Hey, everyone, I am Xiaoyu. I saw CPA on the hot search a few days ago, and I realized that I haven’t paid attention to CPA for nearly a year. After successfully passing the CPA comprehensive stage in 2020, I began to indulge myself and gradually became lazy. I no longer had the motivation to prepare for the CPA exam. The consequence of indulging yourself is that you become more and more confused. But fortunately, when I picked up the CPA textbook, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the knowledge I learned was still deeply rooted in my memory and had never been forgotten. Therefore, I plan to share cpa-related knowledge points here, hoping to be helpful to you who are preparing for the cpa exam!

First of all, let me briefly introduce my own situation. Compared with other passers, I am not a person with very solid basic financial knowledge. I am not a student studying in an excellent university, I am a junior college student (called in Guangdong, in other provinces it is called junior college to bachelor's degree). I signed up for CPA in 2018 with my junior college diploma. During my two years of undergraduate study, I successfully passed the CPA professional exam in 2019 by relying on my self-study in my spare time. I graduated with a bachelor's degree in 2020 and prepared for the exam while looking for a job. I successfully got offers from firms and state-owned enterprises, and also successfully passed the CPA comprehensive stage exam. At this point, my CPA exam preparation journey has come to a successful end.

I will share with you my experience in preparing for the cpa exam from the following common questions.

Q1: How to choose exam preparation subjects?

Xiao Yu: You can follow the following two principles. 1. Remove the "super difficult" CP. Accounting has always been considered by candidates to be the most difficult subject in the CPA professional exam. The low pass rate, thick textbooks, and difficult-to-understand tables and financial tools all make accounting a big obstacle for candidates to pass the exam. Financial management is also a subject that most candidates find difficult. Every year, it is popularly searched for its "super large amount of calculation" based on its strength. Moreover, the preparation time for accounting and financial management exams will be longer than for other subjects. If you do not have sufficient preparation time, it is not recommended to apply for accounting and financial management exams together. (I myself also separate accounting and financial management). 2. Dismantle the "calculation" CP. In addition to financial management, tax law is also a subject that involves a lot of calculations. (I don’t know if you are like me. If you do too many calculation problems in a day, you will feel that the more you calculate, the more wrong you will get). So my suggestion is to prepare for the exam together with subjects that focus on calculations and memorization, and the effect will be better. And my own preparation subject combination is almost the same as these two CP principles. 2018 Preparation for Accounting? Tax Law; 2019 Preparation for Auditing? Financial Management? Economic Law? Strategy

Q2: What are the study materials for the preparation exam?

Xiao Yu: Should I buy light one or textbooks, or both? In fact, it doesn't matter whether you buy textbooks or take a light course. The light one may be more intuitive to learn than the textbook, because the same knowledge point in the textbook may appear in many different places, making you feel confused, while the light one will bring the same knowledge together. For me, I bought textbooks in Dongao. Students who have watched Qingyi may know that Qingyi contains exercises, but the textbook does not. I have a "quirk", that is, if I see an exercise question after learning a knowledge point, I will complete it. But I also think that getting the cpa does not require "question tactics". We must do good questions, not many questions. So I chose the textbook. Of course, I didn’t study on my own by reading the textbooks alone. I also studied together with teacher Dong’ao’s courses and textbooks. In addition, the questions I usually practice are mainly questions from Dongao handouts (use whichever teacher you listen to). Although there are not many questions on the handout, each question is very representative (most of the questions on the handout are from past exams). We can use these questions to understand the test points behind them and draw inferences by ourselves (for example, single-choice questions can be changed to multiple-choice questions, calculation questions, etc.).

Q3: Which teacher’s course should I take?

Student Xiao Yu: Generally speaking, after candidates buy relevant study materials, they have to decide which teacher’s course to take. A teacher that suits you will make your journey to prepare for the cpa exam easier. So which teacher should I take the course from? It was difficult for me to determine at first. By searching for teachers recommended by others on Weibo, and then looking at short snippets of the teachers’ courses, I finally confirmed the teacher that suited me. The following are the teachers I had when preparing for each subject:

1. Accounting—Teacher Zhang Jingfu. Teacher Fufu’s courses are relatively relaxed and the language is humorous, which makes it easier for me to understand and learn the “difficult” course of accounting (I still remember a few examples of “girlfriends” given by the teacher when I was learning long-term equity investment) .

2. Financial Management—Teacher Zheng Xiaobo. Perhaps among the 6 subjects, my favorite is financial management. Teacher Zheng Xiaobo teaches very detailed knowledge points, and sometimes uses examples to help you understand better. The course contains many classic examples. After learning a new knowledge point, there are often examples to consolidate the knowledge point learned.

3. Audit—Teacher Jin Xinsong. Teacher Xiaojin’s courses are highly summative. After the class study is completed, the candidates will be given classroom sections to let you know what you have learned in this class.

