25% through review in a month! Help?

How many hours per week are you spending on studying strictly for the CPA? Are you getting in a solid 25 hours per week? You really need 20+ hours a week to succeed with the exams.

The only thing I don't like about CPA Excel is that I didn't find that there was a way to truly know how you were doing (Maybe there was a way and it was just user error :)). I love the progress report in NINJA MCQ and how it shows your trending average score for each topic. Might be something to consider getting for only $47! Obviously it's only my first time using it and so the jury is still out on whether it'll actually get me the last pass I need. But I like knowing where I stand as I go through questions and I didn't find CPA Excel truly did a good job of that.

JAMfromATL is also right – I don't think Jeff's method is a bad way to go and it makes a lot of sense. I didn't find another 71 until I failed FAR and was desperately searching for answers. I just included what I did that got me passes in my earlier post. I am doing the NINJA method this time for my FAR retake though.

And thank you!! I also hope I can be done with this whole darn thing come November! I'll be rooting you on to get the beast behind you as well! 🙂

Aim for 2.5 hours per day on weekdays, and 6-7 hours a day on weekends. I realize 4 grad classes is a lot probably the equivalent of working 50 hours per week, but many of us do work 50+ hours a week and have kids, spouses, homes to care for. I think your biggest obstacle is being convinced you're short on time, which you are but that describes most people taking the exams.

This is the study schedule I used for FAR. CPAExcel's exam planner is useless. Once I finished a lesson I moved the numbers to the right column. Left column= unfinished. Right column= finished. Then I colored the finished row green. The “Estimated Average Total Study Time” that they give is how long it takes to complete the questions and TBSs, does not include the time it takes to read or watch videos. I usually took twice as much time as CPAExcel indicates, even though I don't watch videos.

I wouldn't bother with diagnostic exams, just make sure you have 2 to 3 weeks for Ninja MCQ review. I didn't have a thorough understanding of the material. There is too much crap in FAR to have a thorough understanding, unless you have photographic memory.

FAR Schedule

Just disregard CPAExcel's stupid schedule. In the beginning I was trying to follow it and I was also trying to make all the little lesson circles green. That was a big waste of time. I stopped with all that and did not worry about any of CPAExcel's stupid metrics once I got into REG. Only did the questions in study mode.

Yeah, go ahead and copy and paste it. If you look at the bottom of the spreadsheet, you will see how I estimate how much I should be doing per day. As I mentioned before, make sure the To Date is 2 or 3 weeks before your exam date, so you have time to do Ninja MCQ. I'm not sure how long Ninja will take you though. I'm not working and I can do about 200 MCQs a day. So the questions took about 9-10 days and the Ninja SIMs took 2 days. You might want to leave another day or two for reviewing journal entries and whatever notes you have.