In this SuperfastCPA podcast episode, we cover the 5 most critical CPA exam study strategies that need to be part of your process so that you get the best results from your study time.
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Episode Timestamps
- 00:00 Intro
- 00:56 Strategy 1
- 07:13 Strategy #2
- 10:36 Strategy #3
- 20:11 Strategy # 4
- 25:36 Strategy #5
Episode Transcript
Nate: [00:00:00] In this video, we’re going to go over the five most critical study strategies that need to be part of your CPA study process, assuming that you want to give yourself the best chances of passing on the first try, you want to avoid failing sections, and you want to make the overall process very manageable instead of a all consuming nightmare that takes over your life.
Nate: I’m not exaggerating when I say that all five of these strategies, each one of these strategies, is so important that when you combine all five, when all five of these are part of your daily and weekly study process, it is honestly hard to go wrong. On the other hand, just missing one of these can derail everything else that you’re doing in your study process.
That’s why I say that all five of these are critical and need to be part of your process in order to give yourself the best chances of passing on exam day.
Strategy 1
Nate: So this first strategy is related to what is [00:01:00] easily the biggest misconception about CPA study in general.
And that misconception is the idea that there is this arbitrary number of hours that you just need to spend studying, which will magically give you the ability to then go in and pass the exams.
So you hear this all the time, and even the review courses will state a specified number of hours recommended to study in order to pass any given section. Now, of course, it’s true that it’s going to take a certain amount of time studying for you to pass. I’m not saying that there’s some magical trick to study 10 hours total and be able to pass FAR.
That is obviously not the case. Really, what I’m talking about is the flip side to that, where you can have someone who’s dedicated, they’re studying each day, they’ve cut out friends and family for the most part, their favorite hobbies for six months, and they still just keep going in and failing the exams. They might hit 200 hours, 400 hours, 500 hours for one [00:02:00] section, and still be failing the exams.
So, the strategy is having a strategic and formulaic process for moving through and learning each topic in your review course.
Now that again might sound obvious, but let me point out that watching the video lecture, reading the chapter, and then fumbling through the practice questions, that is not a strategy, right? That’s not a formulaic and strategic approach to making sure you’re understanding and learning each topic in test day context.
So this test day context versus textbook context, this is a really important idea to understand. So when I say textbook context, what I mean is how a video lecture is presented or how you would read a textbook. You’re learning a topic conceptually, point by point, and all the information is there in this logical, you know, step by step format, [00:03:00] basically.
Now, the problem is, that takes a lot of time to watch the video lecture, restart it a few times because you’ve zoned out or you didn’t understand something, and then read the chapter and do the same thing. That might take you two to three hours, depending on the topic, to just get those two things done and feel like you understood what you read and watched in the video.
But even then, you go to the practice questions, and if you’re lucky, maybe half of them sort of make sense, but half of the questions you still have no idea how to answer, especially the most difficult ones.
And that just illustrates the difference between textbook context and how that is presented versus how that topic appears in question format or simulation format.
Now, of course, the only context of those two that actually matters for our purposes of passing on test day, is question and simulation format, or in other words, that’s what I’m always referring to as “test day [00:04:00] context.”
So the way that you approach any given lesson for the first time in your review course needs to be strategic and formulaic and through the lens of that test day context.
So the way that we teach our users to do this is basically by jumping straight into the practice questions for a topic, because of what I just explained. You can spend two to three hours watching the video, reading the chapter, and still have to struggle through the process of understanding the questions one by one.
So for most lessons, you skip that two to three hours of confusing yourself, you jump straight into the questions, and of course, the first five or 10 questions, you’re not going to have any idea of how to answer them, but you just work on a question by question basis. You strategically submit the question, make sense of, reverse engineer the solution.
And as you get through the first five or 10 questions, you’ll start to be able [00:05:00] to know enough from those first five to 10 questions, to start getting, you know, questions 11 through 15 either correct on your own, or, you know, you start to have an idea. Each question is just a building block, the bottom line is you’re learning the topic directly in test day context.
