ExamPrep.ai CPA Review Beta Comes to a Successful Close

With CPA exam pass rates hovering between 44-55%, preparing candidates to pass on the first attempt is a challenge. To test our effectiveness, we launched a free beta program and invited 50 users over eight months to test drive our FAR exam prep. We chose to focus on FAR as it is considered the most difficult CPA exam and a good starting point to demonstrate success.

Our beta users collectively spent thousands of hours studying and providing feedback on how to improve the learning experience. Thanks to their invaluable input, we have been able to make some incredible changes and are proud to announce the first successes of our aspiring CPAs! This post is about highlighting the improvements made during the beta and celebrating the success of our users.

To understand improvements developed over the course of the beta, here’s a snapshot of where we started…

A promising starting point, but did we have what it takes to help people pass on the first try? Was our CPA prep offering good enough to choose it over other courses that candidates already had access to? Our early beta users saw some success, but we had significant room to improve.

Of fifty beta users, we will be honest that many of our earliest beta users stopped using the early beta within a few weeks, with the top three reasons for early abandonment being:

Beta users generally fell into one of two categories:

Type 1 - Nick’s existing tutoring students: These beta users tended to dive into the personalized quizzes, practiced 600-1,200+ questions, and passed FAR in 1-2 attempts. Of those who failed the first attempt, the most common reason was lack of practicing Task-Based Sims, which were admittedly a poor experience at the start of the beta.

Type 2 - CPA candidates who found us online: These beta users tended to spend more time watching lessons than practicing questions, with one sharing the feedback: “I just want to say thank you for the very informative videos. I have gone through all of them and found them more helpful than Becker.” Many of these users continued studying for months, but the pace of going through the material and actively practicing questions was below what we’d seen was usually necessary to pass on the first attempt.

With this background in mind, let’s look at the improvements that helped bring everyone’s success up to the next level & on track to pass!

Beta improvements include several from our long term roadmap that were refined based on user feedback, in addition to many improvements provided purely by user demand!

Success Coaching Emails: We wanted to help every user receive the same kind of personalized coaching that has brought Nick’s students success over the years, including candid feedback to let you know when you are behind schedule, and what steps you can take to get back on track. After months in development, we now have a series of 15 time-based checkpoints approaching your exam date that provide personalized advice based on your situation. These emails start as early as 3 months before your exam and provide the practical advice, encouragement, & accountability to help you pass on your 1st attempt.

Daily Study Recommendations: Reinforcing our goal of helping candidates consistently pass on the 1st attempt, the new Daily Study Recommendations provide a personalized study plan that highlights the top 5-6 actions you can take on any given day to maximize your chances of passing. These recommendations include big-picture pacing recommendations to let you know which major milestone you want to finish that week.

4-Stage Study Experience: Our study experience is now organized into 4 stages that better incorporate advances in learning science like quickly recognizing prior knowledge, honing in on knowledge gaps, spaced repetition, etc. The stages are: 1) Baseline Knowledge ⇒ 2) Study ⇒ 3) Focus ⇒ 4) Practice. The details behind these stages can fill an entire future blog post in the future, but if you’re eager to learn more now sign up for the free trial for an interactive overview!

1st Pass Insights on Day 1: We vastly improved the intro study plan you see on day 1, which now sets expectations of how much work is involved to pass each exam. This includes unique data-driven insights and measurable practice targets so you can get off to a strong start and pace yourself accordingly.

Lessons At Your Preferred Speed: In the same way speed reading can improve memory & comprehension by holding your attention, watching lessons at a speed slow enough to understand but fast enough to hold your attention can have a profound improvement on your learning experience. Our lessons play at 1.25x by default to hint at the difference and ease you in gradually. Any time you adjust the speed for a lesson your preference is applied to later lessons as well.

Greatly Improved Explanations: We heard loud and clear that explanations on why each incorrect answer is incorrect are invaluable to learning and these are now standard on all questions.

Save Question Notes: Don’t just memorize questions you missed, save notes on why you missed them. Easily review all your notes & missed questions later from the dashboard’s “Review Questions” shortcut.

1-Click Screenshots: Lesson video screenshots can be saved in 1-click with the file named after the lesson & exact time in the lesson so you can easily build your own study guide & review it later.

Task-Based Simulations (TBS): Strong performance on TBS is a critical part of passing any CPA exam and you have to be comfortable with everything involved. Our improved TBS experience closely resembles what you’ll encounter on exam day, including full support for Authoritative Literature-based research questions. One of the only differences in our experience is the option to expand the answer area so you don’t need to tediously scroll horizontally on simulations with large tables – a feature requested by & loved by beta users!

Realistic Practice Exams: Where the beta only simulated practice exams for the MCQs testlets, you can now choose between practicing MCQ-only testlets or a full 4-hour 5-testlet exam, including pre-exam experience, break periods, and an overall environment that looks and feels like what you’ll see on exam day, right down to the exam day calculator itself!

Searchable Lessons: You can now jump to lessons on any topic in seconds straight from your dashboard, greatly improving on navigation from the initial beta.

Higher Momentum MCQs & Sims practice: You can now choose how many sims or MCQs you want to practice, whether you want to see explanations immediately or at the end, and whether you want to include Auth. Lit. sims in your practice sessions.

Resume Where You Left Off: Accidentally close a tab or refresh the browser? No longer a problem! Easily resume where you left off on any quiz or exam.

Memorization Guide: The memorization guide now distills everything you should have memorized to secure all the “free points” from memorization-oriented questions. The guide is now proactively emailed to you leading up to your exam so you have ample time to review it.

Mobile-friendly Study Experience: The mobile-friendly study experience now supports almost everything you can reasonably expect to do on a phone or tablet, including practice quizzes, lessons, review flashcards, & review your personalized study guide. The only study experiences that require a larger screen are Task-Based Simulations & Practice Exams.

Whew!! Okay – well, that’s our list of improvements across the beta! We are incredibly grateful for the beta users who were willing to stick with us and provide feedback, especially in the earlier days when navigation was tough and sims were painful to look at.

We are thrilled to celebrate the first successes of our beta users. It is too early to provide meaningful statistics, but we can still infer a few interesting insights when projecting early results across our ReadyRating predictions.

CPA exams are tough, and passing will always remain a challenge. However, we're excited to announce that enough users shared passing scores during our beta that we'll soon be offering a pass guarantee based on ReadyRating predictions. Stay tuned for details.

We are honored to have played an integral role in helping aspiring CPAs pass the FAR exam and look forward to supporting many more of you on your journeys. To make this journey more accessible to all, we are proud to introduce our low-cost offering of only $199 per exam for unlimited access until you pass. This is significantly less than other competitors and a fraction of the cost of an exam retake fee. We are dedicated to helping more of you achieve CPA licensure and look forward to continually improving our offering.

Curious? Sign up for our free trial for access to the full course with no payment method required!

As a special thanks to our beta users, we are offering complementary premium access to any one exam of your choice. Email Michael to convert your free trial to premium access. Thank you again & looking forward to hearing of your continued success!