[jeff]

NINJA Question –

Passing this along to make sure people see it…it was posted by CPA2BinCA (https://www.another71.com/cpa-exam-forum/topic/thinking-about-strategy-change-to-maximize-18-months#post-700288)

I dont know if this will but I found the Detailed Report under the Progress Report tab in the Ninja mcq to be very helpful in explaining my weak areas.

After doing few sets of mcqs, I copied all the information from the Detailed Summary view and put it into excel. i used conditional formatting to highlight areas where my average and trending scores were below a certain % (i started with 40%). Then I made a copy of the tab and label it ‘V2’. After some review, I would do a few more sets of mcqs, copy the resulting Detailed Report and dump it into the ‘V2’ tab. I would keep doing this throughout my review process and kept dumping subsequent versions of the Detail Report into newer ‘V#’ tabs. I hope this makes sense.

After every testing session, I would compare the newest data with that of the previous tab. It was just an additional analysis that allowed me to see if my understanding of a particular topic improved – evidenced when my average score improved, and if it didnt’, I would target that topic specifically in my next session.

When you have a long period of time to study, it might be hard to see if you are really progressing because its easy to memorize answers by just doing mcq’s. Doing the extra analysis above made me focus less on the percentages and more on improving my knowledge by key topics. I would notice the highlights disappearing in some areas because I got better on the subject matter and some stayed red for awhile. For those, I had to step away from the mcq’s and go through the review material in more depth before I could improve my score on the mcqs. Also, if I started scoring better overall on one of the main categories, this extra analysis helped me check if I improved on one of the more heavily tested subtopics in that category or if the score improved because of my performance in a less significant sub topic. I used the number of questions in the subtopics to rank them by significance.

I hope the above does not sound like a lot of work, because it really isn’t. I found it very easy to do given the current format of the Detailed Report in the Ninja Mcq.

AUD - 79
BEC - 80
FAR - 76
REG - 92

Jeff Elliott, CPA (KS)
NINJA CPA | NINJA CMA | NINJA CPE | Another71