Now, of course, there’s more that goes into this, and a big part of our PRO course is walking through a ton of questions on screen and, us basically thinking out loud, so to speak, to kind of show you the nuances of how to do this. This is like anything else.
There’s more to it than just saying, answer the questions first. There’s a strategic way of doing that. So strategically breaking down, dissecting, reverse engineering, the questions and simulations for each lesson, you save yourself a ton of time in the process. So the practice questions are by far the most valuable tool in your [00:06:00] review course. They are the best learning tool, but they’re also just a direct reflection of test day context and how this topic is going to appear in questions. Do you understand how those questions work? Can you successfully execute the steps on your own? Do you understand the what and why behind this question type for this topic and this question type for this topic? It’s the best way to spend the majority of your study time.
So strategy number one is having a strategic and formulaic approach to learning each topic in test day context. So if you want a deeper dive on that for free, then attend one of our free study training webinars where we go through more or less these five strategies, but more of the how to behind them and how to do that, how to strategically walk through questions, reverse engineer them, you know, make sense of the solution, repeat the steps.
So the link to that training will be down in the description [00:07:00] of this video or the podcast episode. And then for actual breakdowns of a bunch of problems on the nuances of how to do this. That is what is in our PRO course.
All right, so let’s move on to strategy number two.
Strategy #2
Nate: So strategy number two, this will be the most obvious CPA study tip that you have never heard.
As soon as I point this out, you’re going to think, I can’t believe I’ve never heard that before, or I can’t believe I’ve never thought of that before.
So I’ve gotten countless emails over the years or multiple people that were on our podcast interviews, that said that this single strategy completely turned around their study process. And as soon as they heard me say it on the free webinar, they instantly understood what I meant and why it was such a big missing piece from their study process.
So to set the stage for this strategy, let’s walk through how the traditional study approach works. So under the traditional approach, you have the lessons in your review course, you walk through, you work on each lesson one by [00:08:00] one over a six to eight weeks, more or less, and then you do a two week final review.
So the big problem with that format, even assuming that you’re studying every day religiously, like you should be, is that every day, you’re covering a new topic that’s very dense, technical, over the course of weeks, you’re covering dozens and dozens of these topics. So on a daily basis, to a certain degree, you’re kind of like recording over your short term memory.
Basically, by the time you get to the end of that six to eight weeks and you start your final review, you realize, or most people realize, they’ve forgotten a huge portion of all this stuff they spent so much time trying to learn in the first place. So the final review becomes this frantic attempt to relearn everything.
And of course that doesn’t work very well.
Now, also if you do the math on that, that means that you’re covering each topic a grand total of twice basically. Once as you work through each lesson and then [00:09:00] once again in your final review.
So this strategy number two that is so critical and helpful is what I just refer to as re-review. You spend a portion of your study time each day constantly re hitting all the topics that you’ve previously covered up to that point. So if today you finish chapter 5, you would do a re-review session from chapters 1 through 5.
If tomorrow you do chapter 6, then your re-review session is chapters one through six. So there’s a specific way that we teach our clients and customers to do that, and that’s covered again in the free webinar or more in depth in the PRO course.
And then as to why this works so much better, that should be painfully obvious. You are constantly hitting all the topics you’ve previously covered. So instead of slowly forgetting all the things that you’ve covered in the last four to six weeks, you are continually improving on everything you’ve covered the last four to [00:10:00] six weeks.
So when you’re doing this correctly, every topic is fresh in your mind at all times leading up to test day.
It also means that instead of just covering each topic twice, by the time you get to test day, you have seen and practiced and hit every topic dozens and dozens of times, instead of just twice. So this can only logically work better to give you a practical or functional command of each topic as to how they actually work in the questions and simulations that you’re going to see on exam day.
And this also ties into strategy number three.
