Study Tips
CMA Exam – Second Attempt Materials
The CMA Exam results came out last week and while there were many candidates who were successful, there were also some candidates who did not pass their exams. If you are one of these candidates, I encourage you to continue your studies and take a realistic look at how much you think you need to study to pass the next time you take the exam. Based on this assessment, you can determine when you should plan on re-taking the exam. As a general guideline, if you scored 320 or above, you are close to being ready to pass, and should probably plan to take the exam as soon as you are able to. If you scored less than 320, then you may want to plan a few more months of studying before you take the exam again.
Do you need a second Test Bank?
After results come out, we get requests from candidates who are looking to purchase a second Test Bank to study from. It is my experience that a second Test Bank does not add a lot of value to your preparations. All of the main providers use released CMA Exam questions as the foundation of their Test Banks. We all add some of our own questions to the Test Bank as well, but the majority of questions between providers will be the same. Therefore, even if you purchase a second Test Bank, you will not be getting a second set of questions to prepare with.
What additional materials should you consider?
If you are looking for additional study materials, I often recommend that you purchase Videos, especially if you do not have Videos already. While there are differences between the Textbooks of the main providers, a second Textbook is still a book that you read. Some candidates learn more effectively by listening or watching, so if you purchase Videos, you are getting a new way of learning the material, and a new perspective on that material.
Do you already have all of the materials from a provider?
If you already have a Textbook, Videos and a Test Bank and are still looking for additional materials, you should look to purchase the study tool that you think will be most beneficial to you. If you did not always understand the Textbook that you have read, another Textbook will bring value to you. If you did not like the Videos that you have, someone else’s Videos will provide greater value to you. If you have a Test Bank that does not have answer explanations to the incorrect answers, another Test Bank with incorrect answer explanations will be very helpful to you.
Use free samples before purchasing
Before you purchase a second of any study tools, make certain to use the free samples that all of the main providers offer so that you can see the Textbook, Videos and/or Test Bank you are looking to add.
Don’t give up!
While we would always prefer to pass an exam on our first attempt, the global pass rate for the CMA Exams is only about 50%. If you are in the position of having to take the exam again, I encourage you to keep striving for your goal of becoming a CMA. And while additional study tools may be helpful, make certain that you think carefully about what you already have and what would be helpful to you. This analysis will help you make good decisions about what additional investments you need to make to pass the exam on your next attempt.
Brian Hock, CMA, CIA
CMA Exam Videos are on 40% sale right now. Check out the free samples here: CMA Exam Videos.
Exam Preparation Using Exam Content: Planning
In this post, we look at preparing for an exam using some of the same concepts that you might study while preparing for the CMA (Certified Management Accountant) or CIA (Certified Internal Auditor) Exam.
Planning
Planning is a topic covered in many professional exams because of how important planning is to a business. Without long-term planning, a company does not know what it is trying to accomplish. Every department within a company needs to have a plan too so that it can do what it needs to do to help the company achieve its objectives. Even individual employees need to have a plan so that they can help their department achieve its goals. With proper planning, a company can ensure that all of its components are moving in the same direction.
Just like a company, a candidate for a professional exam also needs to have plans, which we can break down into Long-Term, Medium-Term, and Short-Term.
Long-Term Plan
The first plan that you need is a strategic plan that encompasses what you would like to be doing in 5 years in your career, and which professional certification will best help you achieve your plan. You need to know:
- What are the certifications in your chosen career?
- What are the certifications most highly valued in the country where you want to work?
- Which certifications does your company want for its employees?
Once you have selected a certification, you need to find determine:
- Do you have the necessary education required by the exam? If not, how will you get it?
- Do you have the necessary experience in order to be certified? If not, where can you achieve the experience?
- What is the syllabus for the exam and what will you need to study to pass the exams?
Then, you are ready to create a medium-term plan to pass the exams and get any education or experience that you need.
Medium-Term Plan
The medium-term plan should set up a time frame for when you will pass the exams and get the needed education or experience if you don’t already have them. You need to find out what the average time is for preparing for the exam, and when the exams are offered.
For example, you may decide that it will take you 6 months to prepare for each part of the CMA Exam, and so you determine that you want to take Part 1 in early January and Part 2 in late June. Or, maybe you decide that it will take about 3 months to prepare for each Part of the CIA Exam, so you plan to take them in January, April, and July.
You should also decide the order in which you will take the different Parts of the exam. I usually recommend that you start with the Part that you feel will be easiest for you.
Short-Term Plan
You are now ready to start your short-term plans, including making a study schedule for each week. You should know when during the week you will be studying and set these times aside. If you are going to study Tuesday evening for 3 hours (for example), then when someone asks you to do something Tuesday evening, your answer should be that you are busy. Your scheduled study times should be committed appointments that you will not cancel except for an emergency.
Having a schedule will make all of your time less stressful. If you know when you will study, then in the time that you are not studying you can relax without thinking that you should be studying; your study time and your personal time can stay separate.
Just like a plan that helps a business achieve its goals, proper planning will make achieving your goal of earning a certification much easier.
