Going too FAR?

I was getting ready to leave work last Friday and had to check Twitter to see if @NASBA had announced the release of AUD scores.  It being a Friday afternoon, I assumed there would be no such notifications.  Of course, I was dead wrong.  There it was, in color, 18,839 AUD scores were released by the AICPA to NASBA.  I felt my stomach sink.  The moment of truth had arrived, or so I thought.  With this being my first CPA exam, testing section, score release, I didn't know how long I would have to wait to find out my results.  I hurried to the NASBA website to see if by some miracle my score was already there.  It wasn't.  So I went home, anxious as ever, to await my fate.  Did the score release happening at the end of the day on Friday mean that I would have to wait til Monday to find out?  I got home and checked again. Nothing. I checked many times throughout the evening to find out and my score never showed up. 

I went to bed thinking that it would be Monday before I found out.  But even with settling on this thought to be eventuality, I still was anxious.  It was difficult to sleep.  I woke up many times throughout the night.  I had my Ipod right next to my bed and even checked at around 2 in the morning to see if my score had posted.  Still nothing.  The worst part was my dream (or was it a nightmare) that I had.  In my dream, I got on to check my score and to my horror, I received a 48.  Not just a bad score, but a horrible score.  I woke up a few more times throughout the night/morning and felt defeated thinking that my score was actually a 48.  Because of my dream, I had resigned myself to the fact that I had not passed my test.  I'm wasting my money, I'm wasting my time.  Sometimes, I can be a very pessimistic person.

The kids started waking up sometime after 7 in the morning.  I realized that my night of on again/off again sleep was over.  I went straight to the computer to look again, knowing that the scores would not be there.  I typed in my section ID and birth date.  Clicked on the little yellow "Score" button.  And there it was.  My score.  96.  Unbelievable.  I passed.  Of course, I figured that they must have got my test switched with someone else.  I had not been too confident when leaving the testing center, but I still held out hope that I had passed.  Must have been the pessimistic side of me coming out.  I had passed.  What a wonderful feeling it was to see that score.  What a relief. 

The amount of time I had put into studying for FAR between the time I took AUD and the time I received my score (I tested on 8/15 and received my score on 9/16) was very small.  I think I took a week off before I even cracked open the FAR book.  And I never studied two days in a row.  Preparing for that test had been exhausting.  But receiving notification that I had passed has given me a second wind to get studying for FAR.

So, here we go.  Onto the next one.  Any tips or suggestions for passing FAR?  I have heard this is the mother of all CPA exam sections.  Leave some feedback and let me know how to go 2 for 2!

1 Down ... Maybe

Maybe it was a bad idea to decide to start a blog while I was studying for the CPA exam.  As you can see, I am far from a regular blogger.  I guess studying is more important than blogging, but I was hoping to keep somewhat of a record of my journey.

I took the Audit exam on Monday.  I think it was a good experience to get that first one taken and see exactly what it was like.  I was kind of surprised by how it felt so similar to all of my practice MCQs.  I think there were quite a few that were exactly the same as some I had seen many times.  Did anyone else ever have the feeling while taking the test that never in their study time they had seen anything that pertained to some of the questions?  A couple of the questions looked like a foreign language. 

So, how do I think I did?  Like I mentioned, some questions I felt I knew for sure.  Some, I had absolutely no clue.  And some I felt like I could easily eliminate a couple of possibilities but had to guess between two of the answers.  As far as the SIMs, I felt very confident on at least half of them, but not so sure on some of the others.  Does that mean I failed?  Did I pass?  I'm afraid to say that I think I will have to retake the test.  But I don't know for sure.

Now comes the hard part.  I have to wait until September to find out if I passed or not.  Tom Petty said it best - "The waiting is the hardest part"  I am sure the time will go by fast as I have already begun my studies for what a lot people think is the hardest section - FAR.  As I mentioned in previous posts, I am using Gleim to study.  I have just reviewed the first study unit and it was hard to get through.  It was the conceptual part of GAAP.  Boring!   Hopefully once I get going through the actual calculations it will get easier.

Well, wish me luck on getting my results.  I don't know if I have the patience to wait for this!

Apply Yourself

Wow it has been awhile.  At least I can blame it on being busy.  Just saw some people on cpaexamclub.com announce receipt of their scores for the 2nd window.  Congrats to those that passed.  Gives me hope that maybe one day I will join them.

I hadn't yet applied for the CPA exam when I purchased my study materials and started studying.  I figured I would get through most of the materials before I applied because I wanted to try and get 3 tests in on one NTS.  After seeing how long it has taken me to get through the audit study materials, I decided that I was only going to apply for two tests on this NTS and the other two after.  I probably should have applied earlier so that I would have been able to take the test in July, but it now may be August before I take the test.  This may end up helping me be better prepared for the test.  

I received notice from NASBA that they have received my application and are reviewing it.  I guess they are currently waiting for one of my transcripts to come.  I think I am obsessive compulsive because even though it might take up to 6 weeks to receive my NTS, I check the online application status daily.  The anticipation will probably kill me.  

My studies are going okay.  I had an illness one week and didn’t study much, and something always seems to come up to slow me down.  But I am currently on study unit 16.  Study unit 15 was a very difficult one that dealt with sampling.  I will definitely need to spend some extra time there when I go back through the study units. When I first started studying, I was making handwritten flash cards, but I found a website that allows you to create free flash cards online.  It has been very helpful in speeding up the process of going through each study unit.  Check it out at flashcardexchange.com.  Maybe it will help you as well.

Well, here are my results from last week.  Maybe I will post earlier results for weeks that I didn't blog.

