Best Way to Study for the CPA Exams? The 2 Biggest Keys

All right, welcome to episode five of the CPA Exam Experience podcast with Super Fast CPA. I'm Nate

and today we're going to cover what is the best way to study for the CPA exams. Now, in my true

fashion, I am going to give you some of the background information so that your actual strategies can

actually pay off, because if you're not finding the time to study every day, having the best

strategies won't matter at all. So let's go down the list here. Here's what we're going to cover today

First, why you need to be strategic about every aspect of your daily study routine. What things in

your daily study process really matter and what things really don't. We're going to cover

getting to the right mindset for success with the study process, the optimal length of your

study sessions, how to fit in a lot of extra study time every day. And so we'll

start from the top. There are really two key aspects for a successful study plan. First is your

daily routine. Then your actual study methods. So your daily routine and how you set that up

that is going to be just as crucial as the actual study methods that you employ when you do sit down to

study. So your daily study routine. This is very important to understand. A lot of people, they just

get their review course and they think, okay, well, I'm going to just start this process

And they just kind of ambiguously assume that they're going to magically find four or five

hours a day to carve out and sit with their review course

Now, the reality is, we all have a daily routine. And even if you don't think of yourself as a routine person, your daily routine is going to be

very, very similar day to day. You're going to do the same things in roughly the same timeline

every day. What I'm really trying to say is that your days are already filled up with stuff

whether that's your work, what you do when you come home from work, who you spend time with

That is very routine, even if you don't think of it as a routine. So you won't magically find

four or five hours a day. So you have to understand that. So it's going to require

require sacrifice, cutting other things out. Really, it just requires a major rearranging of your

normal day as it already happens currently. So you have to be strategic about when, where

and how you will fit in your studying each day. You will have to sacrifice things. You have to

find the things that you're willing to cut out, that you're willing to do less of. The things that

just aren't that important or aren't going to help you pass your CPA exams any faster

you have to give up some of those things or a lot of those things for a few months while you get

these exams over with. You might need to go to bed earlier. You might need to get up earlier

If drinking a few times a week, I mean, however much you party, whatever, but if drinking ruins

you for the next day, then you need to stop drinking for a few

months while you pass your exams. Whatever it is that impedes your ultimate goal of passing your

exams, you are probably going to have to give those things up for a while. And that brings us to

the all-end mindset. So for all of this to work, for you to, A, find the time to study every day

and B, actually have the motivation, the drive, the perseverance to actually sit down

and grind through your study sessions every day for months on end

For any of that to work, you will eventually have to get to the point mentally where

passing your CPA exams and hitting your study goals each day is more important to you

than your favorite leisure activities. Again, at least for a few months

This is something that I like to ask people or I mention this in emails or other content a lot Would you rather buckle down and be a hardcore study maniac for four to six months and just get these exams over with once and for all

or kind of half-ass it and then let this process turn into a year or more

And I've talked to a lot of people that have been messing with these exams for multiple years

And possibly you go on to not even pass at all. Because if you're just kind of, here's the thing

The mental stress level is the same because you have these exams hanging over your head every day until all four of them are passed

And that mental weight is the same whether you are studying like a maniac and fitting in as much study time as often as you can throughout your day versus someone who's kind of just half-assing it

and missing a few days a week of studying, the mental stress is the same

So you might as well act like a study maniac and just be hardcore about this process

where that's outside of your job, that this is really the only thing that matters

and get it over with as soon as possible. Because that mental stress is the same, and you don't want to have that hanging over

your head for a year or more. when it's it's relatively simple when you figure out a study process that works as long as you put in the steps every day and you're consistent, it's relatively simple to get these over with in four or five or six months

Okay. Now, all that being said, however you do study, it has to fit into your daily routine. So that brings us to the super fast CPA approach. Now, my personal opinion

is this has to do with the 50% fail, 50% plus fail rates across the board

Everyone out there has a review course, and everyone out there is more or less doing the same thing

They're trying to watch every video lecture, read every chapter, do the practice questions

and they're also trying to study like four or five hours a day, because that's kind of what the review course

or the study planners tell you is how much you need to study. Now the problem with that, that would all be great, but the average person that's working full time

and trying to pass these exams does not have four or five hours a day. That's the big problem

You will not consistently find four or five hours a day every single day to sit and do those

long study sessions. So what we teach our customers is how to have a two-hour main study session

and when you do this right, it's more effective than someone that's studying four to five hours

the normal way, what I just talked about. Then what you do is you use study supplements on your

phone all throughout the rest of your day, such as review notes, audios, taking quizzes

Studying from your phone allows you to make up the second half of your study process each day

as you go through the rest of your day. So again, where you're trying to study four or five

hours a day all at once with your review course, that requires dedicated, you know, a separate

a completely separate four or five hours that you have to find and carve out of your day

to sit in front of your review course. Now, clearly a two-hour session is much easier

It's less than half the time. It's easier to accomplish on a daily basis. And then you make up

the rest of your study time by using effective study supplements on your phone. So that is the

approach that we teach our customers. You can get a free overview of our study process at superfast

cpa.com slash training. These are one hour trainings where we just go through the details of our study

process for free. So you can see how that works. And it will be very eye-opening. You will have a lot of

aha moments as you go through one of these trainings. You can also text pass now one word to 4422

to anyways moving on from that Now we go into the actual study methods Now relentless work ethic does not guarantee success on the CPA exams