Strategy #3
Nate: So strategy number three, this is already something that you do on a daily basis multiple times. And by making just one tweak, this solves the three worst parts of the CPA study process in general.
So, before we reveal the strategy, what are the three worst parts of the study process? Well the three worst parts of the CPA study process are, 1. [00:11:00] How much time this is actually going to take from your life, or at least from the things that you like doing to study, get through all the material and pass these four exams. So, the time required.
So the second thing, because these exams require so much time It means that it makes your life fairly miserable for the months or, God forbid, years that it takes you to pass these exams.
And then the third worst part of the CPA study process is of course, failing exams. There is nothing more deflating than thinking you invested hundreds of hours or weeks or months of your life studying for one exam, waiting a few weeks, and getting a failing score, and realizing that you have to do that whole process over again on the same exam.
Or even worse, if you failed the same exam multiple times and then you start to have an identity crisis of, you know, I always did good in college, never had problems with college exams. Why can I [00:12:00] not pass these exams? Okay. So I said that this strategy is something that you already do in a sense, and that this will solve the three worst parts of the CPA study process. So this strategy is simply using mobile friendly study tools from your phone in all the gaps throughout your day.
So to put this simply, whenever you would normally listen to music or podcasts, so that would be whenever you’re in your car, when you’re getting ready in the morning, you’re doing stuff around the house with headphones on, you’re walking the dog, maybe even when you’re at the gym, that was something that I could never actually do.
But there’s all these other times throughout the day that you’re probably playing music or listening to podcasts. So for a few months to get these exams over with, you replace that or at least 80 to 90 percent of the time with audio notes. Whatever section you’re studying for, you just work your way through the audio notes over and over and over.
So the best analogy for that is, [00:13:00] you know, like popular songs that you hear just in restaurants or public transportation or walking through the mall or whatever, you know, the popular songs at any given time, you essentially commit to memory without even realizing it because you just, you hear it in these random pieces, you know, dozens and dozens of times and you like commit it to memory.
So the audio notes are extremely effective for that purpose, and of course the benefit of audio is you can be using it in all these times where you’re doing other things throughout the day.
So then the second thing, you replace your favorite time wasters, whether that’s reading about sports on your phone or scrolling social media, you replace 80 to 90 percent of that time with reading review notes and taking mini quizzes on your phone.
Okay, so why is this so effective? So this strategy, the complaints that we hear sometimes are usually some version of two things. One is that that [00:14:00] just sounds like it would suck, you know, my one escape from work and CPA study throughout this process is, you know, listening to music or just using social media throughout my day or when I’m trying to fall asleep at night. And so you’re saying I’ve got to fill up all that time with CPA study as well.
The second thing is just dismissing the idea that studying from your phone is actually worthwhile. That people just assume that that can’t be that effective or not as effective as sitting in front of my full review course. So why would I do that?
So I have several answers to those two concerns and it’s a combination of answering both concerns at the same time. So first of all, when I was studying I realized, so I was working in public accounting, trying to study, you know, after work, before work, just what everyone does. And throughout the day, I would just read on ESPN from my phone.
Like when I walked down the hallway at [00:15:00] work, uh, the last 20 minutes of my lunch break, in line at the grocery store, you know, whatever. And each day this dawned on me within a few weeks of, working in public accounting that I was like reading the entirety of ESPN’s website throughout the course of the day.
And it clicked like, okay, I’m trying to fit in all this study time sitting in front of my review course. Why wouldn’t I just try to get some study tools I can use on my phone throughout the day? And so I did that. I didn’t even know at the time, but there are a few advanced learning concepts out there that there’s a bunch of research on called spaced repetition and or retrieval practice. And these are proven to be much more effective for long term retention than one long study session, all done at one time in a day. And so the idea with spaced repetition or retrieval practice, is exactly what it sounds like. And it’s just studying in these small [00:16:00] three, five, 10 minute chunks, multiple times a day versus one huge study session.
