The reason why the CPA exam has a high failure rate has nothing to do with brains. As a matter of fact, I know a lot of smart people who have failed the CPA exam on multiple occasions. The CPA exam is really a test of time management more than anything else.
Anyone who has already completed the academic requirements with hundreds of hours of accounting classes is more than prepared for the academic rigor of the exam. The difference between the CPA exam and a regular college exam is the sheer volume of the material. Since most people are accustomed to cramming a day or two before college classes, this habit creeps into CPA study time. The candidate tries to memorize hundreds of pages of auditing standards on a short timeline or new regulations and finds that there is simply not enough time to cram so much material into your brain.
AICPA recommends that students allocate 300-400 hours of study time. I would be willing to bet that only 5% of all students actually hit that number of cpa study hours.
The key to the CPA exam is to understand that it is a volume based test and you need to budget for the right amount of study time. This is why we created a 30 day CPA study program to keep students on track.
Every CPA candidate has to balance life, work and other responsibilities. The successful candidates do not put too much on their plate at one time. In order to fight through all the CPA material you need hours and hours of prep time. I don’t think that there are any shortcuts.
Once you understand that you’ll need 250+ hours of study time, the next question is to honestly assess in what time frame you can cram in the study time. 3 months? 6 months? 9 months?
Let’s go through an example. Joe wants to crank out the CPA exam in 3 months. To hit the 250 hour minimum target he would have to average 2 hours and 40 minutes of study time per day. Assuming he takes some breaks and goofs off a little bit (X Box!) he will probably need about 3.5 hrs per day for 7 days/wk. Now when was the last time you studied for 90 days straight? If you miss a weekend of study time, you would have to study for 9 hours on one day to make it up! This is how people get thrown off track. They simply underestimate the time needed to study for the CPA exam.
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