How I finally passed the CPA exam after 10+ attempts

I took the CPA exam for the first time in the summer of 2013. I passed my last section in late 2017. If you do the math, that’s 4.5 years.

Somewhere in there I sat for sections I’m not going to enumerate because the number is embarrassing. Let’s say it was more than most people would keep going through, and fewer than enough to justify quitting.

I’m writing this because nobody writes the honest version of this story. Every CPA success story you read is either the person who passed all four sections in eight months, or the vague inspirational narrative about perseverance that skips the part where you’re sitting in a Prometric parking lot having just failed the same section for the third time trying to figure out if any of this is worth it.

This is the version with the parking lot.

What the first few attempts looked like

I was doing everything I was supposed to be doing. Or at least I thought I was. I had a course. I was watching the videos, doing the questions, taking the practice exams. I was getting scores in the 70s on practice tests and going into the real exam feeling okay.

And then I’d get a 70. Or a 73. The 73s were the ones that wrecked me. Because 75 is passing. 73 is not. And there is no meaningful difference between the candidate who gets a 73 and the candidate who gets a 75, except that one of them has to pay to sit again and one of them doesn’t.

I kept adjusting. I studied harder. I studied differently. I bought additional materials. I changed my approach three or four times. And I kept getting stuck in the same range, just below passing, wondering what I was missing.

What was actually wrong

It wasn’t the material. I knew the material reasonably well. What I didn’t have was consistency.

I would study intensely for six weeks, sit for an exam, fail, burn out for a month, and then start over. Every restart cost me. Not just the time — the mental reset. I’d have to re-warm up to material I’d already covered. I’d lose the rhythm I’d built. I’d spend the first two weeks of each study cycle relearning things I’d already learned.

I was treating every attempt like a standalone event. Six weeks of intensive prep, exam day, result. But the exam isn’t designed for that approach. It rewards long-term, accumulated familiarity with the concepts — the kind you build through months of repeated, low-intensity exposure, not through weeks of high-intensity cramming.

What finally worked

At some point I stopped trying to win each attempt and started trying to build a sustainable practice.

5 questions a day. Every day. Not every day when the schedule permitted. Every day. Before I looked at my phone, before I checked email. 5 questions.

I stopped scheduling exams at the end of a study sprint and started scheduling them when I felt genuinely ready — which, it turned out, happened faster than I expected once the daily practice was actually consistent.

The last section I passed, I didn’t feel like I’d peaked or found some secret. I felt like I’d finally been doing the work consistently long enough that the material was actually in my head rather than temporarily loaded up and waiting to evaporate.

Why I built CPArcade

The tools I was using were built for people with perfect schedules and unlimited motivation. Long videos. Dense practice sets. Progress bars that made you feel behind if you weren’t covering 20 topics a week.

That’s not what I needed. I needed something that made it easy to show up every day, even when I was tired, even during busy season, even after a failed attempt when the last thing I wanted to do was touch CPA material.

So I built it. 5 questions a day. A game format so it doesn’t feel like grinding. A daily habit that costs you five minutes, not two hours.

CPArcade isn’t built for the candidate who wants to pass in six months on their first try. It’s built for the candidate who has been at this for a while, who keeps showing up despite the evidence that showing up is hard, who needs a sustainable daily practice more than another comprehensive study course.

If that’s you — you’re exactly who this is for.