Journal of Accounting Education最新文献

The auditing profession is undergoing a transformation, becoming heavily reliant on computerized systems to produce data analytic reports. As a result, the demand for accounting graduates with knowledge in data analytics (DA) has increased. Because textbooks remain the primary educational resource in a college classroom, we sought to determine the extent to which textbooks include DA content and provide a summary of our findings to assist auditing educators in locating this content. Our primary analysis includes the examination of the six most commonly used audit textbooks and one book on DA for accountants. For each text, we evaluated (1) the degree to which textbooks have integrated current and emerging technologies into the written chapter content; (2) the degree to which auditing textbooks have students perform specific DA activities, using DA software; and (3) the degree to which these problems follow the AICPA’s five-step process for planning and performing audit DA. We also provide a Detailed Analysis section for each text in which we summarize both in-chapter and end-of-chapter DA exercises. Recognizing the large amount of DA resources available online such as case studies and datasets, we also provide a review and summary of this content, thereby providing auditing educators a wide variety of options for including DA in their classroom. Finally, based on our review of these resources, we provide recommendations for educators, textbook authors, and publishers to consider when developing DA educational materials. Our purpose is to contribute to the discussion on auditing curriculum and whether trends in practice are reflected in the course resources.

Proficiency with data analytics is an increasingly important skill within in the accounting profession. However, successful data analysis requires clean source data (i.e., source data without errors) in order to draw reliable conclusions. Although users often assume clean source data, this assumption is frequently incorrect. Therefore, identifying and remediating “dirty data” is a prerequisite to effective data analysis. You, an accountant working at a firm that specializes in data analytics, have been hired by Rigorous House Insurance to analyze the company’s claim insurance data. In addition to investigating specific issues mentioned by the company’s controller, you are tasked with identifying any other data integrity issues that you encounter and providing preventative information system internal control suggestions to the client to mitigate these issues in the future.

We examine the relationship between state and local spending per capita on higher education and the performance of Certified Public Accountant (CPA) examination candidates. State and local governments play an important role in providing access to higher education at public colleges and universities. Because these government bodies face difficult choices in addressing many competing needs, there is substantial variability in the level of spending on higher education per capita across states. This state-level variation presumably leads to differences in the quality of education. We find evidence to support this view. Specifically, we find that the level of spending on higher education per capita has a positive marginal effect on the CPA exam pass rates for public universities. In contrast, the level of spending on higher education per capita has no effect on the CPA exam pass rates for private universities.

Using a sample of 703 full- or part-time employed students from two U.S. universities, we conducted an empirical investigation of the relation between perceptions of ethical leadership and perceptions of political skill. The sample was composed of 141 accounting majors and 562 non-accounting students. The results indicated that the two concepts were highly correlated. Our findings also indicate that perception of both ethical leadership and political skill significantly dropped with age and work experience. Moreover, accounting seniors who had previously completed a standalone ethics course had higher perceptions than their counterparts on both constructs, which were still highly correlated. This finding suggests that the ethics education of these students may not have positively impacted their discernment in the area of ethical sensitivity. