![]() The very idea of sweeping and significant changes scared the pants off of aspiring CPAs and led to artificially inflated candidate numbers the year prior, a phenomenon widely recognized by the AICPA and CPA review providers as a thing that happens any time there’s a big change coming down the pipe. “The new IFRS questions and other changes to the exam are the first major revisions since the CPA exam was computerized in 2004,” read a joint press release from AICPA, NASBA, and Prometric issued January 2011. CBT-e added questions on International Financial Reporting Standards to the exam for the first time along with “other sweeping and significant changes” per NASBA messaging at the time. I was working in CPA review at the time and remember it well because students were stampeding into the exam so they could sit before the big CBT-e change in 2011. ![]() So unique CPA exam candidates have decreased 34.2% since the last high in 2016 and 35% since the peak in 2010 and the number is the lowest it’s been in the 17 years included in the Trends report. Let’s look at the data going back to 2006. Uniques are probably the most important metric here as unique candidates represent overall interest in sitting for the exam. Given how ashy the pipeline is at the moment, it could be a lot worse. 2021 to 2022 that’s a 6% decrease in new CPA candidates, a 6.8% decrease in unique candidates, and a 3.6% decrease in 4th sections passed. These numbers are of course all down from 2021 - 32,186 new CPA candidates, 72,271 uniques, 19,544 candidates who passed their 4th section for 2021 - and very, very down from 2016’s high of 48,004 new candidates, 102,291 unique candidates, and 27,889 candidates who passed their 4th section that year but we expected that. ![]() In a vacuum the 2022 numbers aren’t terrible - 30,251 new CPA candidates, 67,336 unique CPA candidates, and 18,847 CPA candidates who passed their 4th section that year. Today we’re going to look at CPA exam candidate numbers. As you may already know the 2023 AICPA Trends report is out, here’s our earlier write-up on how many accounting degrees were completed for the 2021-22 period covered in the new report (saving you a click: it’s 65,035).
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