You’ve probably experienced if you’ve done a four or five hour study session that at a certain point, you know, there’s the idea of diminishing returns. You’ve just got so much stuff floating around in your short term memory that it’s just, it like turns to jello and you can’t really think or stay effective anymore or make sense of any more concepts for that day.
So that is part of why a shorter main study session following the study strategies you would learn from either our webinar or our PRO course. So, a shorter main study session combined with, we call these mini sessions, throughout the day it’s fairly easy once you make this a habit to rack up an extra two, three, or even four hours, especially if you include audio.
So an extra three to four hours on top of your main study session. So by the time you’re done with work, you have put in four, [00:17:00] five, six high quality study hours and you’re done studying by the time you’re done with work for the day. So that of course means that you keep your evenings free. So you have a much better life, study work balance than if you’re working all day, then going home and trying to study for four to five dedicated hours all at once in the evenings.
The other thing about studying from your phone is that this is just another version of re-review. So as you work through, let’s say our review notes, and then simultaneously our audio notes. And then our quizzes are just five questions pulled from the entire section. So as you use those three study tools differently throughout your day, you are constantly grinding through the most tested parts of each topic over and over and over and over again. Versus again the traditional approach where you just work through each lesson one by one and then do a final review.
That way you’re covering each topic twice. This way you’re covering each [00:18:00] topic dozens and dozens and dozens, if not a hundred times or more, which will only logically work better. I mean, that’s like indisputable. If you’ve hit every topic 50 to 100 times versus twice, you’re going to have a much deeper functional understanding of those topics.
And you’ve done it all, if you’re following our strategies or study approach, you’ve spent 80 to 90 percent of that time doing it in test day context. So that’s why I say when you’re doing all these strategies as part of your daily and weekly study routine, it’s honestly hard to go wrong.
And then to address the concern of, well, that just sounds like it sucks and I don’t want to do that, I would just say, well, your life while you’re trying to pass these exams kind of sucks anyways, if you’re trying to work and then study all night. And you’ve completed two college degrees or roughly the equivalent, spent thousands of hours and [00:19:00] dollars just to take these exams.
So when you look at it like that, why would you not give yourself every possible chance or every possible advantage of passing on your first time on each exam?
And these mini sessions, I think it just makes logical sense that when you’re running these different concepts across your brain multiple times a day in small chunks, it is just much more effective, or it’s at least easy to understand why that’s so much more effective than trying to do these long study sessions all at once, especially at night when you’re tired.
You know, you’re tired from work. You’re fighting off distractions, people wanting to hang out or just the people in your house. I mean, especially if you have kids, the nighttime is just a nightmare to try and study effectively and efficiently. And it’s hard to be consistent. This format of a shorter main session done in the morning, studying from your phone throughout the day, is so much easier to fit into your life on a consistent basis.
[00:20:00] And it works better, and it gives you your evenings back so that your life is much more enjoyable in general as you go through this process.
All right, moving on to strategy number four.
Strategy # 4
Nate: So this strategy is by far the easiest and most effective way to master the topics that you personally find the most difficult.
This also brings in a huge aspect of efficiency into your process, meaning when you go through and there are a certain amount of topics that you find really difficult, you either have to spend more time on those, but even when you do that, again, over the course of six to eight weeks, it’s easy to forget a lot of that stuff.
This process prevents you from having to do that and guarantees, as long as you do both parts of this process. It guarantees that you don’t forget those things that you spent extra time on, and you actually improve on those topics the closer you get to test day.
So this [00:21:00] strategy is making flashcards in your own words for topics or question types that you repeatedly miss as you do your re-review sets.
So again, for a more in depth explanation of this strategy, you could watch one of our free webinars or it’s explained in detail with some example videos in our PRO course. But the idea is when you are doing your re-review sets, you know again going up to strategy number two where you’re dedicating a portion of your study session to re-hitting all the topics you’ve already covered, as you’re practicing questions from those topics when you miss a question type for the third or fourth time,
that’s when you stop, you really make sense of that solution, re-perform it. You explain it out loud to yourself until it clicks. So the key, that’s the key here. You’re going to explain it back to yourself and rework that question as many times as it takes right then and [00:22:00] there until it clicks for you.
