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Good afternoon everyone
I started so many new forum threads last couple of days that I thought I might as well start a new one to “tie it all together”.
So after my long Atlantic flight and taking REG aka “the beast” last Friday, I started my BEC preparations the very same night, eating a takeaway pizza in a hotel lobby in New York over a Becker book on a Friday night… sweet life. I did not adjust to US time zone, so went to bed at 7 pm and up again at 3 am (9 am “my time”). I did my first set of BEC MCQs literally 48 hours before the exam. I managed to cram 2+12+13+3=30 study hours Friday night – Monday morning, and sat for the exam this morning at 8:30. It was a tough cram session I can tell you, and I wouldn’t do it again. My head was spinning and I honestly did not feel well at all at the point of stopping each night at 5:30 pm (11:30 pm “my time”), just to get up again at 3 am. Bud I did it! And I feel a lot better now at the airport with an expensive glass red wine, all though I wonder how 3 days could just disappear like that.
BEC was a lot easier than I expected. Testlets were E-M-H. I flagged 3 questions in the first testlet, which is less than for any of the other exams I have taken. It was theory focused and just a few, simple calcs – odd tough it took me 30 minutes to complete, which was probably a few minutes too much. Second testlet had longer questions, and more calcs – took me a good 40 minutes. Third session had a great deal of “odd” topics thrown in, and I flagged like 10 of them. Took me way too long to get though 3rd testlet – something like 45 minutes. They kept coming back (with 2 questions) on one topic that I missed in the first session – a calc that I had not studied for one second, so I literally guessed the answer. That’s frustrating, since it probably cost me 3 questions all together = non-weighted 3.5% of the full exam. There were also a ton of other weird theory and calcs in there that I had not seen, but think I managed pretty well with thanks to some old college studies 10 years ago that came back to life (I knew I would get to use it one day!).
The writing sims were on 3 topics that I knew pretty well, however with 60 min left I was running out of time half-way through the second one and really had to speed up. Ended up writing very short memos, no telling if it will be sufficient for a score about 75% but at least it will not count as 0. What I wrote was OK, since I knew the topics OK (not 100%, but OK). For a non-native English speaker, I would recommend allocating 75 minutes or so for the writing.
So – all together – I walked out of this exam feeling pretty good. Better than both FAR and REG. I know I missed a few questions, and probably got a few calcs wrong too due to the rather stressful manner in which you tend to perform these, but surely I will get 75+. Just a little more time on this exam would have made a huge difference though.
Big 4 Audit Manager from Europe here to pass the CPA in the U.S. of A in 2014! Niiice!
AUD - 95 / Jul 15 / 130h over 4 weeks
FAR - 86 / Aug 14 / 240h over 4 weeks
(11 week break)REG - 81 / Nov 14 / 200h over 4 weeks
BEC - 87 / Nov 17 / 30 h over 2.5 days
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