How to Tackle Research Questions

Roger Philipp, CPA presents:
HOW TO TACKLE RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Here’s another CPA exam tip. How to tackle research questions on the CPA exam. Generally on the CPA exam for FAR and for Audit, you’re going to have seven task-based simulations. On Regulation you’re going to have six. For all three of those exams, at least one is going to be on research, although I’ve had many students who have had two of the research questions for those exams. How do you handle those questions? First of all, you treat it like a Google search. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to type in, looking for key terms that you’re going to search, then you’re going to search within. Now it’s not an all-or-nothing type scoring. What happens is they’re looking generally for four things: Topic, subtopic, section and paragraph. So when you’re typing in, for example, “What cost should be included in the evaluation of inventory?”, that would be for a FAR question, they’re looking for the topic, subtopic and section. Those are the most important. Now, the icing on the cake, that would be the last issue, which is the paragraph. But you could still max out on the points by getting three of the four. For example, you might be looking for something called ASC, Accounting Standard Codification 330-10-30 and the icing on the cake for the paragraph would be nine. That’s your CPA exam tip.