If you become a CPA you will be able to certify financial statements. This can be an essential element of running your own accounting practice. Where many people get fooled is that at the time when it would be most possible for them to pass the CPA exam they have no thought of opening their own accounting firm. You may be working for a CPA who signs the financial statements and tax returns. If you are comfortable with that employer you may think why bother spending many hours studying for an eventuality that may never pass.

What you may not realize is that the CPA exam is a test of a large segment of information that you may not remember after college because much of it is not relevant on a daily basis. Ask most CPA's when the last time they calculated Earnings Per Share and other owners equity formulas. So as time progresses the exam becomes more difficult simply because you forget the information.

Most of us when we finish college have very few obligations such as a family. It is hard to imagine how much free time will be limited by a significant other and children. The CPA exam is not as much a measure of inteligence as it is the ability to memorize massive amounts of information ( I hope that does not insult a CPA who passed the exam and is deluding themselves to think it means they are smart ). Also your career demand will be greater as your abilities increase. Simply put the more you know the more jobs you can do and will be assigned. So overtime increases the longer you are working. This means even less free time. So it is likely that when you graduate you have the most free time to study for the CPA exam than you will ever have as you get older.

The CPA exam is composed of a lot of multiple choice questions. The nature of these questions is the questions themselves are trciky in how they are worded. Some of the question from prior years are repeated or changed slightly.

So the best thing is to do tons of multiple choice questions and keep an exact record of the ones you got right or wrong. The wrong ones whould be retested after a little while. Then if there are questions you got wrong multiple times keep them in a list that will be used as a super cram test in the days leading up to the exam.

The more questions you do the better you will get at the questions and the information. Set a goal of doing ALL the questions avaialble. Compute the days to the exam and do a reaonable amount of questions that will result in you finishing all the questions at least once before the exam. Also leave time to review and retest questions you got wrong the first time and to complete the master list of super wrong questions.

States are different in their requirements in taking parts at the same time. I stronglt recommend that you take no more exams at a time then you have to. When you are doing large amounts of information divide an conquer is a great strategy.