[jcbcpa]

So I just took FAR this morning and am now feeling very defeated. I’ve put in a lot of hours studying for the past month and a half. Even took off work a couple days on Fridays for extra studying. I had a 4 day weekend this past weekend and definitely put in 40-50 hours studying on this days alone.

For the most part, I think I felt pretty good about the multiple choice. However, I was shocked that the majority of the questions seemed to be heavily conceptually based with way less calculations than I anticipated. I also felt the degree of difficulty did not really change at all between the first, second, and third testlets. I hope that isn’t a bad sign. I do know for sure I missed two questions (since I literally got the exact same question twice! How crazy is that? It was a pension question I had narrowed down to two choices. I should have spread my answer between the two choices so that I would have got at least one question right).

I’m a governmental auditor, so the government accounting questions were very easy for me. I’m not as strong on Not-For-Profits, but they have some similarities with governments and I feel like I nailed all those questions too. There were several pension questions that threw me off, so those threw me off some.

Anyway, as a whole, I felt pretty good about the multiple choice, but again, it was just weird that the majority of my questions had no or very little calculation involved. So I’m not sure….Anyway, I finished all three multiple choice testlets with an hour and 50 minutes left. I took a quick 10-15 minute break, thinking I had plenty of time for the simulations. Nope!!

I was expecting a few very difficult simulations, but wow! The research question wasn’t too bad. Unless I missed something, I’m pretty certain I got that one right. There was another question I felt pretty confident about, but I’m not sure if I got all the tabs correct. I do feel I at least got the majority correct on that tab.

Another simulation involved journal entries. I got the entries to balance, and I felt pretty decent about a few of the entries, but some of the others I wasn’t very confident about.

So that’s 3/7 I felt at least decent about. After that, the wheels fell off! The fourth simulation involved reconciling, and I got the ending amount to reconcile, but I don’t feel confident at all in the entries that were used to reconcile them. So I’m not sure about that at all. In hindsight, I think I spent WAY too long on this question.

The fifth simulation I essentially just guessed the entries that needed to be made. I had no confidence in any of my choices, but maybe I somehow got lucky and got something right out of it. I’ll take anything!

The last two simulations I left completely blank because I completely ran out of time. One of them was this LONG simulation that involved researching the correct accounting using the research tab. And it was a super long tab! I was just thinking, “You’ve got to be kidding me!” I’m really hoping that was the pretest question.

So anyway, that’s it. I guess I should have tried to just make guesses on some entries in the two I left blank, but oh well.

I’ve been driving myself crazy the rest of today trying to calculate what I think my score might be. If simulations were worth less than a whopping 40% of the grade, I would feel a lot better, but given my extremely low confidence in my simulations, I just don’t see how I could have passed.

But I’ve been reading a few threads where people thought they failed FAR due to the extremely hard SIMS where they just guessed on some of the SIMS, yet they still passed, some even passing in the mid to upper 80’s! I don’t care how high my score is as long as it’s a 75!!

For those who have been through this, do you think I have a shot at passing? Maybe there is some type of curve, even with the SIMS?

AUD - 85 (8/30/2015)
FAR - 73 (10/13/2015), 85 (2/29/2016) (AND DONE!)
BEC - 83 (11/04/2015)
REG - 81 (11/30/2015)