Accountant's Musings: CPA Exam & Life Beyond

Track Your Critical Success Activities

We are trained to be accountants. One of the jobs of accountants is to measure and report performance of a business. If you don’t track it, you cannot measure it, and if you cannot measure it you cannot evaluate and report it. I believe that as one prepares for the CPA exam, she or he has to have a way to measure progress. One of the ways is to look at how you performing on the review tests – for example, are you getting 90% or more on each topic? [Different CPA review course vendors have different recommendations.] You cannot argue with the need to master the content tested on the exam. As you prepare for the exam, there are other things that you also need to keep track of to make sure that you are living a balanced life, and you are not neglecting any activities that may be critical to your success.

For example, you may practice multiple choice questions to the exclusion of everything else. You may get to a point where you are getting 99% on each topic’s MCQs. You go to the exam, and you find out that you cannot write a comprehensible essay to answer the writing part of the simulation, or you cannot effectively and efficiently search for what you need to answer the question. Or you don’t know how or whether to horizontally or vertically split the screen to answer a certain question.

Another example, if all you are doing is answering MCQs and simulations, and not reading the book or watching DVDs or listening to CDs or interacting with your peers (if applicable), then you may miss out on some tips that could be handy during the exam.

Along the way, as I was taking the exam, I tried various things to track my activity. Part of it was blogging, the other part was spreadsheets, the other part was note-taking and writing down when I did what, and yet another part was filling out a calendar as I did some things. Sort of trial and error. I would say it helped me for the most, especially when I was doing FAR, my very first exam. I was a little “bad” and disorganized for REG, but I still tracked my activities towards the end.

So, while doing all that, and thinking about it after the exam (note: I am still waiting for REG, my last exam) I played around with a spreadsheet as I was trying to figure out a way to track my blogging activities. I decided to modify it to see if I could use it to track CPA exam review activities. Below is a link to a spreadsheet I came up. Please feel free to play around with it and change it to suit your needs. Keep in mind that this will track your activities, not performance. To pass the CPA exam, you need to perform well. It is hoped that tracking your study activities will help you be more organized, and hopefully improve your review performance and hopefully(!) your performance in the exam.

CPA-SAT — Success Activity Tracker

BSAT – Blogging Success Activity Tracker

Thanks for reading and I hope you found that helpful.

Image credit: http://www.graphic-mac.com/publications/images/charts.gif

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