Mastering the Art of Studying: How to Prepare for the CPA Exam
Kyle Ashcraft, CPA · 2019 CPA Exam Scores · 95 FAR · 98 BEC · 91 REG · 90 AUD
After teaching students for over 1,000 hours, a few study habits keep separating candidates who pass from candidates who burn out. Patience matters most: the CPA exams are a multi-month journey, and moving too fast or too slow both backfire — too fast and you feel stressed with no sense of progress, too slow and you never build momentum.
How do you build a realistic study plan?
The CPA journey isn't like studying for a single college exam, and treating it that way is the fastest way to an unrealistic timeline. Most candidates choose one of three study paths: 6 months, 12 months, or 24 months.
The 12-month path is the most common. It works out to roughly 12 hours a week — six 2-hour sessions with one rest day — and about 2 to 3 months per exam section. Study each section in 2 months and you leave room to retake one or two sections and still finish within a year. Study each section in 3 months and you've used the entire 12 months, so every section needs to pass on the first try. Don't compress this further than it needs to be — an unrealistic timeline is what makes people quit.
Why does consistency matter more than total hours?
On a bad day, it's tempting to skip studying entirely and tell yourself you'll double up tomorrow. That plan usually fails, partly because focused studying has a ceiling — most people can only think critically for so many hours before returns drop off. Treating study time as all-or-nothing means the bad days become zero days. A 30-minute session on a low-energy day keeps the habit and the retention going; skipping entirely doesn't.
How often should you review material you've already covered?
Don't move through content once and never look back. A spaced-review approach works well: after finishing section 3, go back and review section 1; after finishing section 4, review section 2; and so on, so that by the time you reach the actual exam you've seen every topic multiple times, not once. A study outline you didn't have to build from scratch — downloaded or provided, then annotated with your own notes — makes this kind of repeated review much faster.
How should you learn from practice questions?
Early in your studies, multiple-choice questions are a learning tool, not a scorecard. Working through 25 questions and actually studying every answer explanation — including why each of the three wrong options is wrong — teaches you far more than rushing through 100 questions and only checking the ones you missed. When you get a question wrong, write down why in your study outline, so the next time you hit that section you're reviewing your own specific mistakes, not just the material in general.
The first exam is always the hardest, because you haven't built momentum yet. Give yourself 2 to 3 months for it, review on a consistent schedule, and learn from every wrong answer — the process gets easier once you have a passed section behind you.
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Kyle Ashcraft, CPA scored 90 or above on every section of the CPA exam in 2019. He is the founder and sole instructor of Maxwell CPA Review, a complete CPA review course covering all six sections, where he creates every lecture, textbook and study outline himself.
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!