What are some of your planning strategies to help you stay on track with your studies?
Brian Hock, CMA, CIA
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CMA Essay Study Tip – Make a Time Budget
Brian Hock gives advice about how to overcome some of the stress that candidates feel on the essays and problems on the CMA Exam:
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MCQ Study Tip – Making Educated Guess
How to Make a Good Guess Quickly
On the CMA and CIA Exams, it is important to answer every question, even if you have to guess. One of the reasons for this is because there is no penalty for an incorrect answer.
However, rather than just randomly guessing from the 4 choices, sometimes you can quickly narrow your choices down to three or even only two possibly correct answers. Having a 33% or 50% chance of guessing the answer correctly is better than 25%!
Watch the video to learn the words to keep in mind as you make a quick educated guess, and other tips from Brian Hock.
If you are already a CMA, CIA, or CPA Exam candidate, you may be interested in more study tips from the HOCK team. If you haven’t started studying yet, check out today’s deals and get unlimited access to the HOCK materials.
Multiple-Choice Questions – CMA and CIA Exam Advice
Brian Hock talks about the need to answer every question on the CMA and CIA Exams and the strategy to use for long and difficult questions.
Do you know how is the CMA and CIA Exam scores are determined? Learn everything you need to know!
Slowly, and then all of a sudden!
Brian Hock talks about the idea of “slowly and then all of a sudden.” This expression is used to describe how someone falls asleep, and was used by Mark Twain to describe how he went bankrupt. Brian sees a lot of similarities between this idea and how CMA, CIA, and CPA students learn some of the exam topics.
In this video, Brian also shares his personal experience of sudden understanding with the statement of cash flows almost 25 years ago.
Three Stages of Passing the Exam
When it comes to passing certification exams, every candidate has to learn the same content. Whether you prefer to prepare by reading, listening, or watching, you must learn the content and be able to answer the questions that are asked on exam. Unlike preparing, there is only one testing method for the exam regardless of how you prefer to learn or communicate.
There are three stages of preparation that you must go through in order to pass the exam: learning, practicing, and passing.
1. Learning
As long as you are learning what you need to know, how you learn is not as important. You may choose to use a textbook as your primary learning tool, or you may prefer videos or audios. But, no matter what method you use to learn, you need to use materials that are designed specifically for your exam. There are a number of different providers for most exams, and every provider has the same knowledge and information about exam content (regardless of what some companies may claim or advertise). While any materials from these exam prep providers should be geared specifically to the exam, it is always good to have a copy of the syllabus that you can refer to as you study.
On the other hand, if you use materials that are not exam-specific, you run the risk of studying a lot of things that are not on the exam, or not studying important topics that are on the exam.
How many hours you need to spend learning will depend on your background, education, and experience. You may find that different topics require different amounts of time to learn. Do not let yourself get locked into a specific number of hours. If you think you have learned a topic a bit faster than you expected, that is OK. Similarly, if it takes a bit longer than expected, that is OK too. The key is to learn the content, not stick rigidly to a time budget that may not lead you to success on the exam.
Of course, keep in mind that for any exam that the passing mark is usually 70-75%, so you do not need to learn 100% of the details about 100% of the topics on the syllabus. You just want to make certain that you are closer to 100% coverage than 75% coverage so that you have a margin of error.
After you have learned the material, you need to “activate” it with practice.
2. Practicing
In order to pass the exam, you need to make certain that the knowledge that you learned is “activated” for the exam and the way that exam questions are asked. The best way to do this is to practice past exam questions, which will enable you to learn how the questions have been asked in the past and the language that is used in the questions. This practice will also help you see what the examiners have thought are the most important questions within a topic. For example, on the CMA exam, process costing is a big topic, but in looking at past questions you will see that the calculation of equivalent units produced has the most past exam questions about it.
When you are practicing questions, here are a few things you should keep in mind:
- More questions is not automatically better. The questions that you are practicing need to be on-topic and similar to the questions that are asked on the exam. It is easy to do a lot of multiple-choice questions that are just definitional in nature, but if the exam does not ask definitional questions, then those questions will not help you pass the exam.
- Do not memorize questions or answers. Ideally, your software will change the order of the answers when it repeats a question, but even in that case, you do not want to memorize that the question about Johnson Co. is $600,000. What you want to be able to do is understand why the correct answer is correct. On the real exam, the questions will be different than what you practiced. If the real exam question is changed in what it asks from a similar practice question, unless you truly understand the topic, you will not be able to get that exam question correct.
- Use the incorrect choices as a learning tool. Just as you need to understand why the correct answer is correct, in many questions you can also practice by being able to understand why the incorrect answer is incorrect. In some cases, changing just one word in the question would make one of the incorrect choices correct.
While you are practicing the questions, using flash cards (whether you prepared them or they were provided with your materials) is also a good way to practice what you learned.
