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Tales From the CPA Exam: Is This Support Or Stalking?

Posted on by Adrienne Gonzalez

I came across this very cute engagement announcement in D Magazine out of Dallas the other day and call me bitter, but this doesn't sound like a good idea to me. It seems to have worked out for the couple in question but just wondering how all of you feel about having an escort to the library when you're in the middle of studying:

[L]iving in different cities discouraged them from starting a new relationship, so the pair went their separate ways. A year went by and Luke tagged along with friends who were spending the weekend at Blaire’s family lake house. The couple quickly hit it off and decided to begin a long distance relationship. Luke traveled to Dallas on the weekends to support Blaire while she studied for the CPA exam. Blaire looks back on many long nights spent in the library with Luke by her side and says “I knew he was a keeper!”

Now, how touching that Luke wanted to "help" but I've been in long distance relationships before and the very last thing on my mind was studying anything but the room service menu when we did finally get time together. Perhaps Luke and Blaire were a bit more chaste than your humble writer but wouldn't that make the situation even worse?

If it were me, I would find the presence of my boyfriend at the library while studying a huge distraction and quite possibly annoying, depending on how obnoxious the boyfriend is. Has anyone else had a partner this supportive? 

Blaire went on to pass and go to work for KPMG so I guess it worked out for her but am I the only one who thinks having a significant other by your side at the library is taking support a tad too far? What did Luke do the whole time, make rubber band balls? Read? Play Fruit Ninja on his iPhone?

Uh, congrats you two. Or something.

Related Posts

Failing the CPA Exam the Easy Way…or: How to Use Your Scores to Determine Your Next Move

Nationally, only 43% of CPA exam candidates who sit for any exam part pass on their first try and that number shouldn’t be too surprising to anyone who has gone into an exam completely unprepared or totally intimidated. Failure may be inevitable but it doesn’t have to be the end, nor does it mean you should give up on trying to become a CPA.

So what do you do if you’ve failed?

There are two paths to take and your option from here depends a lot on how you did. Not all less-than-74s are created equal.


If you scored < 70: If you got anything less than a 70, give or take, you can put this exam off until later and move on to the next section if you are having difficulty grasping the information, especially if you scored in the bottom 60s or lower. UNLESS you are on a time crunch (like you have to get this one passed or you’ll lose credit on another section), blow this one off and move on to another. If you want to continue and try this one again you can but you should start from scratch, use your score report to gain insight into where you need more work, and review EVERYTHING as if you have not studied at all.

If you scored > 70: Pay your re-application fee and get a new NTS for this exam ASAP! A score above 70, while disappointing if less than 75, shows that you have an excellent command of the information and you’ll want to retake this one while the information is still fresh in your mind. DO NOT move on to another section. Use your score report to gain insight into your weaker areas but don’t obsess too much over what it tells you, keep in mind the report compares you to other candidates and you don’t care how other people did on the exam, you need to know where YOU need to do more work. DO NOT waste your time watching all of your CPA review lectures again, focus on doing MCQ/simulation practice questions and brush up on the areas you are weak in. Then, just before your exam, give everything a very quick overview one last time to make sure you have not forgotten the things you already know.

The point is that most CPA exam candidates experience failure at one point in the process, and some will experience failure repeatedly along the way. Be smart about your mistakes, learn from them and move on. You CAN pass, it’s just a matter of understanding how to overcome the many stumbling blocks you may encounter along the way.

Also see:
What Happens When You Get a 74?

Adrienne Gonzalez is the founder of Jr. Deputy Accountant, a former CPA wrangler and a Going Concern contributor. You can see more of her posts here and all posts on the CPA Exam here.

CPA Exam Candidate Bloggers, They’re Everywhere

Back in the day, there was really only one CPA exam blogger and it was Jeff at Another71 who chronicled his adventures (read: failures) while amassing a large audience of loyal followers who shared in his triumphs and defeats. Over time, Jeff transformed his humble little website from just a soap box for him to complain to an actual career, blowing off the idea of a day job for the somewhat lucrative but always entertaining world of blogging. By all appearances this has worked out for him and it may be no small coincidence that a storm of CPA exam bloggers have followed in his footsteps, including his own team of CPA exam bloggers writing for him at Another71.

The only other longstanding CPA exam blog we can think of is the New Jersey Society of CPAs’ Exam Cram, which has featured a revolving cast of characters over the years, all of whom share their individual CPA exam stories with NJSCPA members and the Internet at large. Who says blogs are dead?


One CPA exam blogger we haven’t seen in quite some time:
The Cooking Accountant has been at this for awhile now and appears to have allowed a BEC failure to keep her from her blog since June of 2010. Once active in documenting her journey, her last entry reads “It hurts twice as much to learn you have to re-take two parts because you failed one. This is reminiscent of when a little girl riding her bicycle hits a raised chunk of sidewalk and goes flying off her bike, landing on the hard cement. But this time, not only does she scrape and bruise her knee and elbow so bad she can barely get up, but the doll she had in the bike basket is now sitting in the gutter.”

But many other CPA exam bloggers are alive and well and blogging every dirty detail of their lives as CPA exam candidates, at least when it comes to disappointments and annoying coughing girls at Prometric.

My CPA Exam Journey
3 Letters, 1 Day at a Time
Sleep on CPA
No More 74
Mission: Pass CPA Exam
CPA Adventures

The list goes on and on and if I missed any good ones, do let me know.

Here’s my concern: while it’s certainly healthy to form a community of miserable bastards who can share in the joy and misery of the CPA exam experience together, at what point does blogging become a distraction? If you notice, each one of these blogging candidates commit well thought-out, carefully written, decent length posts, something a lot of “other” bloggers don’t always do. So is there an element of procrastination that blogging about the exam allows?

If that’s the case, it’s probably a healthy sort of procrastination. Candidates might be taking a break from the MCQ but they are still focused on their goal of licensure by writing about, thinking about and reading about the CPA exam.

As long as they don’t start using that #twudygroup to talk about movies and their relationship problems, I don’t see the harm.