Top 5 Benefits of Using a CPA Exam Review Course
Kyle Ashcraft, CPA · 2019 CPA Exam Scores · 95 FAR · 98 BEC · 91 REG · 90 AUD
Studying for the CPA exams without a review course is possible, but a good course removes a lot of friction most self-guided candidates run into. Here's what a review course actually gives you.
How does a review course organize the material?
There's a huge amount of tested content across the CPA exams, and filtering out what actually matters is hard to do on your own. A review course places every key topic in one place, and any major provider builds its content around the AICPA blueprints to make sure nothing tested gets missed.
How does it keep you accountable?
Staying on track is much easier with structure than studying on your own. Courses break content into manageable sections, which makes it easy to commit to concrete daily progress — a course with 90 modules, for example, becomes a simple commitment of 3 modules a day for a month.
Why do video lectures matter?
Accounting theory is hard to absorb from a textbook alone. A good video lecture walks through the actual journal entries and source documents in a way reading often can't, which makes abstract concepts concrete.
Why do study outlines matter?
With this much tested material, review isn't optional. A study outline gives you a condensed version of everything you've learned, which makes repeated review far more efficient than re-reading full lectures or textbook chapters.
Why do official AICPA practice questions matter?
Most review courses license official AICPA practice questions — the closest thing to the real exam you can practice with. Without a review course, candidates typically don't have access to these at all.
None of these benefits are exam content itself — they're structure. A review course doesn't know the material for you, but it organizes it, paces it, and gives you real practice material, which is exactly what's hardest to build from scratch on your own.
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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.