Sometimes when you are practicing, you may realize that you did not fully learn a topic or two. This normal, and not a problem. When you do not understand the questions for a topic, just go back and look at the textbook or watch the videos for that topic to make certain that you have learned it. Many times, when you re-learn a topic after doing some questions you can learn it much better because you have an understanding of what you need to know having answered some of the practice questions.
3. Passing
After you have completed your learning and practicing, it is time for the third stage. But, before you take your real exam, you need to pass your mock exam. The mock exam should resemble what will be on your real exam, and you will want to complete the mock exam in the same time limits as the real exam. If you have 3 hours to complete your exam, you need to take your mock exam in 3 continuous hours all in one sitting. You want to go through the process of sitting for three hours answering exam questions so that you know what to expect when you take the real exam.
A very common question we get is what score on the mock exam indicates being ready for the real exam. We suggest that you want to be at least 5-10% above the pass rate for the exam, which usually works out to 80-85%. Higher is better, but keep in mind that repeating the mock exam to get a better score is probably going to be counter-productive due to memorization. Instead, use the mock exam as a final assessment of any weak topics that you still need to go back and review.
Once you have learned the material, practiced what you learned, and passed your mock exam, the last step is to pass the real exam. Think of the real exam as being the final step in your success. Having prepared properly, you can go into your exam confident and relaxed, rather than stressed. You are ready to pass!
Brian Hock, CMA, CIA
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How Much Should I Study for the Exam?
How much should I study for the CMA, CPA, or CPA?
This is one of the most common questions that people ask us, and it is a very important question. If you do not study enough, you will probably fail the certification exam. If you study too much, you will probably pass the exam, but you will not have used your time efficiently.
How much should you study so that it is enough, but not too much?
Let’s look at this from short, medium, and long-term perspectives.
On a daily basis (the short-term)
You usually should not study more than 2 hours per day. Practicing a little bit every day is far more efficient and effective than studying a lot on only one or two days a week. There are some topics that require time for the pieces to “fall into place.” For most people, this process cannot be hurried in one long study session. The longer you review in any one session, the less you will learn in that additional time – this is the law of diminishing marginal returns.
On a weekly basis (the medium-term)
It is important that you spend 30-60 minutes reviewing the topics that you have already studied. One of the challenges of preparing is remembering the topics that you studied early on, usually months before the exam. In this review, you should do some questions from the topics that you have already learned (15-20 will be enough) and also scan through the textbook to remind yourself about the terms and topics.
Overall (the long-term)
We cannot give you a total amount of time that you need to study because it is so different for each person based on your specific education, experience, study speed, etc. The mock exam can give you a good sense of how prepared you are, but you will need to be honest with yourself in making an assessment of your level of readiness.
Assess Your Level of Readiness
- How confident are you when answering a question? Do you KNOW that choice C is correct, or do you only THINK (or hope) that it is correct?
- For theory questions, do you know why the incorrect choices are incorrect? If you know why they are incorrect, that is a very good indication that you understand the topic.
- Would you be able to explain the topic to someone else? If you know it well enough to explain it clearly to someone else, you know that topic very well.
While there is no magic number of hours that you must study, you can follow our strategies to help you make the most of your study time and honestly assess yourself to know when you are prepared to pass your exam.
Now that you know how much you should study, the question is how to study. And the answer is you have to make a schedule for success and peace of mind.
If you don’t have your exam prep materials yet, you can choose them right now:
From Brian’s Desk: Exam Character
The True Character
When we talk about the character of a person, we are talking about “who” they are. A person’s character tells us their values, what motivates them, and how they will respond in a given situation. While someone may be able to act in a way contradictory to their character for a short period of time, eventually their true character will reveal itself.
The UK company Brighton Rock makes candy with the name of the company embedded throughout the entire candy. Even after you have eaten the outer edge of the candy, the name of the company is still visible. Thus, this candy shows what character is – something embedded throughout a person.
What Is the Exam Character and Why is it Important?
Just as having good character is important for a person, having good exam character is very important to passing the professional certification exam. If you only have a shallow understanding of the material, you may be able to get some of the questions correct, but not enough to pass the exam. If your knowledge is deep, you will be able to think and apply the concepts that you have learned to new situations and be able to answer any question asked on the exam.
How to Develop Your Exam Character?
Like personal character, exam character does not come quickly or easily. We need to study and practice and be willing to spend time to make certain that we really understand the topics tested on the exam, and not just shortcuts to answer practice questions. Exam character does not come from shortcuts or study “secrets,” but rather it comes from your hard work and dedication to studying.
How Does HOCK Help?
In addition to helping you pass the exam, what you learn in building your exam character becomes part of you and part of your skills and knowledge that you will be able to use in your career. At HOCK, we help you build your exam character one topic at a time until you are ready to not only pass the CMA, CIA, or CPA exam, but also put your new skills to use every day long after you have achieved your certification.
Brian Hock, CMA, CIA
The Day Of Your CMA, CIA, or CPA Exam
In this video, Brian discusses some tips for exam day: how to eat, how to dress, how to prepare mentally, what to bring with you to the exam center, and offers some final words of encouragement.
If the exam date is not coming up just yet, check out the following videos:
