Kfan wrote: Well, AICPA publicly doesn't want to acknowledge that it's curved. Since some people are getting scores of 99 on these exams, do you really think that they got 99% of the questions right on such a hard exam? I don't think so. Even Gleim says in their testing materials that you just need to score in about the top 45% of test takers.    Anyways, don't worry about this too much. The key is studying hard and being prepared.

The grade you receive is not a percentage but rather a percentile...as in you did better than that percentage of the people taking the exam.  The AICPA has publicly said it isn't curved but your grade does somewhat depend on what others do.  Remember that before each graded question appears on your exam, it was a pretest question in the past.  That's how they assign a point value to it; some are worth less than one and others more than one.  It's up to you to get it right or wrong but it is completely out of your hands as to how many points you actually earn since that depends on how others performed on the question. 

After they sum and weight all the areas (MC-70%, SIMS-20%, WRITTEN-10%), they rank all the scores and set percentile ranges. You have to have done better than 75% of the testakes to have passed.  My problem is, suppose a bunch of really great candidates took it in your testing window and generally ended up with averages of 85%.  If you scored 83%, chances are you won't pass?? That's just wrong on so many levels.  Granted, many people who take the exam are not even remotely prepared so that's unlikely to happen.

Kfan wrote: Well, AICPA publicly doesn't want to acknowledge that it's curved. Since some people are getting scores of 99 on these exams, do you really think that they got 99% of the questions right on such a hard exam? I don't think so. Even Gleim says in their testing materials that you just need to score in about the top 45% of test takers.    Anyways, don't worry about this too much. The key is studying hard and being prepared.

The grade you receive is not a percentage but rather a percentile...as in you did better than that percentage of the people taking the exam.  The AICPA has publicly said it isn't curved but your grade does somewhat depend on what others do.  Remember that before each graded question appears on your exam, it was a pretest question in the past.  That's how they assign a point value to it; some are worth less than one and others more than one.  It's up to you to get it right or wrong but it is completely out of your hands as to how many points you actually earn since that depends on how others performed on the question. 

After they sum and weight all the areas (MC-70%, SIMS-20%, WRITTEN-10%), they rank all the scores and set percentile ranges. You have to have done better than 75% of the testakes to have passed.  My problem is, suppose a bunch of really great candidates took it in your testing window and generally ended up with averages of 85%.  If you scored 83%, chances are you won't pass?? That's just wrong on so many levels.  Granted, many people who take the exam are not even remotely prepared so that's unlikely to happen.