Editor’s note: Welcome to a special Wednesday edition of >75, our weekly post on questions that you have related to the CPA Exam. Send your questions to tips@goingconcern.com and we’ll do our best to answer as many of them as possible. You can see all of the JDA’s posts for GC here and all our posts related to the CPA Exam here.
Enough with this question, I’m going to start emailing students this article directly.
First of all, if you don’t send me questions, I can’t answer them. No question is too stupid, trust me, I’ve been in CPA Review for almost 3 years. They don’t tell you kids shit about the exam in college, better to ask than listen to some guy you work with (he’s wrong 87% of the time – or so I have calculated from professional experience via our students). So send them in. I’ll try to be nice and at least sort of useful.
That being said, I keep getting the question at work about materials. 2010 materials. Updates to 2009 materials. Being the most up-to-date in the cubicle farm. I got it, your brain is programmed to think December 31st equals a whole new year. How many of you are getting married this 31st, btw? Happy Anniversary to my boss – the CPA – and his wife on that fine day that you CPAs love so much. Deductions, bitch.
As previously disclosed, the AICPA Board of Examiners doesn’t want you to know they’re cheap. Those difficulty-weighted questions cost a whole shit ton of money to pop in that exam (speaking of which, any IFRS experts out there willing to contribute their time to screwing with CPA exam candidates? Prestige! Honor! No money though.) and the BoE likes questions that have a little more, erm, staying power. Those guys’ “creativity” keeps me in a job so I can’t really elaborate, you get the point.
That means you’ve got a 6 month window to work with from the time pronouncements are announced and when they actually start appearing on the exam. They might appear earlier as pre-test (not counted toward your score and about 15% of exam content) but unless specifically noted – as in SFAS 141(r) – pronouncements trickle into the exam slowly and on a delay.
When new exam content does appear (as it does twice a year, inevitably), it tends to be introduced slowly. Think about it – the only test run those questions got was pre-test, and you were not expected to know that information anyway. How can they gather intelligence from candidates’ collective knowledge of things they don’t know? Seems bizarre to me but whatever, can’t question the wisdom of the AICPA.
Except in the case of the Feed the Pig campaign.
