Knowing how to increase CPA exam scores is crucial for improving your chances of passing your CPA exams. In this episode, you’ll learn 3 separate ways to increase your CPA exam scores by 5-10 points or more.
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Episode Timestamps
- 00:00 3 Ways to Add 10+ Points on Your CPA Exam Scores
- 01:11 Making Flashcards for Topics You Struggle With
- 02:24 Take Your Time-wasters and Turn Them Into Extra Study Time
- 06:24 Mega Cram Session + Test On a Monday
- 10:18 Recap
So in this video, I’m going to give you three ways that you can add 10 plus points to your score. And each of these strategies can each be worth 10 points all by themselves.
Now, when you think about the fact that the average failing score is somewhere between a 65 and a 74 then adding 10 points to each section is a huge deal.
3 Ways to Increase CPA Exam Scores
Knowing how to increase CPA exam scores by 5-10 points or more adds a lot of insurance that you actually get a passing score.
So the first strategy is to take your personal problem areas, topics, or ideas, or concepts or formulas, journal entries, whatever it is. Any piece of information that you struggle to either understand for whatever reason or you just struggled to remember it, you take those and you explain it back to your self out loud.
The explaining it back to yourself is crucial, but also it’s crucial that you do it out loud. You sit there and you explain things back to yourself until you understand them in your own words.
Making Flashcards for Topics You Struggle With
And at that point part three of the strategy is to write down the explanation that you came up with that makes sense to you in your own words, you write that down in a flashcard for yourself.
Now, some people really like to make the physical flashcards and the standard flashcard that you’ve used probably in elementary school. But what I would recommend is that you do it on a digital flashcard service, something like Quizlet or BrainScape. That way you can keep a tab open as you have your review course open as you sit there and study.
And when you come to one of these weak areas of yours, you can just quickly go to that tab where the flashcard software is open. Write yourself a flashcard in your own words and later you, those automatically sync with the app. And so you have your personal areas that you struggle with written in explanations that you’ve come up with in your own words.
And it’s the perfect study tool to use on the go. Whenever you have a few minutes or at night, it’s a very light, easy that doesn’t take a lot of brainpower to review your own flashcards at night. And then according to some of our other strategies, you would use these flashcards that you’ve written very heavily in the last few days before an exam.
Take Your Time-wasters and Turn Them Into Extra Study Time
All right. So moving onto the second strategy. That is to take your favorite time-wasters and turn them into extra study time. So what do I mean by this? Well, let’s use a social media is kind of the main culprit. The big thing and if you’ve seen any of our other videos or podcasts, you hear me talk about this all the time.
You want to take all these little gaps that you basically waste time on your phone. We all have phones. We carry them around all day. And the screen time reports that you get every week that tells you no matter how busy you are, you somehow found two to four hours a day, maybe even more to stare at your phone.
And typically you don’t do that all in one all in one time during your day. That typically happens by looking at your phone a hundred times a day in these little two to five to 10 minute chunks. And so the idea is simply, you know, ideally you’re doing a main study session at some point during the day, you can see our other videos for our recommendations on how to do that.
But ideally you’re doing your main studying every day, right? The idea with this is to simply add in a ton of extra study time per section by trading in your favorite time-wasters like Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, music and podcasts. You know, podcasts, if they’re educational, aren’t necessarily a waste of time, but for our purposes, you know, if you are really wanting to get laser-focused and pass your CPA exams in a few months, instead of a year or more, you trade all your media time and use it to get an extra CPA study.
So when you’re driving in your car, when you’re working out, when you’re doing your favorite, uh, activities like mountain biking on the weekends, whatever it is, you listen to audio notes all the time as you go about your normal day, whenever you would normally just open your phone for a few minutes and scroll through Instagram or again, whatever your favorite time-wasting apps are.
You trade that in for taking quizes or reading review notes on our app. Now, when you make this a habit and you do this consistently, and again, you can hear this on interview after interview on our podcast interviews with some of our previous customers. When you do this consistently, this helps you add in an extra again, assuming you’re doing your main study session at some other point during the day with your main review course.
This strategy, as long as you’re consistent, helps you add in an extra two, three, maybe even four hours a day of study time. Now, if you’re studying for six to eight weeks, you know, that’s 42 to 56 days, 40 to 60 days of studying. You take three hours, times 40 extra days. That is an extra 120 hours of study time above and beyond your main study sessions, which goes a long ways to increase CPA exam scores.
So an extra 80 to a hundred to 120 hours of study time, that is obviously going to have a huge effect on your retention, your deep, the level of understanding you have among the topics and how they relate to each other, you will be much more likely to perform well on test day.
