The QBO ProAdvisor exams seem to be unnecessarily difficult, but they are not impossible to pass. It may take more time and effort and strategy than you’d like to devote to such a relatively narrow credential, but if you want it, QB makes you work hard for it.
Requiring 80% to pass each section means that for all sections with fewer than 10 questions, you cannot pass if you miss more than one. One! So it is a pretty high bar right there. Offsetting that is of course the fact that the exam is “open book”. You absolutely have to use that to your advantage. I used a combination of live webinars and self study of the supplemental materials. I then opened the PDFs of the webinar slide deck and the associated supplemental guide before taking each section. I also kept the QBO advanced sample company open on a separate browser window. I did exam parts one or two at a time so that I wouldn’t get brain fried. I screen captured each question with my answers selected and pasted them into a Word doc to save in case I did not pass. Then I submitted my sections. I passed 7 out of 10 on first try and mind you, this was after doing all the above! And as other CPAs have noted, we passed the dang CPA exam, so how can we not pass this?
When it came to retaking the 3 sections I missed, I paid careful attention to what QB said I should review - that is your only useful clue to figure out which ones you got wrong. QB tells you what learning objectives you need to review and that corresponds to which questions you answered wrong. To verify which questions those were, I went back to the supplemental guide, went to the learning objectives page, and reviewed the parts of the supplemental guide that contained those objectives. The exam questions go in the same order of objectives as the study guide, so you can back your way
into which questions you missed. Now that you know what you got right, that will help in case you get those questions repeated on your retake. Then look at the ones you got wrong and work them hard until you are confident you know where you went off course. Then when you retake the test, be extra careful on each question, resisting the urge to speed up because it’s the same things over again. This is how I was able to pass the rest of the parts on my second attempt.
All this said, I agree with those who have said that many of the questions are intentionally tricky, and often are a level of difficulty or critical thinking beyond what is specifically covered in the training and supplemental materials. A cynic may argue that this is to keep pass rate low, but an optimist would see this as adding to the implied skill level of those who do pass. The silver lining for me was that those retakes forced me to take a deeper dive on the materials which in turn helped me get to a higher comprehension level on those topics, which I suppose is the aim of the whole certification.
