It’s been over a year since I passed my last CPA exam and I have finally recovered enough to write about my experience.
There are four "Uniform CPA Examinations" which are estimated to take about 80-120 hours of studying per exam. These exams are exactly the same no matter which state you're in, so my notes should be generalizable to everyone. Each exam is scored out of 99, and you need a 75 to pass. You can Google exam pass rates, but they usually hover at around 50%.
When people ask me about the CPA exams, one of the first things they want to know is how I scheduled them and what my timeline was. So here’s the breakdown:
May 10, 2018 – sent in my application to take the exams to the California Board of Accountancy (CBA)
July 9, 2018 – got my application approved by the CBA (took them 8 weeks)
August 4, 2018 – took FAR – scored 94 – studied for 4.5 weeks
October 30, 2018 – took AUD – scored 90 – studied for 3 weeks
November 28, 2018 – took BEC – scored 99 – studied for 2.5 weeks
January 18, 2019 – took REG – scored 90 – studied for 2.5 weeks
July 9, 2019 – got my year of work experience and sent in my initial licensing application to the CBA
September 2019 – finally got my CPA license in the mail!
That’s the breakdown. I started working at EY (in tax, in the LA office) in early July 2018, so I was working full time while studying for all my exams. I studied 3-4 hours every weekday, 8-10 hours on Saturday, and took Sunday off. I used vacation days to take the 1-2 days before each exam to study, so I spent about 8-10 hours/day on those last two days. For my first exam (FAR), I was very motivated and woke up early (5 or 6am) every morning to study before work. After FAR, I realized I had lost my sanity by doing that and opted to study for 3-4 hours after work every day instead.
So that's how I did it. I know people who studied for 3-4 months (instead of 3-4 weeks) for each exam. Plenty of people pass the exams with timelines like that, so if that works for you, great! I knew that stretching out my study plan over multiple months wouldn’t work for me. By 3 months in (let’s be honest, by 6 weeks in), I’d forget everything I had learned in the beginning and would have to start all over again. But to be fair, the 3-4 weeks I spent studying for each exam were miserable—I cut pretty much everything else out of my life. I had absolutely no social life. But it was only for a short period of time and it worked well for me. At the end of the day, a passed exam is a passed exam, so do what works for you.
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