NJSCPA Exam Cram Blog

Turkey, Score Report, and a Ticking Clock.

Hi. I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and found time between their studying to enjoy family time.

Thanksgiving this year was even greater than years past as I had much more to be thankful for.  Along with family, friends, and a job where I have the opportunity to learn everyday, I was also thankful for a passing score on the BEC section of the exam.  I had taken the exam in early November, and found out the results via mail before the holiday.  The score was relieving, but I am still waiting to hear back for the FARE section, which I took in October.  It’s getting harder and harder not to check for the score multiple times everyday.  I wonder if anyone else has this problem.

I took part of the break going through my Becker audit book and marking important pages.  I take the Audit exam in January 3 weeks after taking regulation.  I want to spend that period doing as many questions as possible.  (For the previous sections, I spent way too much time trying to memorize the material rather than applying it with questions, and it didn’t help any in easing the stress going into the testing centers.)

Right now, with Regulations about a month away, I am beginning with the Wiley CPA Examination Review book, which is broken into 17 modules.  Even though I took the Becker course, its so much harder to go from the book to the labtop on a train.  For the FARE and BEC sections, I always completed the whole lecture and answered the questions afterwards using the book as a source.  This was entirely inefficient, and it felt as if I remembered more material as I worked the questions immediately after reading the book.  I’m hoping to work these short modules quickly, and immediately reinforce what I learn by doing questions.

With Thanksgiving now over, the real work is going to begin.  I hope to check back in with good news about my previous test section and progress towards the next one.

Good luck with your studying.

- Kunal

Beginning anew… Kind of.

Hi, my name is Kunal Mistry, and I am a Tax Consultant at Deloitte.  I graduated in May, 2008 and started at Deloitte the following September.  Since starting work, I’ve been busy on Client assignments, and have been studying at night.

Since graduating from Rutgers University,  I’ve been studying and preparing for the CPA examination on and off.  I have taken two parts prior to beginning this blog, FARE and BEC, and am anxiously awaiting the results. 

I will be taking Regulation and Audit in January.   Since I’ve scheduled my Audit exam only 3 weeks after my Regulation exam on the 3^rd of January, I want to be able to reduce the amount of reading that I will do in January.  My goal for the upcoming week is go through my Audit study materials, and highlight the important information.  I’ve always been able to remember information better when it is in outline format, so I plan on noting important page numbers on the content specific outline.  Plus, everyone that has taken the test has told me to work on as many questions as possible.  By doing the reading and highlighting now, I hope to review the material again by working through questions and problems.

Well, I’m at the beginning of another work week, and I hope to come back to you later this week with some progress.  The amount of material to review for the exam seems daunting, but I hope diligent work and trying to understand the bigger picture will help me on this exam.

I hope that you can gain insight and learn from my experiences and mistakes.  I’ll see you later this week.

-Kunal

How much more can I procrastinate studying?

So this past week I know a lot of scores came out for October exams. Hope a lot of you passed!!!  I'm still waiting on my score for regulation which is SOOO frustrating since I know at least one person got their score last week and I haven't gotten mine.  As a result, studying for audit tomorrow is NOT going well as I keep checking my score every 5 minutes. Even tried calling NASBA but to no avail.  Let me know how you all did and when I finally get my score I'll update my blog.  I know a lot of people are squeezing exams in right now so to those of you who are taking one this week too GOOD LUCK!!!!

And HAPPY THANKSGIVING!! :)   Can't wait to eat lots of turkey and pie and see my family. Makes it even harder to focus on audit when you have that a mere two days later. I couldn't imagine scheduling my exam for the day after or two days after Thanksgiving. So to those brave souls of you who did, good luck, I'll think really smart thoughts for you!

I PASSED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

EXCUSE ME FOR TYPING IN ALL CAPS - BUT I PASSED!!!!! I PASSED I PASSED I PASSED!! MY LAST EXAM!!!!!!!!!

Phew, OMG. I passed. I passed. I passed. OMG.

If anyone were to compare the feeling of getting the first past score back versus getting the last passing score back - getting the last one back is DEFINITELY better.

I'm still in shock. OMG. I got an 89!! A freaking 89!! Take that Auditing exam!!! Haha...I showed you!

OK, so I'm pretty much delirious right now. It feels SO good to know it's all done.

 

My only complaint is that I wish I would have checked it at work instead. My running around and screaming would of been appreciated much more by my coworkers than it is by my dog now that I'm at home. Although, the look he's giving me is pretty much similar to the one I'd expect to get at work too. OMG, I PASSED!!

If only the exam were as easy as one in college

How many of you have had this problem. You have the exam coming up in the next few weeks or in a month and your friends, those not studying for the exam, try to get you to come out and when you say you have to stay home and study they say 'oh its just one night, come on!' This has been a problem for me since the start. I have a lot of different friends trying to get me to do one thing or another and use the excuse of 'oh its just one night', or oh you have to eat sometime, (a 3 hour dinner out vs. a 30 min dinner at home are very different). When you do want to take a study break how do you choose who to see and what activities to participate in? I personally find that too often I try to make everyone happy and then lose out by not getting the studying in. If only it were like college where here and there if you needed to pull an all nighter for an exam you could get away with that. I want to see someone pull an all nighter on one of these exams and pass.

In a previous blog Priscilla had mentioned the NJSCPA Facebook group (if you're not a member JOIN!). Currently they're running a contest of taking a picture with their logo (or doing something really fun with the logo). The winner gets a $100 gift card and who can't use $100 just before the holiday season!?! With all my studying, my creative juices aren't flowing right now but I'm trying to think of something really fun and exciting to do. The deadline is December 1st. See in a future blog what I come up with and try to think of your own fun way to play with the logo, even if it's just you out with a bunch of coworkers having a good time, prove that accountants DO have fun! Studying is going slow for me at the moment.

I have just over a week til I take audit and I've lost the focus on it and am getting to the point where I just want to be DONE with it. Still waiting for my score for REG. Has anyone received their score for exams taken in October?? Let me know how you do, hopefully I hear about a lot of passing scores! Good luck to anyone taking an exam in the next week or so like me!

Is the NASBA website down today?

So as usual, I began my day at work by checking my e-mail and (equally important obviously) checking the NASBA site for my score. I cannot wait for the day I can come in and no longer ever wonder if I passed.

Well anyway, the NASBA site wasn't coming up. I tried again later in the day, same error message. I just figured it was the Merrill network. Now that I'm home, the NASBA site still isn't working! What if my scores are posted and I'm sitting here with no idea??

OK, so it's not that big of a calamity...but enough of one to aggravate me. In other news, I have TONS of good work stories for later if you're interested and I still have to tell you how the Audit exam went - can you forgive me for being slow? :-(

I can't wait to get a life again

I'll be honest from the start; I've never blogged before so hopefully I don't bore you all with my experiences. I've read Priscilla and Scott's blogs before and really enjoyed reading them since it's someone else to commiserate with about the misery of this exam.  I'm actually on round two of taking the exam, passing only BEC on round one.   I decided last summer that it was a good idea to try and take the exam before I started work. Thinking that my grad assistantship and 3 grad classes a semester would leave PLENTY of time to study, I was wrong.  The hours for my assistantship often ran longer than I was scheduled and funny thing about the whole class thing, when I wasn't doing homework the thought of sitting down with my CPA book made me want to stick a pencil in my eye. 

 

REG was my first exam for round one and my first for round two.  I actually read the exam cram blog before, and my first time I read it Scott mentioned the Lawrenceville testing location that had burned down. I actually commented on it because the day of my exam I went to that center only to find out it had burned down and the woman working there simply said "they didn’t call you??" of course they hadn’t called me, if they had I wouldn't have shown up to take my exam.  Although I was able to reschedule it for two days later in Toms River, the damage was done, the mental preparation I had done for the exam was replaced with stress and my new test time was 8 am and well, that early the caffeine hasn't set in for me yet.  I only failed that one by TWO points. Which begs the question, and I'm curious what you all think, which is worse: Failing by a lot or failing by just a few points??  I'm still undecided on that one.

The other two exams failed were simply me not preparing enough, no horror stories about those testing centers. So here I am, I just retook REG first week of October and anxiously await my scores. I got to the center earlier than my scheduled time just to be done with the exam only to find out that there were no open desks, so was placed in the special accommodations room. For any of you who have been to the Clark location it's that little room that you see through the window behind the proctor's desk that sometimes has a single person in.  Yea, not good for me, I don't know if other people have been in there or have had problems, but I wasn't a fan. Every noise from outside was heard and echoed. Hopefully I did better than I felt I did despite the noise.  Someone told me that it was pretty loud in the testing room that day too. We'll see if I pass. I hate that feeling that you just gave your life up for months to study and you leave the exam feeling like it was all for nothing. 

 

 At the moment I'm studying to take Audit. I'm taking it a couple days before Thanksgiving.  Thankfully work is slow at the moment since tax season is done and all the Q3 stuff is done so I've had some time to study at work. Well, where I COULD be studying, but as I write this blog, I recognize that this is just another way to procrastinate studying while I'm at work. I've gotten good at finding other things to do and figuring out a way to justify it as not procrastinating, much like Priscilla's newfound love for photography.   After working on passing this exam for over a year I just want to be DONE with it.  I forget what life is like without having to go home and study every night. I can't wait to leave work and go home and relax rather than go to the library to study.

Ideally I'll be done with it mid-January when I retake FAR but that all depends on me actually passing these sections as I retake them.