Professional tests like the CPA exam determine the fates of many ambitious people each year. Passing with flying colors can mean moving onward and upward, while failure might well hold a promising career back.
Naturally enough, people who hope to become CPAs and other types of certified professionals typically try to maximize their chances of passing any required tests. Simply signing up for a comprehensive preparation course will often be a productive step, but it can also give rise to unjustified confidence.
Most people, after all, have a preferred learning style, and prep courses and materials do not always account for all of the possibilities. Being aware of how you study and learn most effectively will allow you to make appropriate related arrangements. Figure out which of the following four learning styles suits your own mind the best, and you will get off to a strong start.
1. Visual Learning
Of the five senses, most people find that vision dominates their perception of the world in ways that the others cannot match. This has significant implications for learning, a fact that sometimes gets overlooked.
A professional exam preparation course that relies too much on spoken lectures with a minimum of visual aids will often serve a visual learner poorly. Many people find it much easier to absorb well-designed charts and graphs than to achieve the same kinds of insights with the help of verbal coaching.
What many regard as the best cpa review course for visual learners has made this clear for many successful students. As visual learners are particularly common, such courses tend to be among the most popular and generally useful.
2. Reading-Oriented Learning
Anyone who hopes to pass an important, difficult test like the CPA exam will need to do plenty of reading beforehand. Each of the four parts of that exam covers many pages of written material that need to be mastered.
It might be thought that all this reading would suit people who learn best when presented with visual stimuli. In fact, reading is an activity so distinctive that it does not fit into any sense-based categorization scheme at all. Whether they read digital textbooks or conventional-looking volumes filled with Braille, people who naturally adopt a reading-focused learning style need to be accommodated in related ways.
3. Auditory Learning
Children learn to speak and understand others by interacting with grownups and older kids who coach them without thinking. This particularly fundamental learning style can remain the preferred option well into adulthood and beyond.
The auditory learning style is common enough that college lectures are in little danger of becoming extinct. Having an informed, authoritative person lay out the details of a lesson allows many people to absorb it more readily than would any other approach.
4. Kinesthetic Learning
Some people are naturally active and seem to be full of energy at all times. That can make it difficult to submit to the passive styles of education and learning that are so common.
Fortunately, there are ways to take advantage of a built-in inclination toward action even when preparing for an exam. Kinesthetic learners retain information most effectively when they absorb it in especially intense, focused bursts. Although kinesthetic teaching techniques are more commonly used with younger students, professionals preparing for tests like the CPA exam have used them with success, as well.
Just about everyone inclines fairly obviously toward one of these learning styles by default. Taking stock of your own situation should make it easier to identify an exam preparation approach that will accommodate your learning style very well.