Here’s Your Open Thread For the Third CPA Exam Score Release of Q3 2019

Posted on September 10, 2019September 10, 2019 by Adrienne Gonzalez

For those of you playing along at home, this score release leaves us with one more for this quarter and five total remaining for the year. Where did this year go? You know what, I’m not going to complain.

On September 10, 2019, NASBA received and processed the following scores from the @AICPA. pic.twitter.com/jjipmhoJ8i

— NASBA (@NASBA) September 10, 2019

In a little over two months, 2019’s CPA exam testing will be officially over. I feel like I probably say this too much (Lord knows I’ve tried to hammer it home over the years) but for the love of God, if you plan to test before the year is over SCHEDULE THAT SHIT ASAP. The fourth quarter is historically one of the most difficult to schedule as far as your ideal dates and testing locations are concerned so unless you’re a glutton for punishment, get on it.

Your remaining score release dates for 2019 are as follows:

September 19
November 5
November 22
December 10
December 19

As previously mentioned, NASBA has been killing it this year on getting scores out on time and even early in some cases. Although a wise CPA exam candidate always plans for the unexpected, you should feel pretty confident scheduling your anxiety around upcoming score release dates.

And just think, by this time next year we probably won’t even be having this score release conversation as continuous testing could be in full swing. As far as we’re aware that’s still on track to make its debut mid-2020 but we’ve yet to hear specifics on that. Let’s just focus on getting through this year and getting those 75s, eh?

CPA Exam

Here’s What You Need to Know About Authoritative Literature and Research on the CPA Exam

Adrienne Gonzalez
May 7, 2010

Though it doesn’t get much coverage in CPA exam study guides (for a reason, which we’ll get to later), your ability as a CPA exam candidate to tackle research on each exam section might make or break your overall performance.

When planning out the amount of time you will spend on each exam section (i.e. 45 minutes on each simulation as a general rule), you can rest easy if you save the research portion of each sim for the very end. It is believed to be worth only one point so if you can’t get to it, don’t worry about it too much. Focus on the written communications as those are worth 10 points – or one of them is, and you don’t know which one so take care of both and save the research for last only if you have the time.

As for practicing, newer CPA Review practice software already has this function built in.

If you would like to practice manually, you’ll have to take your active NTS to register for 6 months’ worth of access to the professional literature from cpa-exam.org. With this, you can search through AICPA Professional Standards and FASB Pronouncements to familiarize yourself with accounting regs, though you are still encouraged to take the tutorial CPA exam on the cpa-exam.org website as the research on its own is not exactly representative of the research function in the exam environment.

If that is not enough practice, book a 30 minute test run with Prometric to check out your testing center and the computer you’ll be using.

Anyway, don’t obsess too much over the literature. Like the tax code, a lot of your “answers” will be provided in the questions, it’s just up to you to look into what the questions are asking.

Think about it: CPAs have access to volumes of regs and standards in their careers, it is not imperative that they memorize each one. The CPA exam is meant to test your understanding of accounting fundamentals, not how well you can memorize 200 FASBs and spit them back out.