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Your CIA Exam Study Planner to Customize and Download [Free]
You can download my CIA exam study planner for Gleim and HOCK review courses.
This study planner is an excel spreadsheet that helps you to:
- Calculate the number of study hours per week
- Estimate the time required to prepare for the exam based on the number of study hours and any vacation days you may have identified
- Specify the start and end dates of each study unit. You can then monitor your progress in the calendar
This Video Shows How My CIA Exam Study Planner Works
The spreadsheet is pretty much self-explanatory, but just to make sure, I made this screen capture to walk you through. This video was originally made for the CMA exam planner but the format is exactly the same.
CIA Exam Study Planner Download Area
This file contains worksheets for Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, and it can be automatically downloaded to your computer after clicking. Please check your desktop or download folder:
Further Explanation
For those who have a slower internet connection, you might want to refer to this instruction in text format.
The image below shows what the CIA exam study planner looks like once you open the excel sheet.
This is the master page where you can enter all the inputs:
1. Weekly Schedule
The area shaded in yellow is the weekly schedule area. You can mark an “x” for your CIA exam study time. The default spreadsheet starts the day at 5 AM and ends at midnight, but you can always insert more rows for further customization.
2. Days off
Realistically you will have some days off. For the scheduled ones, such as wedding days and a long weekend off, you can mark them off in this column, and the spreadsheet will exclude these dates from the calculation.
3. Basic Study Mode
You need to input a start date (please pick a Monday, otherwise, the spreadsheet won’t work). Other than that, it’s all auto-calculation.
I am showing you a screenshot of the first page of this CIA exam study planner. The area highlighted in yellow is the input area. In other words, don’t type outside the yellow boxes, or you may alter the formulas and affect the calculations.
You will see, from the bold text, the number of study hours for your chosen exam part. (There are 3 tabs indicating each part of the exam.) For example, the worksheet above shows that 61 hours are required, which translates to 38 days, 5 weeks, and 1.2 months.
4. Comprehensive Study Mode
What’s special about our CIA exam study planner is that we’ve got 2 scenarios. To me, to ensure passing the CIA exam on your first try, you need to use this comprehensive mode.
The basic mode (for Gleim, for example) assumes that you go through the entire Gleim CIA Review System. This requires students to go through 20 multiple-choice questions in each study session.
For comprehensive mode, you’ve got to work on the above, plus ALL the practice questions on Gleim, together with the time needed for a thorough review. As you will see, it often doubles the prep time.
Any Questions?
This study planner has been vetted by the Gleim Team. If you have questions on how it works or how it doesn’t work (e.g. you find a bug), please let me know in the comment section below. Thanks a lot, and I hope this can help you in your CIA exam prep.
About the Author Stephanie
I am the author of How to Pass The CPA Exam (published by Wiley) and the publisher of this and several accounting professional exam prep sites.