May 26th

Looking at the last 3 sessions for 5/26, I got 85% combined.  Not too shabby, but maybe not good enough.  That was for all sections that I had studied up until then.

June 17th

My mock test for the 17th, I averaged 83%.  Good thing I still have plenty of time to study for this test.

Let me know if you received your scores and how you did!

Help!

Well, I am a little late in keeping up with my once a week posting.  Life can do that to you.  This is the blog I was planning for last Friday and never got completed.

In the beginning, with the extensive use of the internet, I wondered if there would be a lot of websites or forums with people discussing or helping each other to prepare for and take the CPA exam.  I have done a little searching, but I have not come up with many websites that do this.  Maybe I haven't looked hard enough, or in the right places, but I am surprised by the lack of online discussion of preparation for the CPA exam.  I was able to find one place that seems to be the best so far. 
http://www.cpaexamclub.com/

There seems to be quite a bit of activity and camaraderie at this site.  Everyone seems to want to help as much as they can.  Leave me a comment if you are aware of any other websites that are as good as or better than the one mentioned above.

Last week involved studying units 6 and 7 in the Gleim course.  Unit 6 is internal controls and unit 7 goes into detail on the internal controls for the sales/receivables cycle.  Study unit 6 took me quite a while to get through, due to the length as well as me not putting in enough time.  Study unit 7 was quite a bit quicker.

As I posted last time, I thought I had figured out how to post the test stats in a better format without the beautiful desktop background.  Well, I did.

Looks better doesn't it.  Well, except for maybe some of the results.  My plan is to go through each study unit once and then hit the sections that I didn't do so well on really hard.  We'll see.  I think that I will be taking the test sometime in the July/August testing window.  Most likely mid to late July.  I think I better start spending more time studying.

But I also don't want to deprive you of my new desktop background courtesy of my dad.

Where Am I?

Since I decided to start this blog last week, I thought I should make a post about where I am currently, or at least at the time of my decision to do this.  As I mentioned before, I am using the Gleim CPA study course to hopefully be one of the less than 20% of people that pass all four sections on their first try.  I'm surprised that there are that many that pass their first time since they just announced the Q1 2011 pass fail rates -

AUD  -  43.88%
BEC  -  42.32%
FAR  -  42.43%
REG  -   41.28%

That doesn't make this task seem daunting at all does it?

So I decided that I should study for the Auditing portion of the exam first, since I figured it would be the most difficult for me and I could spend the most time preparing for it.  Not sure if that is the best course of action or not, but that's what I decided.  As I mentioned before, I received the study materials around the end of March.  Each test is split into 20 study units.  Each study unit is split up into subunits, around 4-7 per study unit.  I figured if I spent an hour or two studying each night, that I would be able to complete 1-2 study units a week.  So I should be on study unit 10 or so, right?  Well as of last week, I was only on study unit 4.  Of course, most of April I was trying to train for a half marathon and studying took a back seat.

Anyway, I took a screen shot of my to date test question results and saved it in a word document.  I have now figured out how to save it as a jpeg, so it will look better (I hope) the next time I post.

Do you enjoy the scenic background?  I have two monitors attached to this computer so you get to see my desktop background as well.  Hopefully this doesn't appear too small when it gets posted on the blog and you can see my results.  The blue lines represent testing sections.  After completing a testing section, I can review questions I missed or questions that I was unsure of and retake those questions.  Sometimes I just really don't have a grasp of the subject matter!

Who Am I?

Thought I should start this off with a little bit about myself.  I am married and have 4 children under the age of 7.  I graduated from high school in 1995.  During my time in high school, I took an accounting class that I enjoyed and decided that I should become accountant.  As far as school subjects, math was the only one that made sense to me.  I didn’t enjoy English, art, or history, and science just didn’t thrill me.  The fall after graduation, I went to Weber State University.  I took some classes to fill my general requirements in the fall and winter quarters.  After that, I went to South Africa for a couple years as missionary.  When I returned from South Africa, I went back to WSU with the intent of getting my bachelor’s degree in accounting.  While attending school, I also returned to work at a local fast food restaurant, The Burger Bar.  My plan was not to work fast food for the rest of my life and a short time later I began working as a teller at a local credit union.  I lasted there for about 6 months before, out of the blue, a friend of my father offered me a job as an inside sales rep at a brick company.  During this time, I attempted to be a full time student as well as a full time employee.  This didn’t always work.  I waffled as a full time, part time, and no time student.  During this time I also decided to get married, start a family, and purchase a home.  I finally graduated with BS in accounting from WSU in the summer 2007.  As Chris Farley tells David Spade in Black Sheep – “A lot of people go to school for 10 years.”  After my graduation, I found a job with a large corporation as an associate accountant.  I have since transferred over to cost accounting with the same company.  Sometime after my graduation, my wife thought that maybe it would be a good idea to further torture myself and go for a master’s degree and sit for the CPA exam.  Being busy with kids and work, we decided that the University of Phoenix online would be the best alternative for this.  I started in August of 2008 and finished my final class in February of 2010.  In my typical fashion of procrastination, I waited until 2011 to finally decide to sit down and study for the CPA exam.  My company purchased agreed to purchase CPA exam study materials.  I decided on the Gleim study materials.  I received them in March of 2011 and decided I would try to pass the auditing section first, since this is my least comfortable area.   I had been trying to train for a half marathon that was on Memorial Day, but my knees told me that they were not going to allow me to complete that goal.  So I have finally decided to stop the procrastination and really focus on my studies.  This blog is supposed to track and chart my progression and results as I study and take the test.  I don’t know if this will be a daily, weekly, or monthly blog, or if this first entry will be the last.  But here we are and we’ll see what happens from here!