Where your
four hours go
On FAR, seven task-based simulations carry about half the score in three testlets, inside a four-hour exam. [source] The failure mode that costs the most is not being slow overall — it is one cell eating the budget for the three after it.
Per cell
—
For reference: across the simulations we have written, a cell’s par time runs from 120 to 300 seconds, with a median of 180. A cell that takes you more than about 1.75× its par time, and eats a quarter of the whole simulation, is the one worth naming.
The exam you are budgeting for
| Testlet | Type | Items |
|---|---|---|
| Testlet 1 | MCQ | 25 |
| Testlet 2 | MCQ | 25 |
| Testlet 3 | TBS | 2 |
| Testlet 4 | TBS | 3 |
| Testlet 5 | TBS | 2 |
Four hours total. Multiple choice and simulations each carry about half of the score, which is the single most useful fact on this page: the three simulation testlets are worth as much as the fifty multiple-choice questions.
Source: UWorld Accounting, “About the FAR CPA Exam” · checked 2026-08-15
Four ways a simulation eats your time
“I ran out of time” is four different problems with four different fixes. These are the categories our pacing report uses, and they are worth knowing even if you never use our product.
- Derailed. One cell takes 1.75× its par time or more and eats a quarter of the whole simulation. The cost is almost never in that cell — it is in the cells after it. Fix: a hard per-cell abandon rule.
- Starved. A cell answered in under 40% of par, wrong, in a run where there really was time pressure. This is the cost of the derailed cell landing somewhere. Fix: the same abandon rule, upstream.
- Rushed. Same signature — fast and wrong — but the run finished well under budget. Nothing squeezed you. You started writing before you finished reading. Fix: nothing to do with speed.
- Blank. Simulations are graded cell by cell, so an empty cell is a certain loss. A rough estimate is strictly better than nothing.
Distinguishing starved from rushed matters more than it sounds: the prescriptions are opposite, and telling a rushed candidate to go faster makes it worse.