How to Nail Difficult Topics in Your CPA Study

It's hard enough to get yourself to sit down and study consistently and stick to your study routine

It's also hard enough to have effective study sessions where you're working through practice problems or practice simulations

and really making sense of those questions so that you can redo that on test day

So a study session in its most effective form will be you working through some MCQs and simulations on a certain topic

and ideally by the end of that study session you have a really good handle on how those questions work

how to perform the steps to those questions and you're kind of understanding the what and the why behind those multiple choice questions and simulations

Now the problem is tomorrow you're going to do the same thing on a brand new topic

and the next day you're going to do the same thing on another topic and I think everyone understands that over the course of six to eight weeks

you're going to forget a lot of the stuff that you spent so much time on going through each lesson one by one

and making sense of those questions and simulations for each topic. So the best way to avoid this, in other words to capture that understanding that you gained in each individual study session

is to make flashcards as you go through the different topics. Now I know that your review course probably came with flashcards

but what I'm talking about is you make your own flashcards. So most people do some form of note-taking as they go through each study session

They write things down, little key takeaways or the steps to a problem or a formula

but to take that to the next level you take those key pieces of information that emerge as you work through the practice problems for a topic

and you turn those into flashcards at the end of your study session. Now taking notes and writing out in your own understanding key takeaways or the steps to a certain type of problem or formulas

that is a very valuable use of time or that's a good practice to do as you go through your study sessions on the different topics

Now the reason that you want to take those things that you wrote down during the study session

and turn them into flashcards is because of forced recall. Now on exam day you have to walk into the testing center

and your only tool for answering those questions you're going to see is the information that you can pull out of your own memory

In other words, your recall or your retention of all the topics

So going back to your day-to-day study sessions, again, writing out notes and traditional notes

that's better than nothing, but when you go back to review those

everything that you wrote down is just in front of you on the sheets of paper

So your brain doesn't have to do any work or it's not dealing with your memory at all to reread the stuff that you wrote down in your notes

So the flashcards on the other hand involve recall. As you review the flashcards and if you use a free digital service like Brainscape

then you have the app on your phone, you can be reviewing your flashcards throughout the day

each day, week to week as you create these flashcards throughout the process

You're spending 15 to 20 minutes a day always reviewing the flashcards that you've been making

And so in doing that, you are continually reinforcing those concepts, but instead of just reading them off of your notes that you've written down

there's that forced recall element so that you're committing these things to memory

you're deepening your understanding, and it's all involving that same mechanism that you're going to have to rely on on test day to pull that stuff out of your own memory

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 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 a time, and I will see you on the training