Written By Guest Blogger KP.
Looking back, there were a few important things I did with my studying to help me pass the EA Exam. Since I work full-time and go to grad school, it worked best for me to find about 6 weeks to cram studying in, rather than studying a little here and there. That’s what I did originally, and studying went really slow for the first couple study units. I found that my retention rate was about 5-6 weeks, and anything that I studied before that tended to get lost in my memory. Doing the review problems at the end of the study units was like seeing the information for the first time.
The Part 1 exam took me a bit longer than Part 3, which I had taken first. I finished Part 3 in about an hour, and that included going back and reviewing all 100 questions to make sure I didn’t make any silly errors. I finished Part 1 in a little under 2 hours. Unfortunately, my thought process during the exam was almost self-defeating. Before the exam, I spent a few hours cramming all of the little details . . . AGI limits, exact numbers for the EIC, all the credit and deductions amounts, etc. I was a little disappointed to not get any of these in the first 20 or so questions! If you have been following my blog posts, you know that I have mentioned a few times how important it is not to forget the easier, seemingly littler details. Don’t glaze over the seemingly easier preparation and representation details mentioned in the study unit. I was second guessing myself on these questions because when studying, I thought there was no way I would forget this information.
That being said, I wish I didn’t stress as much about remembering all the exact income limits, credits, and deductions. There was a lot less of this information tested on the exam than I thought there would be, and Gleim definitely over-prepares you. If you are getting at least 80-85% on the software review questions, which I was, you should be good to go. My overall study plan with this exam was listening to the audios, then reading the outline, and then answering the study questions at the end of each study unit. Once I was done with the book, I moved on to the software questions and then the online multiple-choice and true-false questions. I plan to follow this same path for my final exam – Business!
