your Health in Check

Without being healthy, you’ll find that you are having trouble concentrating whilst you are studying. Make sure you get plenty of exercise, eat lots of fruit and veg, and perhaps most importantly, make sure that you are getting enough sleep each night. You should also make sure that you are fitting in breaks to your revision routine, by doing this you will have much more energy so will be able to study to the best of your ability.

6. Find Study Buddies

By studying with fellow students who are also planning to complete the CPA test, you will be able to focus a lot easier and will notice you are much more motivated. It’s also very handy to have someone around that you can discuss confusing and complicated concepts with; it’s also really handy to have someone about who can help spur you on when you are feeling down. If you are currently working at an accounting company, start asking your other workers or college friends if they are also gearing up for their exams. If you are finding it hard to locate people that you can study with, you should search for forums on the internet to find people who are in a similar situation. You may even find different people who are looking for individuals to study with in your local area.

7. Focus on a Chunk at a Time

Many students drastically underestimate how complicated the exam is so they book all of the sections one after another and attempt to revise for them all at once. Whilst this may be possible for some people to do, a much better idea would be to revise for a section at a time to greatly increase your chances of successfully passing each exam section. Because each of the four sections cover a huge amount of material, trying to remember all the information at once would probably cause a lot of people to fail all of the sections. Another good idea would be to revise the section that you find the hardest first. After you have passed the hardest section, you’ll have just eighteen months to complete the next three sections before the first section will reach its expiration time, so by completing the section that you find the hardest first, you greatly reduce the chances of the sections you have passed expiring on you.

8. Concentrate on Confusing Areas

Whilst constantly going over concepts that you understand completely will make you feel confident, it can also lead to an untrue sense of security that may ruin your chances in the final exam. To increase the efficiency of your revision time, you should definitely break down each of your problem areas and focus most of your effort on them. Make a list of all of your hard to understand areas and go through them piece by piece until they are no longer confusing to you.

9. Take Lots of Notes

Your memory can only absorb a fixed amount of information in the short term. Information that you revise shortly before your exam will be the easiest to remember. Because of this fact, you should remember to make short but sharp bullet points that you can look at and force into your memory shortly before you take your exam.

10. See How Long You Take

When you’re completing example questions that are a part of the material that you are studying, make sure that you time yourself with a stopwatch and pretend that you are actually participating in the exam. By doing this you will become used to completing questions within the allowed time period so you don’t end up panicking in the actual exam.

CPA Exam Prep Tips – How to Pick a CPA Exam Review Course

On August 7th, 2011 by dave bryant | No Comments | Posted in CPA Exam Prep

Pass the CPA on your first try! The Yaeger CPA Review Course will maximize your chances and minimize your study time. Click Here to Check It Out.

Most accountants who are preparing for their CPA will take advantage of a great reviewing course for CPA to prepare them for the final exams. A great review course will really cut down on the time that you have to study and in turn will give you the best possible chance of passing the exam. Because there are various types of courses for CPA exams around today, it has become quite difficult to choose between them all. Below is a list of things that you should consider to help you choose the greatest CPA review course for your needs.

1. Course Contents

Whilst all CPA review courses tend to cover most of the same accounting concepts, each teacher will explain things differently. Excellent review courses tend to only be taught by friendly and engaging instructors who can easily explain confusing concepts in a simple manner. A great instructor will also spend extra time on confusing concepts and spend less time on the simpler, easier understood ideas to make sure that lectures are as efficient as they can be. The top CPA courses usually have samples of their lectures that you can view before you make a decision on whether or not to buy the review course. Another way that you can find out the true quality of a course is by looking at forums along with review sites to do with CPA exams to learn what other people think of the quality of various courses.

Lectures can also be viewed via a whole host of different media, this includes ways such as DVD’s, CD’s or webcasts, which can either be recorded or live. A great advantage of this kind of media is that they are very portable and extremely accessible, so when you are looking for a course, you should probably think about picking one that has this kind of media available.

Also, when you are on the search for an excellent review course, be completely sure that you find out the expiration dates for the materials involved in the course. You should do this because a lot of questions will be disabled after a certain period of time has passed. As well as this, some courses use lectures that are solely available to students for a certain amount of time before they cannot be accessed anymore. The best kinds of courses are the ones that have the software and materials that don’t need access to the web so therefore don’t need to be downloaded and in turn, won’t have an expiration date. If you have your mind set on buying the kind that will expire after a certain amount of time, be sure that you have more than enough time to learn from all of the material before it expires.

2. Example Questions

After a student has successfully studied and digested the information from the materials presented to them in the course, they will usually be provided with example questions to help cement what they’ve learnt into their long term memory. This will also help them to easily apply what they have learnt to real life situations.
Many CPA courses choose to prepare their students for every possible question that may appear in their exam, even if it has very little chance of actually appearing. Whilst this method is a safe bet, it also uses a lot of excess time. A lot of students having to do this technique either run out of patience or simply don’t have enough time to study so much in a short amount of time; this then leads to many students being unprepared for their exams.

At the opposite end of the scale, some review courses don’t give their students any example questions at all so the student ends up being drastically underprepared for their exams. Obviously, this is also a bad situation.

The perfect CPA course will only include questions that are highly likely to be present in the exam. This is easily done by checking previous exam papers to find out the most common questions that come up. By doing this, students will have the best chance of doing well in their exam and will use their time more efficiently and effectively.

3. Student Help

Various CPA courses will produce different stages of customer support. Students who prefer to talk different concepts through with an instructor should make sure that they pick a course that offers that particular service. Alternatively, students that prefer to work alone can search for a course with little support. And of course, there will be courses that offer services somewhere between the two. Before you purchase a course, be 100% sure that it can provide you with the amount of help that you need.

4. Rate of Updates

Because of changes in the law regarding accounting, exam study material must be updated regularly. Some courses will update their materials and example questions more frequently than others; so be sure that you take this into account before you select a course.

An aspect that all students are rightly interested in is the price. However, it is highly recommended that because most accountants experience a big rise in their pay once they are CPA certified, that students looking for the perfect review course for their CPA exam should definitely pick a course because of its quality and not its price. When you realise that the standard pass percentage for the main CPA exam is just 47 to 49 percent, failing a few sections isn’t unlikely. Nobody wants to have to restudy and re-sit parts of the CPA exam just because they tried to save a bit of money on a cheaper, but lower quality course. Perhaps the only exception to this is when your fees for the course get reimbursed through your future employer, if this is the case you should definitely take advantage of it, even if it means you may have slightly less options to choose from.