As I previously posted, the CPA Exam is going to be changing in several ways next year but possibly the biggest item of note will be the inclusion of questions based on IFRS.  IFRS stands for International Financial Reporting Standards and has yet to be adopted in the United States though various timelines and convergence schemes have been proposed in recent year.

As a practitioner, I can tell you that very few of my colleagues have much IFRS knowledge and I suspect that the same can be said for most accounting students.  That could spell trouble for those you that will be among the first to sit for the new exam starting next year.

There is kind of a chicken/egg thing playing out where textbook publishers and schools are awaiting more clarity before adopting widespread IFRS curriculum, not to mention the fact that faculty will need to be brought up to speed on these things before they can teach it to students.

IFRS will only add to the test anxiety CPA candidates face when preparing for the exam.  It will be interesting to see how many people try to take the exam before the content changes and how the pass rates are affected once the changes go into effect.

The Journal of Accountancy prepared a 10-question self-test of some IFRS concepts and put them on their website.  See the link below and take a stab at these to see how much (or how little) you know about IFRS:

Test Your Knowledge of International Standards.