Our Standards
How we source, review, and certify every piece of content.
Not marketing language — the actual process a question goes through before it's allowed in front of a student, and the claims we refuse to make no matter how tempting they'd be to ship.
The path from source to certified content
Six steps, in order — a question doesn't skip ahead.
- 1
Source
Every question starts from a primary, citable source — the current AICPA Blueprint, official exam guidance, or the relevant accounting/auditing standard — never a guess at what “feels right” for the exam.
- 2
Author
Written against that source, tagged to the specific Blueprint Area and skill level it tests, with the reasoning for every wrong answer written alongside the right one — not added later.
- 3
Independent review
A second reviewer — blind to the first author's own answer key — solves the question again from scratch. If their answer doesn't match, the item is corrected or rejected before it ever reaches a student.
- 4
Automated integrity checks
Before anything ships, it runs through a battery of automated checks — for leaked answers, answer-position bias, duplicate options, inconsistent arithmetic, and other defect patterns CARE has specifically tested for across its own content.
- 5
Certify
Only content that clears every step above is marked certified and eligible to appear in practice sessions or mock exams.
- 6
Recertify on change
If a certified item's Blueprint tag, skill level, section, or wrong-answer reasoning is later edited, that certification is automatically invalidated — the corrected item goes through independent review again before it can ship a second time. A passing automated check is never treated as a substitute for that review.
What we will not do
Specific refusals, not a vague promise — because a vague promise is easy to quietly break.
Publish a predicted score or a pass probability — on any page, free or paid, worded any way — without real, disclosed, non-self-reported calibration data behind it.
Present raw practice accuracy as an official CPA score. The real passing score is a scaled 75, set by NASBA — never a percentage we compute ourselves.
Hand-wave a Blueprint tag. CARE's own internal topic taxonomy is not the same thing as the AICPA Blueprint's official Group/Topic structure, and we don't blur the two.
Quietly re-run an old question bank forward into a new exam cycle instead of re-verifying it against the Blueprint currently in effect.
Grade anything that matters — an answer, a score, mastery, certification, entitlement — in the browser, where a student could inspect or spoof it. Every one of those is decided server-side.
Why this is the standard, not an exception
A study tool that's wrong about the exam is worse than no study tool at all — it teaches the wrong thing with total confidence. Independent review and automated integrity checks exist to catch what a single author, working alone, will eventually miss. That process runs on every item, every time, not just the ones that seem important.
Important disclaimer
CARE CPA Prep is an independent study tool. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the AICPA, NASBA, or any state board of accountancy. Practice questions are written independently based on the current, publicly available AICPA Blueprint. They are for educational purposes only and may not reflect the exact questions on the actual exam.
Curious why CARE exists in the first place?
This page is about how we build. Why CARE is about why it's worth using.