CMA Exam Advice from Hari, Winner of Priscilla S Payne Award

I am honored to have Hari, a Priscilla S Payne award winner from our very own community, to share his CMA exam journey with us.

(in case you aren’t aware, this award is given to THE candidate who achieves the highest score as a student in each testing period.)

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I  am writing down my experience of passing the CMA exam and winning the Priscilla S Payne award. I hope this is useful.

• Currently pursuing: PhD in Management Accounting at Michigan State University.
• Educational Qualification: Chartered Accountant (CA), BCom (Mulund College of Commerce, University of Mumbai)
• Professional experience: Co-Founder and Head of Academic Affairs at Raising a Mathematician Foundation, Visiting faculty at Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), Faculty and Mentor at Enkays Classes (Kalyan, Maharashtra, India)

How I Began the CMA Journey

I met Lisa Beaudoin, Head of Educational Partnerships, IMA at the Puerto Rico Mid year Management Section meeting of American Accounting Association in Jan 2017 where she mentioned to me about the doctoral scholarships for students interested in pursuing CMA.

I thought about it for a week and decided to enroll for the same in Jan 2017. I took both the sections in Feb (Part 1: 13th Feb and Part 2: 27th Feb). For me the objective of taking this certification is to partner with IMA to bridge the gap between academic research and practice. IMA will provide me with networking opportunities and I hope to collaborate with companies on research.

As soon as I finished my exams I was confident that I did well on my exams but I didn’t expect to win the Priscilla S Payne award, which is given to a student who has scored maximum marks in an exam window. I am happy to receive this award because it is only given to one student globally.

Although it may come across that I studied for a month but I was instructing courses on Management Accounting for CA Final and Inter students in India for 8 years before I came to US for pursuing PhD. Hence, my preparation for the exams shouldn’t be considered as one month but consider it as many years of hard work. Hence, I won’t focus on what I did for the exam but will share my experience on how to prepare for such exams as a student as well as an instructor.

Who is Hariharan?

I have completed Chartered Accountancy (CA) from India in 2008 and have been passionately instructing students studying in schools as well as colleges.

As a student I always focused on understanding the concepts and didn’t study to pass the exams. This is a good long term strategy to succeed academically. It requires lot of patience and work ethic and sometimes one may question whether it is worth the efforts because the outcome can only be observed over the period of time and results are not always immediate.

I can say with confidence that completing CA has helped me tremendously to achieve success in my CMA exam.

I have observed that majority of the students try to study from the past exams, put less efforts, take shortcuts to pass the exam but this is a disaster as one may not be able to apply what one has studied.

Students find the material difficult to comprehend because it builds on previous material and it is very important to identify at what stage one is finding the content difficult to comprehend and go back and work hard on that particular topic.

For example: A student may find absorption costing difficult to understand but if it is primarily because of lack of understanding of overhead allocation, it is very important to study the topic on overhead allocation before proceeding further.

CMA Exam Specific Strategy

I used the Wiley material and it was nicely structured. The CMA exam has 100 multiple choice questions (MCQs) to be answered in 3 hours followed by essay questions to be answered in 1 hour.

While preparing I allowed myself one minute to answer a MCQ and will make a separate word file for noting the questions which I didn’t get right. This gave me a question bank that I used for review.

Also, I had made notes of every topic that I find difficulty in or topics which were new to me (SOX, Internal controls- these were US specific). I could save at least 15 minutes from my MCQs and carry forward to essay questions. For MCQs we need to practice so that we can reduce our time of answering and that is equally important along with accuracy.

Summary

1) Focus on concepts. Don’t just solve MCQs or problems it won’t help you. Problem solving is ancillary to conceptual understanding.

2) Practice not just to get accuracy but also to achieve efficiency.

3) Work hard. There is no substitute for hard work.

I want to conclude with a quote I believe in “Amateur works hard till he gets it right but a professional works hard till he can’t get it wrong”

Thanks,
Hari

Note from Stephanie

We “met” Hari when he shared his good news of passing the exam, but we didn’t know he is the award winner until a reader identified him. So excited when Hari accepted my invitation to write this guest post.

I highlighted two sentences above because these are the perfect answers to the many questions I got from readers, that is:

1. Do I get a good job / instant salary increase / promotion / a ticket to move to the US once I pass the CMA exam?

From Hari: “It requires lot of patience and work ethic and sometimes one may question whether it is worth the efforts because the outcome can only be observed over the period of time and results are not always immediate.”

Can’t agree more with this. Please see the certification as a longer-term investment.

2. How do I know if the same questions will appear in the exam / I heard this set of practice questions do not match those in the real exam. Should I go for another provider?

From Hari: “Focus on concepts. Don’t just solve MCQs or problems it won’t help you. Problem solving is ancillary to conceptual understanding.”

Some candidates aim to cover all practice questions because they want to increase the chance of seeing the same questions in the actual exam. They miss the point.

The purpose of going through the multiple choice questions is to put the theory in practice. By applying the concepts in various scenarios in the form of different questions, you can feel how the concepts come to life in a real work place.

I hope this sharing is helpful to you. If you have any questions, please drop a note below. I’ll see if Hari can spend some time answering your questions in the next few days or so.