(Posted January 2025)

Each year, we have many candidates tell us that they do not feel adequately prepared technically to write the CPA Common Final Examination (CFE). They wish they had more time to complete technical review before jumping into case writing. If this is you, start now! Get organized and start your technical review, so you are as prepared as possible for your upcoming CFE attempt.

Here are some tips and tricks on how to get started and how to improve retention during your technical review sessions.

Active Studying

Active studying is defined as a method or strategy where the student cognitively engages and interacts with the material they are learning. In contrast, passive studying is consuming information by merely reading or listening to the material.1 Therefore, you want to ensure that you are doing more than just reading a textbook or listening to a tutorial on the technical topic.

With that in mind, here are some active learning strategies you can apply to enhance your technical review sessions and improve your knowledge retention:

1. Set goals

Setting goals for your technical review sessions may help to hold you accountable to complete those goals. For some people, this is motivating and will help ensure that they work through the material at pace. For others, this can be demotivating if goals are not achieved, so this may not be the method for you if you get completely derailed as soon as you do not meet a goal.

Make sure your goals are SMART – define a specific and realistic actionable plan, make sure you can measure progress, and ensure that they encompass the time you have available to complete your technical review.

2. Write and read out loud

As you study, be sure to write out the key points you need to retain in a notebook or on cue cards. Writing by hand is associated with stronger neural encoding and memory retrieval.

Furthermore, as you review the topics again, read your notes out loud. The dual effect of speaking and hearing helps encode the information in your memory more strongly.

3. Test yourself

Quizzing yourself after your technical review sessions will help engage your retrieval skills. The problem with repeated re-reading, which is what most students do to study, is that it gives you a false sense of familiarity. You feel like you know the material, but you have never tried retrieving it.2 To ensure information has reached your longer-term memory, consider waiting before quizzing yourself to ensure you have retained the information.

4. Study in a group

We know that many of you are used to working on your own and you like it that way. However, studying in a group can help with the knowledge learning and retention process in several ways.

It can help hold you accountable to make time for your technical review. It also provides you with a source of help when you do not understand a topic. Conversely, it also helps you reinforce your learning if you can help someone else by teaching them a topic they are struggling with. Finally, this can help with quizzing by having someone else quiz you and vice versa.

5. Take breaks

A common scenario is realizing you are behind on your technical review and having a lengthy cram session. However, your brain can only retain so much information at a time. Taking breaks and spreading your learning across several days will help you better retain your learning by giving your brain a chance to refresh and be ready to accept new information. When your brain rests, it repeatedly replays compressed memories of what was just practiced, allowing it to better absorb what was just learned.

6. Space your learning

Ongoing review is necessary to move the technical knowledge from your short-term to your long-term memory. Return to topics you have previously studied later on to practice your active recall of the topic and assist with your prolonged knowledge retention. For example, if you reviewed your personal tax knowledge this month, come back and do a quick review of that topic again next month to ensure that you still have good retention of those concepts.

When Should You Complete Your Technical Review?

If you are taking Capstone 1, you should be performing your technical review prior to start of the Capstone 1 module. This technical review time early in the process will help improve your performance on cases sooner.

If you are not taking Capstone 1, you should perform your technical review from January to March if you are writing the May CFE or from April to June if you are writing the September CFE.

In either situation, you should set aside 4-6 hours each week to review your technical.

How Should You Complete Your Technical Review?

Focus on the technical competency areas and topics where you are weakest. Our natural tendency is to gravitate to where we are strongest as that reinforces our confidence, but that is likely an area where you do not need a great deal of review, so it will not be a good use of your limited time. Use the technical resources you have available to you to brush up on your technical but be careful to focus your review at the right level. You do not need to memorize the less common technical details since you are looking to apply this knowledge in a case writing scenario, and not on MCQs.

If you are looking for technical resources, consider our CPA Competency Map Study Notes publication. Our CFE Prep courses also include our Scenario Flowcharts workbook, which walks you through the key technical and writing process to apply for the most commonly tested topics on the CFE, and our Skill Drills, which are mini case-based exercises designed to help reinforce your technical review.

Conclusion

Technical review is not easy nor is it a lot of fun. However, it is the process of learning, forgetting, retrieving, and relearning that eventually registers the knowledge in our long-term memory.3 Stay disciplined, and you will have all the technical knowledge you need to write the CFE this year.

1 “Active Study Strategies.” College of General Studies, University of Pittsburgh

2 Henry Roediger, PhD, as quoted in the American Psychological Association article “Study smart” by Lea Winerman

3 American Psychological Association