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| November, 2003 | The
Monthly Newspaper of the NYSSCPA |
Vol.
6, No. 11 |
AICPA Identifies Critical Skills Needed to Ace CPA Exam
The Board of Examiners of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) has published a report identifying five critical skills upon which entry-level CPA candidates will be evaluated on the new computerized CPA exam. The five skills—analysis, judgment, communication, research and understanding—are assessed under four content areas: audit and attestation; accounting and reporting; regulation; and business environment and concepts.
Issued on April 14, “Skills for the Uniform CPA Examination” offers approved skill definitions as well as target weights for each skill category, so you can decide where to focus your studying.
Below are summaries
of the five critical skills extracted from the list, which is available
online at
www.cpa-exam.org/download/CBT_skills_weights_final.pdf.
Analysis
If a student knows how to “organize, process and interpret data,” he can develop options for decision-making. The accounting profession expects strength in identifying issues, classifying transactions, categorizing topics and understanding information relevancy. Questions under this skill category will require students to “recognize business-related issues and their relevance to evaluating an entity’s financial condition,” for example.
Judgment
With solid judgment skills, students perform better in evaluating options for decision-making and reaching conclusions. Among other things, questions in this section will require CPA candidates to “address, analyze and resolve issues in the conduct of an engagement.”
Communication
Effective communication, defined as “the ability to effectively elicit and/or express information through written or oral means,” is important for the exam and in the profession. Accountants must know how to write well, how to correspond persuasively with clients, how to design business plans and how to compose effective letters to attract and retain new clients. The CPA exam will ask students to demonstrate well structured, relevant written responses in the context of specific subject matter.
Research
The research category is defined as “the ability to locate and extract relevant information from available resource materials.” Research skills are often crucial in knowing how to read professional literature, how to identify relevant information and how to use technology to research effectively. On the exam, a CPA candidate can expect to search provided research materials for a citation that answers a given question.
Understanding
In scoring each section of the exam, the most total test points fall under this category (see “Skills Target Weighting” chart). So how can you ace it? It’s a bit vaguer than the others, but the understanding component of the exam refers to “the ability to recognize and comprehend the meaning and application of a particular matter.” This entails evaluating, processing and analyzing data as well as “identifying financial and accounting reporting methods and selecting those that are suitable.”
NYSSCPA member Zev Landau, CPA, MBA, and adjunct professor of accounting at La Guardia Community College, contributed to this report.
