Am I ready
for FAR?
Your chance of passing the CPA exam starts, before anything is known about you, at the rate everybody else passes at: 42.12% for FAR in 2025. A CPA exam pass probability worth reading moves away from that base rate only as far as your own evidence allows. Enter the practice work you have already done, from any course, and this returns a probability with its confidence interval and a plain statement of what it does not know.
beta · not yet validated against real exam outcomes
How a CPA exam pass probability should behave
The starting point is not zero and it is not optimistic. With no evidence about you, the estimate is 42.12% — the 2025 national FAR pass rate. As you enter evidence, the estimate is pulled away from that prior in proportion to how much evidence there is. Ten questions barely move it. Four hundred move it a lot. This is deliberate: a number that jumps to 85% after eight questions is telling you about its own design, not about you.
The interval is the honest part. The wide band is not a hedge. It is the range the estimate is actually consistent with, given how little any of us knows about the relationship between practice performance and a real FAR score.
Simulation cells count differently from questions. Multiple choice and simulations each carry about half the FAR score. [source] A simulation cell you answer correctly is evidence of two things at once — that you know the topic, and that you can produce it under multi-cell time pressure — so it moves the estimate roughly twice as much as one multiple-choice question. If you have done no simulations, that half is carried as unknown: not inferred from your multiple-choice accuracy, and not treated as zero.
Skipping simulations is not a ceiling. This gets misquoted, so plainly: a candidate with 200 correct multiple-choice answers and no simulations lands near 76% in this model. The effect of an untested simulation half is that the number climbs more slowly than multiple-choice accuracy alone would suggest and the interval stays wider. It is not capped.
What this estimate of your chance of passing the CPA exam cannot do
It takes your word for it. You are reporting your own counts, so the estimate inherits whatever is wrong with them — questions you have seen before, a course whose questions run easier than the exam, a percentage you rounded up.
The version inside the product does not ask: it gives you a short diagnostic, marks every answer against the Blueprint itself, and keeps the estimate updated as you work. When you miss a question, it opens by asking you one thing about the specific wrong choice you made, rather than pasting the explanation. You get the full walkthrough within a few exchanges either way — and if you would rather just have it, ask three times and it is yours.
Where the 42.12% base rate comes from → · Eight questions to ask any readiness score → · What the number means after a fail →
Source: NASBA, “CPA Examination” · checked 2026-08-15 · exam sections and scoring
Common questions
Can this tell me my chance of passing CPA exam sections other than FAR?
No. The prior is the FAR pass rate and the topic tree is the FAR Blueprint, so the estimate is only meaningful for FAR. Pointing it at another section would give you a number with the wrong base rate and the wrong coverage map underneath it.
How accurate is a CPA exam pass probability estimate?
Unknown, and we would rather say so. This model has never been checked against a real exam outcome, because we do not yet have candidates who used it and then sat. That is why the output is an interval rather than a single number, and why the page is labelled beta.
Why does the estimate start at 42%?
Because before you enter anything, the best available guess about you is the rate everyone else passes at: 42.12% for FAR in 2025. Evidence moves it away from that base rate in proportion to how much evidence there is — ten answered questions move it very little, two hundred move it a lot.