That's a harsh reality. There's no, you know, there's no option on test day to say, okay, now, if you end up getting

a failing score, as long as you check this box that you spent at least 200 hours studying

you know, we'll bump it up to a 75. That doesn't happen, obviously

You have to get a passing score. It doesn't matter if you've somehow studied 50 hours or 300 hours for the section

You have to be able to pass the exam. So how you study matters

Again, going back to those 50% plus fail rates, everyone out there has a review course

Everyone out there has access to the same information. and they approach it more or less the same way

watching the lecture, reading the chapter, doing the practice questions. But on test day, of all the people that go in there

only 50% pass. That comes down to, that means the difference is how people are studying

Now again, this will be an overview. Watch one of those trainings I mentioned for the full details

but I don't want this to be an hour-long video. So in general

you want to focus on the questions first. For any lesson, you look through the questions first

So you're going through the questions to get an idea of what you're trying to learn

Now remember, you are studying to pass, not get a PhD. You don't need to be able to get up in front of a class and lecture on every single topic like a accounting professor would

That's not the requirement. You just need to be able to answer the question

questions that you're going to see on test day. For any given lesson, you can do this yourself

run this as a little test. Go and watch the entire video lecture for a lesson, and you'll get all

the background information, all this stuff that you really won't end up seeing a lot of on the

actual questions. So the lecture in the text gives you the full picture. But now go through the questions

for any given topic or for that same topic. Go through all of them just to get an idea of

what they're actually asking questions about. And you will see that for any given lesson

most of the questions will come from the same three or four main ideas from that topic

So that's a huge reason to go straight to the questions from a lesson

so that you can get an idea of, okay, if I'm going to answer the questions from this lesson

these are the things that I apparently need to know or need to know how to do or how to calculate

So go through the questions first and read the explanations. Some lessons will be relatively easy, based on your background, the information that you already have

based on your background or your job experience, whatever it is. Some lessons will be easier than others for you personally

Now, for those, you might get what you need to, you might get the understanding you need to

from just going through the questions alone. So that is a huge time saver

If even 30 or 40% of the lessons are that way, you can move through it very quickly

make yourself a few flashcards maybe, but essentially you move on without having to watch the lecture or read the chapter

Then on the harder lessons, you still want to look through the questions first

because again, you're trying to get an understanding of what you need to learn

Then if you go and watch the video lecture, the lecture will instantly make 100 times more sense

because you have an idea of what you're trying to learn from it. And you do that instead of, again, just starting with the lecture and watching it

you don't really understand what you're hearing. It doesn't mean really anything to you because you don't have context of what you need to learn from that lesson

So you can avoid zoning out and restarting it 20 times by going through the questions first

Now here is the best tip I can give you about how to study Again using the normal way of studying you go through each lesson in a linear format one by one and you don re any previous lessons until your final review

So what that really turns into is you slowly forget all of these things that you've spent so much time learning up front

and then you get to your final review, and you have to just relearn everything

which is a recipe for disaster. Again, I would refer to those 50% fail rates. That's why that happens. So instead, here's the tip. Find a way to build re-review into your daily routine. You have to find a way you should be spending a portion of your study day on re-review every single day so that you're continually hitting the stuff that you've already studied over and over and over. Now, we have specific strategies, again, that we teach our customers

Using your own review course, it doesn't matter what review course you have, we cover that on those

free trainings I mentioned. Again, you can just text pass now to 4422 and you'll be sent. You will be

texted a link to those trainings so you can sign up for one. Or you can go to superfastcpa.com

slash training. So we have a specific strategy or a few of them that we teach to our customers

You can learn for free on those trainings. The other thing is, and the reason we have our

study tools, our study tools such as our review notes, the audios and the quizzes on the super

fast CPA app, they make it extremely easy and convenient and very effective to be able to just

consistently and conveniently go through all topics from the lesson over and over and over

So the idea is you read the review notes whenever you have five minutes throughout your day

from start to finish. You just work through it from start to finish. The audio is the same way

Whenever you're in your car, whenever you're commuting, whenever you're preparing meals or cooking something or whatever it is you do to get ready in the morning, you can just play the audio's on your app

And then also whenever you have, whenever you would normally pull out your phone and look through social media, like I talked about, take a few months off from that kind of stuff and replace it with just using study supplements on your phone

take quizzes. You can take quizzes in our app. The questions on our app have been modified with

nice round numbers because the problem with review course apps is they have full strength questions in there

And so if you're waiting for a meeting to start, I mean, you basically need a calculator and

scratch paper to try and do those questions. It's just not functional or feasible to do on your phone

So we've modified our questions so that they work easily. You can do questions in your head

So here's a recap. Your study routine needs to fit into your daily routine. So again, the super fast

CPA approach is a two-hour main session in the morning plus what we call mini sessions so that

the second half of your studying each day can happen as you go throughout your normal day. That's

much, much easier behaviorally to fit in each day than trying to set aside or find four or five

in four or five hours all at once where you have to sit with your review course

It's clearly easier to accomplish this on a day-to-day basis. You can watch our free training for the full walkthrough of how that should all work

And then for the actual study strategies, remember that you should be focusing on questions

learning how to dissect questions, going through the questions first because that teaches you

or that's showing you what you need to know for test day from each lesson

then build re-review into your daily routine so that you're consistently improving on all

topics instead of just slowly forgetting the things that you've spent so much time learning

So again, if some of these ideas have made sense to you, but you want to see a full walkthrough

of how we teach our customers and clients to study, go to superfastcpa.com slash training or just text

pass now to 4422 and a link will be sent to you where you can sign up for one of these

upcoming training sessions. So I hope you found this valuable. And until the next video