study tips the final cpa exam?

[ryanj247]

hopefully this is the right place for this...

a friend has passed 3 of the 4 exams, and is scheduled to take the 4th and final exam on friday. apparently the 4th exam covers a lot of material, including a huge volume of formulas and what not. he's been using a software package he bought to help him study, but is having trouble getting such a large volume of material memorized.

anyone who has passed the exam have any tips/suggestions i can pass along to him on how to best spend the next 2 days cramming for this exam?

[Big TR]

I passed the whole test on my first shot in 1999 before the computerized tests. Back in the day there was a rough breakdown on the topics covered on each part of the exam.

I pretty much did a cost/benefit analysis on the sections covered. If there was a topic which was 3 pages of material that typically had 1 question, I punted that topic. I passed all the sections with lots of room to spare.

[broiler]

It really depends on what section he has left to pass. A good trick is to see if he knows anyone that has taken that section in this testing window. Our staff in the office have found a frequent similarity in the major topics covered on a section in the same testing window, ie the tax questions a few months ago had an unusually high focus on AMT. The questions might even be the same because some of the areas just don't have a large database of questions when the importance gets turned up.

TR has the right idea that he should only focus on the major topics. There is no reason to focus on the smaller topics. If he gets a really obscure section, he would have been wasting time by studying all of the obscure areas to know the answers to a small subset of questions. The only possible downfall to this strategy is that the random question generator may cause you to get a bunch of obscure questions and you just have to live with that as a possibility.