This press release should come as a surprise to absolutely no one:
Becker Professional Education, a global leader in professional education and a part of DeVry Inc., announced that all 19 of the 2010 Elijah Watt Sells Award winners prepared for the exam with Becker's CPA Exam Review. Since the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) began recognizing the Elijah Watt Sells Award recipients nationally in 2005, a remarkable 89 percent of the winners, 66 of 74, have studied with Becker's CPA Exam Review.
The Elijah Watt Sells Award, first awarded by AICPA in 1923 to honor CPA pioneer Elijah Watt Sells, is presented to the 10 CPA candidates, who, on their first attempt, achieve the highest cumulative scores for all four sections of the Uniform CPA Examination. In 2010 several candidates received identical cumulative scores, resulting in ties and increasing the number of award recipients to 19.
"We would like to congratulate these outstanding candidates for their achievement," said John Roselli, president of Becker Professional Education. "We recognize the hard work required to earn the CPA credential, and we are honored that so many of the nation's top students have turned to Becker to help them achieve their goals."
In case you missed it, all 19 winners can be found here. Or anywhere on the Internet for that matter.
Now, on the off chance any of the Elijah Watt Sells Award overachievers actually read this website, I would love to find out which, if any, of the winners actually bought Becker with their own money. It's known Becker has deals with Ernst & Young, PwC and Deloitte but what about the smaller firms? I doubt Becker has an exclusive deal with Exacta Aerospace in Wichita, Kansas but I could be wrong (and have been before). I know for a fact KPMG uses a different CPA review course (unless that's changed since I stopped spying on other review courses for work purposes) but since none of their folks made the Watt Sells list, that's neither here nor there.
So, if you winners are out there, hollatcha girl, eh?
