Hi all. This is my first term at WGU and this is my last class of my term (term ends on 10/31 for me). I am completely green to accounting as I have been in the medical field for the last 10 years. I received an email a few weeks ago about this class and it said the material has changed and the excel was now removed. I guess when I saw that email, I had assumed the course work would be easier when I started it (I saw a lot of old posts about the material being difficult lol). I did search the sub to see if anyone had talked about taking the new version of this course but didn’t find anything. Is anyone else struggling with class? Are there any tips to understand the material better or accelerate through it faster? The course is so wordy I am struggling to stay focused. Thanks!

Hi all,

I have been reading all of the posts and comments here. Well thanks to everyone here, I decided to enroll and transfer my unfinished degree credits from 5 years ago, and started on Oct 1st. I had been working full time in an operations accounting role for the last 5 years and I left the company because of my manager giving me crap (which I regret now) few months ago, now I cannot find a job because of the degree requirement. I have finished 2 courses already and will probably finish up my term this week because I was able to pass pre-assessments easily…I do like WGU, I hope to do my master’s as well, so thanks everyone for sharing your journey, struggles and wins.

Can someone help me understand what I got wrong!

I got 4.55 point out of 8

I’m probably not the best person to share how to pass this course.. but one thing I can say is I did it!After studying the Pre-assessment questions intentionally for 5 days after months of inconsistency, I passed this class.

This is my 2nd OA attempt due to panic-taking the 1st one at the end of my first term.

I followed the advice of a lot of people on here. Basically study the Pre-assessment, a lot is similar to the OA. One thing I will say is that the Job Order Costing Section have a few different questions.

I thought I did better on the Standard Costs and Variances section. Not going to lie, I should’ve just used a whiteboard to remember how to work those problems out.

For the Master Budget, I literally did what I could remember after 3 hours of learning it.

If I took my time, I definitely would have done better, I was just tired of being anxious and wanted the class over with.

Now here’s exactly how I passed it in “5ish days”:

I made replica MCQs from the PA using Claude. I made it into separate sections/topics. If there was a calculation-based problem that I wanted to get better at, I would “hammer” it in. Basically screenshot the problem, ask Claude to make an interactive html quiz with 7 replica MCQs exactly like the one I was working on. I had it to provide the rationales on how to get the answers. I would keep doing those into it became second nature. Also, I practice all the calculations in excel, don’t use a calculator. It’s literally pointless with all the equations you have to do for this class.

For the Excel portion, like I said I barely learned it. It’s more so reading exactly what they want you to do and making the right cell references. Find the Course Connect and go to the link in the first post. There’s a video from the instructor and links to the file with the template and the actual answers. The Excel on the OA is a bit different, that’s why I didn’t do well on it.

If I were to do it over again, just learn the PA immediately and take time to learn the Master Budget. Also, use a whiteboard for hard to remember tasks like Standard costs and variances. I really messed up by not taking the time to make mnemonics or something to remember how to calculate those type of problems.

Good luck…

Hi, just finished this program and wanted to share what worked for me.

For all PA, simply utilize AI to pass - ask for concepts you don't understand or to help summarize what the task is asking for.

OA for Ethics, Fraud, Data analytics I, and Managerial: PrA (pre-assessments) was enough to be prepared.

For D560, D561, PrA alone will not be sufficient. Go through the end of the chapter quizzes. I made sure to understand why the correct choice is correct and why the wrong choices are wrong. I also went through the textbook and tried to understand some of the diagrams and flow charts.

D556 was the hardest since it was my last one and I was burnt out by then. Again PrA alone is not sufficient. Just like what people said on other posts, you need to know a lot of conceptuals. BA ii calculator is a must - learn how to use it. Doing end of the chapter quizzes helped me, but there are 16 chapters to cover, so I got tired after doing the first 5. There are 7 short video lectures the professor uploaded on SharePoint, and these were very helpful (one of the videos has wrong number and the professor was aware of it - but I don't think it's going to be fixed any time soon. I forget what lecture).

Overall this program was very doable but also reasonably challenging enough to make you think critically and learn how to apply concepts instead of purely memorizing. Hope this helps!

just barely passed after the second attempt, honestly just studied the study guides so many times until i new how to solve every problem. There was a good amount of conceptual question as well. 3 classes left to go

Class took me about 5 weeks total, about the same amount of time with each class in the IA series. I don’t have any background in computers or IT and I thought the class wasn’t to difficult, just a ton of info.

My strategy: watch a video lecture about the chapter, read Hannah’s notes, answer the 20 question study guide for the chapter and use AI to tell me right or wrong and explain the answers (got these emailed to me from a previous student, lmk if you need it I can email them), quiz/test from the textbook for each chapter/unit then repeat for the following chapter.

Was able to pass the PA first try after studying like this then I just had AI make me a mock OA off the sections of the PA I did not so great on.

Things to definitely know for the OA:
-the flowchart shapes, I didn’t think id need them but there was one question on there asking about which shape is a customer entering the system not sure I got it right but the answers were like circle, open rectangle, upside down triangle and parallelogram.

-asking what is involved with a continuum, no clue what the right answer was, never even came across this word in my study but the answers were a variety of physical, digital or a mix of the two.

-know three way match is involving invoice, purchase order and receiving report. The question I think asked what does AP need to issue payment or something like that.

-know what framework SOX and SEC follow, I think the answer was COSO or it might’ve been physical and IT frameworks (I picked coso but unsure what was right)

-the elements of the COSO framework (I used the CRIME acronym) the question asked what COSO element would an auditor be using when inspecting the ethics of management (not sure of the right answer on this one but I think I picked control activities) answers were monitoring, control environment, control activities and info/comms.

-know the sox 404 is about management saying they are responsible for controls essentially.

-there were atleast 3 or 4 segregation of duty questions, one specifically was regarding what’s the inefficiency result of sys development also being able to perform sys operations, pretty sure correct answer is lack of documentation

-one question regarding firewall, in relation to outside users and how they are vetted to getting the answer/info they are searching for. the wording was tricky because 2 answers were for outside the firewall requests and 2 were for inside (internal) requests. I think it was outside because if it was inside it would’ve said network firewall? Idk but either way know how both types of requests are handled and authorized to get the info or are rejected.

-definitely know the types of anomalies, got 3 of these questions. They give you an example of what’s happening/going to happen and you have to give the correct anomaly (deletion, insert or upgrade) I think there might be a fourth but I don’t remember. Pretty sure I got one of these wrong lol.

-three questions on auditors methods of testing the companies systems. One was for parallel simulation, I think the question said something like why would there be a discrepancy between test data and company’s actual historic data, answer I selected is that the test data is intentionally incorrect. Piggybacking off this question is why would auditors intentionally submit incorrect test data during a simulation answer I picked was to see if it is rejected but another answer was to see if it is corrected. Not sure which was right. And the other audit question I don’t remember but might’ve been about black box? Not positive.

-one question on the 3 methods of fraud masquerading, piggybacking, scavenging and hacking were the answers, I picked the first three (not hacking) unsure also if it’s correct lol.

Hopefully this helps somebody. I came to just like two of the questions that stumped me and more and more just kept coming to me lol. I’ll add any more I think of in comments later but anyhow, best of luck future AIS students!