Given the exam’s level of difficulty, knowing how to study for the CPA Exam is essential. As you prepare your strategy for how to pass the CPA board exam, know that a well-designed CPA Exam review course can be worth the investment. A review course will help familiarize yourself with both the exam’s content and its format and functionality. To compute, the US CPA Exam is hard, because there is a comprehensive amount of details covered on the exam and, with most examination courses, quite a plenty of study time is required. The best piece of advice I can give you to increase your score and CPA exam passing rate is to get a proper CPA review course and stick with it.

• Based on data and anecdotal evidence, FAR is the hardest section of the exam.
• In other words, the CPA Exam is a long exam, and this time investment makes every aspect of it that much harder.
• You have 18 months to pass the remaining three sections of the CPA Exam; if you do not pass them all, you’ll lose credit for the first section you passed.

Regulation scores have been pretty stable over the past several years. This trend might be explained by the lack of information changes in the exam. Unlike FAR where additional IFRS information keeps creeping into the exam, REG consistently focuses on federal taxation. There’s a slight downward trend, but nothing that is too serious.

What Is The Hardest Part of The CPA Exam?

In most instances, you would be better off simply retaking the exam. A vast majority of review requests and appeals are unsuccessful. The CPA exam is conducted in a meticulous and painstaking manner. A great deal of effort goes into ensuring that the questions for the exam are prepared and graded carefully.

Hence, it’s advisable to treat all the parts of the exam equally and try to answer each question as best as you can. These are questions that are used by Prometric, NASBA, and AICPA to collect data and scoring information for later use. The score that you get on pretest questions does not form part of the final score release for your CPA exam. You will see that each section has a large number of Multiple-choice questions divided into two testlets. Testlet number 1 in the Auditing and Attestation section has 36 Multiple-choice questions, and testlet number 2 in the same section has another 36 Multiple-choice questions. Similarly, the other three sections have two testlets of Multiple-choice questions each.

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Over preparing will consume your time and can cause information to become dated as the CPA Exam changes. Within 18 months of passing your first CPA Exam section, you must have passed all four sections or you will lose credit for that first section. Then, you must pass any remaining sections and any section(s) you lost credit for within 18 months of the oldest section you still have credit for. This adds additional stress to every stage of your exam process. Managing this stress, creating a study plan, and adjusting your plans for setbacks is part of passing the CPA Exam.

For AUD, FAR, and REG, the remaining three TBS testlets affect the other half of your score, and in BEC, the two TBS testlets and the one WC testlet supply the rest of your score. This makes passing the CPA Exam How Hard is the CPA Exam? And Why are Pass Rates Only 50%? a difficult, but achievable, goal. You’ll need to study wisely, set a strategy for managing your time, and call on your support network, but with the right plan and good study materials, you will conquer it.

How much time does the exam require?

Our results make it clear that with the proper guidance, you can develop the skills and strategies that can help improve your chances of obtaining a CPA passing score. They also show that Becker is the best review course to prepare you for the big day. For the BEC section, your total score is a weighted combination of the scaled scores from the MCQs, TBSs, and written communication tasks.

• Testlet number 1 in each of the sections is always a medium testlet.
• It’s important to know that your total reported score does not represent a percentage correct, nor can you interpret it as such.
• Many applicants choose to take the perceived most difficult exam first, and then the others.
• However, like all tests, the amount of time you dedicate to studying for each section of the exam will depend upon your own knowledge, experience and test-taking abilities.
• Given the exam’s level of difficulty, knowing how to study for the CPA Exam is essential.
• The score releases occur during different times of the year depending on candidates’ testing window.
• Here’s a graph of the Financial Accounting and Regulation exam passing rates for the last 5 years.

It tests those topics using multiple question types, including some that simulate real-world tasks CPAs are expected to perform. You have a limited amount of time (18 months from when you pass your first section) to pass all four sections. ⇨ The score is not graded on a curve – grading on a curve implies that an average score is calculated for the individuals who take an exam, and everybody’s scores are compared with this average. If you consider the pass rates for the four sections of the CPA exam, FAR is the most difficult. The cumulative pass rate in the first three quarters of 2018 for the Financial Accounting and Reporting section was 46.79%.

How should I prepare for the CPA Exam?

In other words, the CPA Exam is a long exam, and this time investment makes every aspect of it that much harder. With Gleim’s Study Planner and Personal Counselors, you’ll have the tools you need to plan your exam schedule. An ideal schedule will be flexible enough for emergencies and additional hurdles—but firm enough for goal setting. This countdown will be one of your greatest enemies during the exam. You have to really manage your time well if you want to finish within the allotted time and pass the exam.

The score releases occur during different times of the year depending on candidates’ testing window. Each of the four sections has a time limit of 4 hours, so by the time you pass the CPA, you will have taken at least 16 hours of tests. You are given an 18-month window, starting from the date you pass your first section, in which you are able to take the remaining three sections of the test in any order you prefer. There are several factors that make the CPA exam one of the most challenging credentialing examinations.

Steps in computing your score

Our expert instructors will show you how to structure time for each exam part, providing valuable time-saving tips along the way. The tools and materials contained within Becker’s CPA Exam Review course are specially designed to mirror the CPA Exam interface. So on exam day, you can focus on answering the questions, not figuring out the format, features, and functions.

• The Exam is not harder or easier to pass at different times.
• In actual practice, the number of correct answers that you provide only forms the basis for calculating your final score.
• Among the four sections, FAR has a reputation for being the hardest.
• Since then, they have begun to diverge a bit, leaving FAR with the reputation of being the most difficult section.
• This is somewhat surprising in that many candidates tend to struggle with the written communication simulations on BEC.

Your task is to answer each of these questions to the best of your ability. But having a time limit means you’ll need to prioritize answering every question over scrutinizing each question individually. Each section has 12 pretest Multiple-choice questions and one pretest Task-based simulation. Furthermore, the Business Environment and Concepts section also includes one pretest written communication task. The purpose of using a scaled score is to make the score used for different versions of the CPA exam comparable. Therefore, it is possible to standardize the exam results by using statistical processes to calculate test scores that allow the results from different sets of questions to be compared.

What is the CPA Exam Passing Rate?

Thus, the material covered on the Regulation section is always changing as well. Many candidates also find this section difficult because it involves a lot of memorization with very little logical connections. For example, there is no reason why the standard deduction is its current amount. The numbers do not lie, the hardest section of the CPA exam is most definitely FAR. With a 2022 Q4 pass rate of under 45%, it is a brutal section. When this is compared to the Q4 pass rate for BEC, which was a healthy 60%, it is clear that people are less successful with FAR.