Concepts are your friend - memorization is not.

You have to understand the material because memorizing a practice test question will do you no good on the exam.

Ditch the Software questions and do the questions by hand out of the book.

I am a doubter, a major pessimist, incredibly lazy, and a horrible test taker with a frightening level of anxiety.  I passed my first two parts after being out of college for more than 9yrs and working my way up all the way to senior manager at a local firm.

No way I could have studied & passed this exam while I worked at the Big 4 - why I quit after 5yrs and moved to a local firm. 

Make an excel worksheet with 10-columns of 40 cells and print.  Answer 10 -20 questions at a time and then go to the answer key and read up on each one you got wrong.

File that worksheet away and then work on the next section.  Start back at the beginning and compare your 2nd test score with your first, hopefully you are scoring higher.  I would take each multiple choice section at least 4 times before sitting.  Scoring a combined 80 - 85%.  Then start doing the software questions and see how you do on unfamiliar questions you have never seen before.  Take a Gleim online review test and see how you do on unfamilar questions.  If you score well you are ready.

For questions you don't know - research the answer - do it by hand on scratch paper with a simple calculator  - do not guess/  Learn the concepts.

Wiley seems to be working for me.  Lots of hard questions and long sections of questions.  Also review the released questions from 2009 & 2008. 

Exam sucks - but its a must if you want to stay in the field and get paid the big bucks.

I appeared for all 4 sections, for the first time this past November and passed just AUD with 80. The rest of my scores were pretty miserable: FAR (64), REG (66) and BEC (73). When I got out of the exam, I felt killed in all these 3 sections. So I knew right then that I was not going to make it. However for AUD, I felt pretty good and the results just show why. Personally I feel that any score below 70 shows that the preperation was just not right. I had 2 such scores. So I have tried analyzing why I screwed up, and it was not difficult to identify the reasons.

Lessons learnt: 

1. Didnt practice enough SIMs. Someone had advised that if you do MCQs well, you will make it past SIMs. But I don't think that advice worked for me. When I saw the Sims in FAR and REG, I almost froze. YOU HV GOT TO PRACTICE SIMs. (Wileys has a good number of Sims.)

2. Someone had also advised that don't get caught up with the study material. Practice MCQs because that's what will be tested in the exam. May be that worked for them, but not for me. YOU HV GOT TO STUDY THE MATERIAL AND UNDERSTAND THE CONCEPTS IN DEPTH, especially for FAR and REG. 

3. I started my preparations with Gleim and never managed to finish all the questions. So technically I attempted the exams without sufficient revision. Some of the chapters I had reviewed a couple of times, but not all, and that's just not the way to crack this exam. YOU HV GOT TO REVISE ENOUGH NUMBER OF MCQs.

4. Despite having the option to take a Gleim final test online, I didn't do it for any of the sections. Neither did I practice the AICPA released questions which is freely available, because I just assumed that all the big review courses anyway cover those questions. DO NOT BE SCARED TO TEST YOURSELF OUTSIDE YOUR REVIEW CD.

5. The biggest reason for my failed scores was too much planning but lack of execution. Secondly, my time management sucked.

Hence my recommendation is - try doing an honest assessment of why things didn’t work for you. Then you have to make that extra effort to change your strategy. Don’t just rush into taking exams. Take a window off, if you must, but get it right the next time. Failing over and over does not help your confidence.

I stick to the principle that all review courses are good enough to get you the 75 points. But you have to do everything they say. You cannot get lucky by cutting short with excuses that something is less important than others.

I wish you the best for all your future exams.

Great point!  All of the major review courses are in business for a reason; if followed correctly, you will pass.  It all comes down to the effort you're willing to put forth.