Jay is a weekly columnist as a Club 75 Blogger, where he documents his journey through the CPA Exam. He has been a member of Club 75 since April 2010.

Week 16:

Hello all. I’m back in the swing of things at work and with my studies. I logged 24.5 hours of studying this week. I finished up all of Chapter 4 and the associated homework. I made it through leases in chapter 5 and I’m currently halfway through the bond lecture. I’m actually very comfortable doing the amortization schedules, however I barely got any questions on these topics in my past FAR experience, so hoping my next experience will be slanted to my stronger areas.

I have been really focusing on journal entries, as that has historically been my Achilles heel. Previously, I just read through the journal entries, but never really took the time to understand the j/e’s, so that I could recreate them myself. With the new exam format, I think this will be especially important.

I really think this new format is similar to an MBA course exam, where you have to be able to step through the processes to complete a question. With the past format, you could potentially muddle through a Sim without being fully competent on the subject matter, but I don’t think you’d be so lucky with 4 sims. I’m very curious on how they will mark these sims and whether they’ll mark all 4 equally, as everyone knows the rumor that only one sim used to get graded under the old exam format.

Anyway, my exam is scheduled for Friday, Feb. 25th, so I think I’m in decent shape thus far. I would like to speed up my pace a bit to get through more than a chapter per week, as it will give me a bit more time at the end to work on practice exams and cramming. I plan to hopefully do 25 hours this week, as well, possibly a bit more due to the MLK holiday. I expect to be through Chapter 5 and well into Chapter 6 by next week’s update. Best of luck to everyone.

Regards,
Jay.O