I mean, obviously , your main study sessions, whatever that adds up to, you add on an extra hundred hours of study time onto that, you’re obviously going to increase CPA exam scores. So this idea is self evident when I explain it like that because it’s just a simple way, it’s doing something you’re already doing. Messing around on your phone for a few months.
You switch out time-wasters for actual CPA study using study tools on your phone. Ideally, our SuperfastCPA study tools because they’re designed for this exact purpose and you will score much higher anecdotally. From hundreds of emails I’ve received from our customers through the years, typically the average CPA candidate that adds just this one strategy adds in our study tools to what they’re already doing and this idea of mini sessions, they typically increase CPA exam scores by 10-20 points.
Mega Cram Session + Test On a Monday
So moving on to strategy number three, and that is to schedule your test on a Monday, and then you have what I can only call a mega cram session on Saturday and Sunday before your exam on the Monday. Now, again, this strategy, if you’ve been inconsistent and you haven’t studied consistently every day up until this point,
this strategy isn’t going to save your score on its own. Again, the idea is that assuming you’re consistent throughout the study process, adding on this strategy, the last two days before an exam can definitely make a 10 plus point difference to how you perform on test day. So what do you do on this mega cram session?
Well, the worst thing that you can do and this is what a lot of people use their final review for, they go back to their weak areas and they try to go really deep on these individual lessons. You have to remember, let’s use FAR as an example, you are going to be tested on 200 to 240 topics roughly or at least there’s that many topics that could appear on the exam.
And so by far, the best use of your time in these last few days is to just do exactly what you’re going to be doing on test day. So sets of 30 multiple choice questions over and over and over. And as you review those sets of 30 reviewing your answers after the fact, when you see things that again, you keep forgetting, or you just struggle to remember how a formulation has done or whatever you take the time to keep making those flashcards where you stop.
You explain the explanation back to yourself, put it into your own words and keep making those flashcards. That’s all part of this 48 hour process. So to give you specifics, what we teach our clients to do is two sets of 30 multiple choice questions, and then one set of five to seven practice SIMS. So this is like a mini version of a full practice exam but it doesn’t have that added stress of sitting through an entire four hour full mock exam and not seeing any of your answers until clear after the fact.
You want to do the 30 questions, see the answers, review them, make flashcards as needed, do another set of 30 and so on. Same thing with the simulations. The other thing that we teach our clients to do in this mega cram session is to try and read our review notes for whatever section you’re studying for.
You try to read our review notes all the way through three times in these last two days. So Saturday, read them all the way through. And again, this is a less mentally intense thing to do. So spend the morning doing these sets of 30 and practice SIMS then as somewhat of a break. Spend an hour, two hours reading through our review notes all the way through.
So you’d do that Saturday, Sunday, and then the morning of the exam for a total of three times. And then in the evenings and at night as you’re falling asleep, you review all the flashcards that you’ve made throughout the study process. You get through those decks over and over and over and over. So going back to the flashcards for a minute, as long as you’ve been consistent with doing that, making the flashcards, you have
all of your weak areas contained in these little flashcards but because you took the time to explain it to the point where it clicked for you, at least when you originally did it, that we’ll come back to you much easier. And as you review these flashcards in these last two days, you will go into the testing center and I guarantee you, you will see at least five to 10 specific things from your own flashcards that you’ve made.
And again, Five to 10 questions throughout the real exam on test day, that can easily be the difference between a failing score and a passing score.
Recap
So to recap, the three strategies that each alone can be worth 10 points or more to your score on test day is first, making flashcards for topics that you struggle with but in your own words and then obviously reviewing them along the way.
The second thing is to employ your phone to rack up extra study time all throughout your day, doing things that you already do. You already waste time in two to five minute chunks, looking at social media apps, switch that out for reading review notes and taking quizzes on the app. You already listened to music whenever you’re in your car for a few months to get these exams over with sooner,
switch that out for listening to audio notes over and over and over. And then the third one is to schedule your test on a Monday so that you can have a mega cram session where you do sets of 30 and practice Sims and keep making flashcards for things you keep missing. You read our review notes several times through these last two days.
And you keep reviewing your own flashcards that you’ve made along the way. Adding in those three things again, assuming that you are consistent and diligent with your main study sessions all the way through dramatically increases the chances of you getting a passing score on exam day. So if you found these ideas helpful, you will really find our free study trainings incredibly helpful, because we give you strategy after strategy
like this but how to apply it to your main review course, how to have two hour main study sessions that in those two hours, you will get more done than someone studying four to six hours. The normal way you can sign up for one of those that our main site at superfastcpa.com or if you’re watching this on YouTube, there should be a link down in the description.
So thanks for watching and we’ll see on the next episode.
