I have REG on Saturday. honestly not sure what I should be focusing on either, right now I'm just going over questions I flagged or got wrong.
I'm not focusing TOO much on business law, I feel like I have a good general understanding of it, I don't know every last rule and exception but I think I know enough. one of the best things I've done in studying business law is figuring out to use your scrap paper. it seems stupid, but write down every single party, draw arrows to and from each saying who's doing what for who, if someone assigns rights to someone else, if it's commercial paper draw the instrument and write out the endorsements on it so you can follow the chain, etc. it's much easier to keep facts straight if it's written neatly on paper than trying to hold it all in your head.
for tax, I'm trying to focus more on big issues like basis, whether it be gift basis, partnership basis, or S/C corp basis, particularly formation and distribution in partnerships and corporations
but, I know my weakest area is individual taxation. there are a lot of numbers and limits I didn't bother to memorize because I figured specific numbers wouldn't be important but as I did more MCQs they seemed to get more and more important. things like the $25,000 rental real estate passive loss allowance and its associated phaseout, the small business stock losses, some of the bigger tax credits like education credits and the dependent care one. I'm still not sure how helpful it's going to be to memorize those types of limits. but I figure, I'm good with partnerships and corporations because they're more applying concepts, which I'm good at, than memorizing, which I suck at. so I might as well do tons of individual tax MCQs till it starts sticking better.
best thing to do is just be brave, be honest with yourself, pinpont that area that seems significant but you're still scoring low on, and start working from there. if you can, do a practice exam to find those weak areas, or at the very least do like a set of 80-100 MCQs including all content to help figure it out.
oh, one more thing, too. if you're like me and like to do 20 “random” MCQs per set, make sure to uncheck all the business law sections every couple of sets. in my test bank, business law takes up a disproportionately large amount of the available questions, so my MCQ sets ended up being like 80% business law. tax is more important. you want as much tax practice as possible. business law is still important so include it regularly, but make sure to get in those sets where it's ONLY tax. looking at my practice history, the last set of 20 I did, I got 100% on it, but it included 4 tax questions. the last tax-only session I did I got 75% on. so that business law weighting really skewed my averages quite a bit. need to focus on the more difficult and more important aspects.
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