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!

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!