Teacher Xiaojin’s explanation of the examples will allow us to think and analyze from both positive and negative perspectives, which will make us more comprehensive when thinking about problems in the future.

4. Tax Law—Teacher Liu Ying. Tax law was the first subject I took to prepare for the exam. I particularly like Teacher Liu Ying’s teaching methods. I took the course in 2018, so I can’t remember the details clearly. However, I still remember what Teacher Liu Ying said at the end of the course: "Although the road is far, the traveler will soon reach it."

5. Economic Law—Teacher Guo Shoujie. Teacher Guo likes to talk about "Vernacular", which is to use "Vernacular" to make you understand some obscure definitions.

6. I don’t read many strategy courses, so I don’t recommend the teacher (but I use Teacher Xiao Di’s lecture notes).

Q4: What are the preparation methods?

Student Xiao Yu: My main preparation methods are: 1. Study without looking back. Watch the teacher's lessons for each subject (see Q3 for details) and study together with the teaching materials. When watching course videos, I recommend watching them at 1x speed. When studying, don't just "watch videos" blindly because you are worried that there are too many videos to watch. Because the course itself is difficult and difficult to understand, we need to have a solid professional foundation, and every course video we watch is actually laying a solid professional foundation for ourselves. Whether you learn this subject well or not depends on whether your foundation is solid. Whether you have learned the important and difficult points of this subject depends on whether your foundation is solid. After all, the obscure knowledge points are also in the basic knowledge points. It deepened little by little. So, after watching each course video, ask yourself first, have you learned it? Do you understand? Got it? If you know it all, you can move on to the next video. 2. Learn to draw inferences from one instance. My usual practice questions are mainly questions from the teacher's handouts (see Q2 for details). Most of the questions are derived from real questions over the years and are representative to a certain extent (you can use these questions to understand how a certain knowledge point is examined, the difficulty of the test, etc.). We must learn to use these questions. Even if the teacher has explained them once in the course video, we must do it again independently and try to draw inferences from one example and do it again (such as changing single-choice questions to multiple-choice questions, calculation questions, etc. ). 3. Mock exam. After all the courses are completed, we have to give ourselves a mock exam. How to practice exam? According to the examination time of each subject of the CPA each year, we use past papers to simulate the CPA exam. Take financial management as an example. The financial management exam is from 13:00 to 15:30 every afternoon. Then we can choose a free afternoon and use the financial management real questions from previous years to simulate a two-and-a-half-hour exam. This will let you know whether you can complete the questions within the specified time? Will the speed of doing the questions be too slow? Does typing on a computer feel unfamiliar?

Q5: What is the time schedule for exam preparation?

Student Xiao Yu: How to arrange your preparation time reasonably? Please read the following points. 1. Watch at the same time. The so-called reading at the same time means that if we have 3 hours of free time today, we should allocate the time reasonably among the subjects we applied for. For example: If I applied for two subjects, accounting and tax law, and I have 3 hours of study time today, then I can study accounting for 2 hours and tax law for 1 hour according to the difficulty level of each subject. The advantage of this is that it can avoid the boredom caused by always studying one subject every day. (See Q1 for details on the combination of specific exam preparation subjects) 2. I believe that some candidates can’t help but sigh when they learn that the financial management exam is in the afternoon: “It’s easy to get sleepy in the afternoon, but I have to take such a calculation-intensive subject. ". I think so too. People tend to feel sleepy and lose concentration in the afternoon, and financial management is a subject that requires us to keep our heads clear, because if we make a wrong calculation in one step, almost the entire army will be destroyed. Therefore, when we prepare for the exam, it is recommended to prepare in the order of the exam time for each subject. For example, according to the examination time of each subject, we can study auditing and accounting in the morning; financial management and strategy in the afternoon; economic law and tax law in the evening. 3. Some students may not have much time to prepare for the exam and cannot do one, two, or even three rounds of review (the same is true for me). Since there is a lack of time to prepare for the exam, we need to use the time rationally. We can add a round of review. The so-called additional round of review means that after each chapter we complete, we need to summarize the chapter we have studied (such as summarizing what we have learned in this chapter, what are the important and difficult points, and what are the easy test points etc.), and this summary process is actually the consolidation and refining process of the learned knowledge, which is also equivalent to the second round of review. After the summary is completed, learn new chapters. 4. Cannot be omitted. This is very, very important, that is to say, you must practice the exam before taking the exam (see Q4 for details). I usually do a mock exam by myself 1 to 2 weeks before the exam. The purpose of this is to simulate a real exam situation and make yourself more calm and calm during the real exam.

So far, the above is my sharing of my cpa preparation experience. I hope it will be helpful to students who are preparing for the cpa exam?

Finally, share a sentence to encourage yourself! Let’s work hard together!

"If you are also going through a personal struggle at this moment, please believe that the future is promising!"