That doesn’t mean you master the entire topic, just that question type. And then you take that explanation that you can coherently explain back to yourself out loud, and it actually makes sense, and you make yourself a flashcard. You can either do that on physical paper flashcards, but I think it’s highly preferable to use something like BrainScape or Quizlet to where you just do that in another tab in your browser when you’re in your study session, and then the app for, you know, the Brainscape app, you just have all your flashcards you’ve made with you on your phone at all times. And then you start mixing your own flashcards that you’ve made into your mini sessions throughout the day.
So you have taken a question type or essentially a little subtopic or part of a topic in question format that you’ve repeatedly missed questions on. You sit there and re-perform it and explain it out loud until it finally actually [00:23:00] clicks. You make a flashcard on that, and it might involve steps, it might involve a example calculation.
Your own flashcards should be very personal to you. Like whatever makes you finally grasp whatever it was that wasn’t clicking before about that question type, you capture that understanding. So you’ll hear us say that in our PRO course a lot. You “capture the understanding,” then you have it in your own words in an explanation that makes sense.
And then as you review your own flashcards over the weeks leading up to your exam, you will be committing that explanation or series of steps or formula or whatever. You’ll be committing that to memory, again, in an explanation that makes sense to you, so by the time you get to test day, you’ve taken this thing that you were repeatedly struggling with, and you’ve turned it into a strength.
Now I do want to say, because I constantly almost debate some of our users on this point, flashcards are vastly superior to normal [00:24:00] notes. And here’s why, normal notes, what most people say is, well, the act of writing it out just really helps me understand it. Okay, I agree with that. That same thing happens when you make yourself flashcards.
The big differentiator or the big difference is forced recall. So when you’ve taken a bunch of notes in a notebook and then you’re going to review your notes, you know, the last few days before the exam or the night before or whatever, you’re just reading your notes back. And you know, some of it will come back to your mind because you, you know, you did take the time to write it out, but everything’s just laid out in front of you, you know, in paragraph format, you’re not forcing your brain to recall anything.
So the forced recall element of flashcards is what makes them so much more effective than normal notes or traditional notes. So I would highly recommend you adopt this practice, flashcards versus regular notes. Or even you [00:25:00] might, you know, you might take normal notes still when you are going through topics for the first time and just, you know, jotting down key points or key takeaways from each question as you go.
But it’s this process of, okay, in my re-review sets, I’ve missed this question on dollar value LIFO like four times. Just cannot remember how the calculation works or the steps. That’s where you stop, make a flashcard. So you’re really only making flashcards on the things that you have personally struggled to remember, that you keep stumbling over.
Okay, so moving on to strategy number five.
Strategy #5
Nate: So this strategy turns the CPA study process in general from a all consuming nightmare that takes over, and some would say even ruins your life for months or even years, into a very manageable process, a very manageable part of your day that you are fully in control of, and it fits into your daily life.
So we’ve already alluded to this in [00:26:00] the earlier strategies, but we could frame this with the question, would you rather have to sit in front of your review course for five hours a day or two hours a day? Especially if the two hour version was working just as well or even better than the five hours a day.
Obviously everyone would take the two hours a day.
So the main thing that you’ll learn from our PRO course or even our free webinar is our daily format of study, which is ideally you do the two hour main session in the morning before work, and then you do the mini sessions from your phone throughout the day. And as we discussed earlier, that gives you four, five, maybe even six hours of very high quality study time. Two hours of dedicated study time required.
Now, if you’re trying to do all your studying in one big study session a day, meaning four or five hours, that will require that you do it at night because no one’s going to wake up at two in the [00:27:00] morning and study from, you know, two to 7am and then go to work.
