Welcome to BEC Study Plan Talk!

This is the place where you can put your BEC study plan in writing and put it in action.  Talk about your broad-range plans for tackling BEC as well as your nitty-gritty day-to-day study plans.  Compare and contrast with others about what works/worked for them and help each other "tweak" study plans accordingly.

Don't forget to check out the forum's area on Study Tools & Review Programs...that's the place where you can discuss, compare & contrast review programs, books and software.  You can find it here.
http://www.cpanet.com/cpa_forum/forum_topics.asp?FID=4

Good Luck with your Studies!
CPAnet

Here's something to help you brainstorm and possibly jumpstart your own study plan.  Don't forget to come back here and put your plan in writing! 

It's a visual Studying Methodology tool forum member cpasunj created for his BEC & REG study plan and you can find it here, especially check out the Routine Studying section.  It was great to see "visit CPAnet Forum" under Motivation!

Here are a few examples to give you some ideas...

Example #1 is the dialog that takes place in the post How to Study
The post does not address a specific section of the exam, but instead addresses overall strategy and planning and has great dialog...hopefully it will give you some good ideas for your study plan: http://www.cpanet.com/cpa_forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=21473&am p;am p;am p;am p;am p;am p;am p;PN=0&TPN=1

Example #2 is a specific plan from nic4747 in the How to Study post above:

You must develop a study plan and keep detailed track of your progress with spreadsheets or other things.  This is more important then the actual studying part!  Below is what I did, hope it helps. 

FIRST REVIEW

Step 1.  Read the chapter and type it into an outline format in Microsoft Word.  These are your goals:

• Condense the material (try restating in your own words)
• Try to understand some of the material as you are converting it to an outline (you do not have to understand it all, do not get discouraged)
• Make the outline organized and easy to reference in the future, your goal is to get the outline to a point where you can reference the outline instead of the book if you have a question later on

Step 2.  Do the multiple choice questions and simulations at the end of each chapter (concentrate on the MCQs).  Put your results in a spreadsheet so you can indicate your strong, weak, and shaky areas.  Don’t get discouraged if you get a lot of them wrong.  If you see what you think is an important point, make it into a flash card (or just type a bunch of questions and answers into a list in Word like I did.)  Quiz yourself on these every day. 

Step 3.  Go through your outline and make flashcards out of any important points (or add them to question and answer list).  

Step 4.  Move on to the next chapter and repeat until done with all chapters

SECOND REVIEW

Step 1.  Go through all multiple choice questions again.  The objective is not just to answer the question correctly, but to understand the concepts behind the questions.  For concepts you are strong on that you will not forget before the exam, mark on your spreadsheet you are done with them so you don’t do them again.  Keep adding material you need to know to the list of questions and answers that you have been quizzing yourself on. 

Step 2.  Go through all your typed outlines and remove information you definitely know.  Try to condense the outline for each chapter down to about 1-2 pages. 

Step 3.  By now your list of questions and answers is probably pretty big, start to remove the questions you know the answers to by heart. 

THIRD REVIEW

Just keep doing the steps in the second review over and over until you have absorbed most of the info.  My goal was to really know 90% of the material on the exam.  There are some EXTREMELY difficult concepts in each section that are such a small part of the exam it was not worth studying in detail.  If you decide to skip something I would try to at least learn some basic stuff about it.  But if you really know through and through 85-90% of the material on the exam, you should be fine unless you get really unlucky and get a graded simulation on the 10-15% you don’t know.  Even then you may be ok and end up passing.  Just remember to use the research tab for the stuff you don’t know!

So...what's your BEC Study Plan???

Start talking...who's first?