Mastering the Art of Studying: How to Prepare for Your CPA Online
Introduction
Have you just started your CPA journey? Are you trying to optimize your study timeline and CPA study sessions? After teaching students for over 1,000 hours, I’ve learned these high-level CPA skills that I will share in this article. Overall, you will notice that patience is key to the CPA exams. Realize that this is a multiple-month journey, and give yourself the time that it takes to pass the CPA exams. If you move too quickly, you will feel stressed and not see your progress. If you move too slowly, you won’t notice enough progress and won’t feel the momentum behind your studies.
With that, let’s move into the importance of creating a realistic study plan.
Create a Realistic Study Plan
Student should first accept that the CPA journey is a long-term journey. It’s not like studying for a college exam. If students haven’t ever prepared for a long-term journey, then they will need to set up an adequate study plan and learn to have ample patience.
Students should typically choose one of three study paths: 6 months, 12 months, 24 months.
The most common path to study for the CPA exams with is the 12-month path. With this approach, a student should study for around 12 hours per week. This involves 2-hour study sessions 6 times a week, with one day of rest. Students should take the CPA exams between 2-3 months. If using 2 months to study, this will provide room to retake 1-2 exams and still finish within 12 months. If a student takes 3 months per exam, then they will need to pass each exam on the first try to pass in 12 months. Remember, the CPA exams take the time that they take. Don’t rush yourself into an unrealistic time frame, because you will feel unmotivated and perhaps call off your studies.
Prioritize Consistency Over Number of Hours
Some days, you might not feel like studying and will tell yourself, “I won’t study today and will simply double up my study time tomorrow.” This often is a flawed approach, and the main reason being that our brains can only handle critically thinking a certain number of hours per day (I find that after 4 hours of studying, I can’t be any more productive).
You don’t want to feel that either you will study for multiple hours or you won’t study at all. Some days, you’re not going to feel like studying, but you should still squeeze in a quick 30-minute study session. This will allow you to have more consistency in your study plan and to retain the information more effectively.
Review on a Regular Basis
Don’t try rushing through the content and never looking back at the previous content you learned. I like to take a spaced interval approach to reviewing. For example, if you have finished 3 sections of the FAR exam, you should go back to the section 1 and spend time reviewing the content. Then once you finish the 4th section, you go back to section 2 and review. And then once you’re throughout all the content, you spend ample time reviewing the content on a comprehensive basis. The goal is that, by the time you reach the exam, you have seen the same content at least 4 times.
The use of a study outline will help you to efficiently review CPA content. The best approach is if you download a study outline that someone else has prepared, and then you add your own notes to it.
Learn from Each Practice Question
When you’re early into your CPA studies, you should use the MCQs to learn as much as possible, instead of to show you how well you’re doing with the concepts. Instead of rushing through 100 practice questions and not studying the answers, it’s much more effective to only perform 25 practice questions and study the answer explanations. You should also study the 3 incorrect answers to see why they weren’t the correct answer. If you implement this approach, then you will begin to score much higher on your MCQs.
Along with the previous section on reviewing, each time you get a question wrong, you should jot down the reason why you got it wrong in your study outline. That way, before you practice the same section again, you quickly review all the reasons you typically get those questions wrong.
Conclusion
From this article, I hope you have learned a few key tips that you can implement into your CPA studies to experience success on the exams. Passing the first exam is always the most difficult, because you don’t feel any momentum behind you yet. So give yourself 2 months (3 months max) to study for your first exam, regularly review the content, and you will be on your way to passing your first exam!