So by definition, if you’re trying to study four or five hours a day, Your only option is to do that at night after work. So then your life is purely go to work, come home and study, until later than you want to, go to bed, wake up earlier than you want to, and do it all again for months. It’s probably not working that well because studying in the evening is for most people, very ineffective.
When you are trying to study four to five hours at night, you’re either sacrificing all your hobbies or friends and family, just anything you would normally do that you want to do. You’re either sacrificing all that. or you’re sacrificing consistency. You know, if you’re going to still do the stuff you want to do, well, then you’re probably only going to fit in two or three nights a week of study time.
Now, as a side note, you really need to be studying on a daily basis because you get, you just get good at this whole [00:28:00] study process. There’s a lot of nuances to the process itself. I mean, most people don’t think of this consciously because why would they, but you’re not just trying to learn the material.
You are trying to create this strategic study process that is formulaic. So no matter how easy or difficult a given lesson is, you approach it the same way. And for a lesson that’s a little bit more difficult, you know, you might have an extra series of steps that you do according to your own process.
So what I’m getting at here is, when you are inconsistent with your studying and you’re only studying a few days a week versus every day, it’s very, very hard to ever have breakthroughs in the efficiency of your own process and how good you are at this study process.
If you want to hear a really in depth breakdown of that idea of constantly improving your own actual process, then listen to a recent interview on our podcast with Scott. He scored in the high nineties on [00:29:00] each of his exams, following this study routine where he was only sitting in front of his review course, you know, for two hours a day and then studying from his phone the rest of the time. He got insanely good results from this really these strategies I’m talking about here. But in his interview, we just talked a lot about that idea of, here’s the goal on test day, therefore work backwards and all your time should be spent getting good at what you need to do on exam day.
You’re not really learning how to go in and audit a company in real life. You’re trying to learn how the questions work on the audit exam, and how to answer those questions, then at your job, you know, over the first year or two, you’ll learn how to do the real world job. The CPA exams are not trying to teach you the actual real world skills of every part of any accounting profession that’s covered on the exams.
Your job is to learn the information in the [00:30:00] terms or the context that you’ll see it on test day and pass these exams. When when you’re talking about the CPA exams, that is the only thing that matters.
So again for a more in depth overview of these five strategies or these ideas and more of the how to on them. Make sure to watch one of our free study training webinars if you’ve never done that. Again, the link is down in the description of this episode either on YouTube or in the podcast version. And then our PRO course covers all this in extreme elaborate detail, including a bunch of walkthrough videos of each part of these processes that I’ve talked about.
So at this point, you can probably see logically, how, if all five of these strategies are part of your daily process, you have a format or you have a process for effectively working through new material, re-reviewing all the previous topics you’ve been through, how to make your daily study routine much easier to stay consistent with, by spending less time sitting in front of your review [00:31:00] course and then studying from your phone throughout the day, how you make the process itself easier to just deal with mentally or emotionally for that matter, on a months long or year long basis, because you get your evenings free and most of your weekends, following this format. And overall it’s working better because instead of hitting each topic only twice, you’re hitting every topic dozens and dozens and dozens of times.
So if you found this helpful, please take a second to like the video, subscribe to our YouTube channel. Speaking of walkthrough practice questions, we’ve started uploading a lot of practice question walkthroughs on some of the most difficult topics from the different exams. They take a lot of time to make, so we’re working our way through each exam, but you can find those also on our YouTube channel.
But most of all, if you find these episodes helpful, please take a second to share this with someone, you know, who’s working on their exams or the podcast or YouTube channel in general.
Our [00:32:00] podcast interviews, where at this point we’ve interviewed over 150 of our past clients and customers, and you just get to listen to their full story of the things they were struggling with, the adjustments they made, what started working, and then just their insights to the whole process as they look back, those interviews are incredibly valuable. Easily the best free resource available anywhere, if you are trying to nail down this effective study process that I keep talking about.
So thanks for watching or listening, and we’ll see you on the next episode.
