Talk:Uniform Certified Public Accountant Examination

CPA exam history: calculators?

I sat for the Nov. 1985 exam and have a vague recollection of either being allowed to use calculators, or being furnished with them. Could be wrong. Billbrock 05:53, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

Hi Billbrock,

Assuming you indeed took (and presumably passed?) the CPA Exam in 1985, you should not have been furnished a calculator. [If you were, you may be protected under a Whistlebower Law, though I'm sure the statute of limitations has passed....  ;-) ]

I worked on the Uniform CPA Examination at the AICPA from 1985-2005. It was seven years after I arrived that calculators were allowed to be used by candidates (1992). Until then, the assumption was that calculations were simple enough so that theycould be done manually, and scratch paper was provided to candidates for that purpose. However, in 1989, a major practice study of the CPA profession determined that manual calculation skills had become relatively less important for licensing purposes (since most CPAs were expected to document significant calculations with computer printouts or with calculator tapes). This finding, combined with other factors, resulted in the inclusion of calculators for those portions of the exam requiring extensive calculations.

For security purposes, the AICPA provided each candidate with a color-coded calculator. The color was changed for each administration for security purposes. Each board of accountancy had the option of collecting the calculators or allowing candidates to take them home. Calculators became obsolete in 2004 when the computer-based CPA Exam was introduced.

So feel free to tell your grandchildren that "back in the day," you had to do all your calculations on the CPA Exam using paper and pencil!

Drbb01 (talk) 14:16, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

The law tested on the exam

I made a correction on the law tested on the exam. The exam most certainly does test STATE law, not just Federal law. Contract law and the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) are state laws. What I think may have been confusing the issue is that the exam does not test the laws of a specific state, such as Georgia or Nebraska or California.

If you're testing contract law, you're testing mostly state law. If you're testing UCC (which is also heavily contract law), you're virtually exclusively testing state law. There's no such thing as a "federal" UCC. The UCC is enacted by each state legislature, on a state by state basis, and there are some variations from state to state. Yours, Famspear 21:42, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

PS: The law of agency is still tested as well. That's primarily state law. Famspear 21:59, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Results?

Does anyone know of any statistics regarding results, preferably as specific as possible, by window? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Myndaen (talk • contribs) 23:14, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Warning to CPA Candidates: A controversial new NASBA/AICPA fingerprinting mandate called "BIMS" was quietly implemented on January 1 2008. According to the AICPA, all candidates who sit for any part of the CPA exam now are fingerprinted prior to each exam section, and the fingerprints are stored in a new global fingerprint database which is shared with the foreign data-broker Choicepoint. Industry insiders (Accounting Today, WebCPA) report this has sparked significant opposition from concerned CPAs and from within the State Boards due to the risk to candidates' privacy and possible identity theft ("CPA Exam Fingerprinting Provokes Controversy" [1].

ChoicePoint/ReedElsevier (Wikipedia: [2]) has had significant privacy and legal issues in the recent past, including being hit with the largest fine in the history of the US Federal Trade Commission for privacy violations [3]

I think the points raised in this section are both notable and well sourced. It's noteable because it's relatively uncommon to be finger-printed and there are well documented privacy concerns with a company involved in the data collection. The sources also appear to be reputable. As long as it meets these two criteria, then I think it deserves to stay. That said, I think the original text was less than neutural and needed to be toned down. I've attempted to tone it down and 'NPOV' it, but this may need further refinement. What should not be occuring is an edit war on the page itself. Rather than 'responding' to this text or just removing it, please edit it to remove any POV and try to keep it to the facts. Seth ze (talk) 01:07, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Test Duration

I just registered for the FAR examination today, and the Prometric Appointment Summary states that the Appointment Duration is 4.5 hours for this section. The article currently stats that this test's duration is 4.0 hours. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 167.234.12.79 (talk) 19:31, 14 October 2009 (UTC)