The 80% Percent Rule of Highly Effective CPA Study

This CPA study tip will save you a ton of time and even more than that, a ton of frustration

And that is to spend 80 to 90% of your study time doing exactly what you'll be doing on test day

which is, of course, answering multiple choice questions and simulations. Now, that might not sound like a tip at all

You're probably thinking, okay, of course, on test day, I know I need to answer the MCQs and the simulations

Now what I'm talking about is day to day, probably without realizing it, most people spend 80% of their study time on very passive study methods such as watching the video lectures and or reading the text

So instead of watching the video lecture and reading the textbook first, you jump straight into the questions

So I've been talking about this strategy and that's kind of the basis of the whole super fast CPA approach

I've been teaching people this for the last nine or ten years, and now in 2024, the big review

courses are starting to recommend this approach. And I can prove that this will save you a lot

of time and is much more effective by walking through an example that you've probably

personally experienced. So when you start with the video lecture, let's say it's a half-hour video

lecture. By the time you zone out a few times or re-watch a few key parts, by the time you've

watch the whole thing and you feel like you understood it pretty well, it's very easy for that

half hour video lecture to have turned into an hour, if not an hour and a half, maybe even two hours

Okay so you spent one to two hours just watching the video And then you go to the practice questions which again is what matters because the context is different The textbook or video lecture context is much different

than how the questions appear and how you have to answer them. So you spend an hour or two

watching the video and maybe reading the text and you get to the practice questions and you realize

that you're still not really sure how to answer the questions. So even though you invested the time to

watch the video and read the chapter, you still have to go through the process of piecing together

the practice questions and figuring out how they work and how the solutions work, what the

steps are based on the question type. You still have to go through that process anyways. Now

I will say that learning how to dissect and reverse engineer questions from the beginning is a skill

but you can get good at this pretty quickly. And once you do that, for most lessons, you'll find that

you don't need to go back to the video lecture or chapter at all. You will be able to learn what you need to know and how to answer the question types

just by reverse engineering and dissecting the practice questions for that topic

And the same thing with the simulations. Now, even for the most difficult topics

if you've gone through several practice questions and it's still not making sense at all

then if you go back and watch the video lecture, or usually you can just find the specific pieces you need in the

the text, it is much faster and you already have context about what you're trying to learn

from that video or what you're trying to find in the textbook

So for the dozens and dozens of topics that are covered on each of the CPA exams if you are able to avoid watching the video lecture and reading the chapter for half or more of those topics you saved yourself a ton of time

But not only that, that's not the biggest advantage. The biggest advantage is that you are directly learning and improving your understanding

of the practice problem and practice simulation context. So question context or exam day context

The other problem with watching video lectures and reading the textbook first is that, like I said, it could take you two hours to do all that

And so you're mentally beat down by the time you get to the most important part, which is the practice questions and the practice simulations

And the other problem is, like I mentioned, watching a video, it's easy to pat yourself on the back and think, okay, I'm studying, you know, I'm watching this video

But you and I both know that if you're lucky, maybe 10% percent

percent of that information gets in your brain from just watching a video. Whereas working through

practice questions and reperforming solutions and making sense of question explanations, that's a very

active process that, you know, you're forced to write things down, perform calculations. It's just an

active process that forces that new information into your brain where when you're just sitting there

passively looking at a screen, probably half the time thinking about what you're going to do this

weekend. It's just a huge waste of time for the most part. So you can save yourself a ton of time and

energy and frustration by jumping straight into the practice questions for a topic So the reality is there are a bunch of highly effective study strategies or these little tweaks little ways of doing some of these common strategies slightly differently that

yield much better results. So we have a free training webinar where we go through the six

key ingredients of a highly successful study process. So when you're applying these much more

effective study strategies compared to the normal way of doing things, what you're doing is you're

just layering advantages together. And it honestly makes it hard to go wrong. So specifically

in this free training, the six strategies that we will walk you through, if you are doing all

six of those things correctly throughout your study process on a daily and weekly basis

it is honestly hard to go wrong when you're doing all six of these throughout your whole process

In other words, this free training, it's one hour that will literally save you months and months of time and frustration and likely hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on retaking exam fees

So to see the upcoming times, you can click on the link that's either on or below this video

Click that link, go to that page and choose a time that will work for you and then make sure to watch the training

I promise you that as you watch the training, you will have multiple

pull aha moments and light bulbs going off in your head and you will see the study process

much differently and you'll be able to see how this is going to work so much better and more

effectively than what you've been doing so far so click the link choose the time and i will see you on

the training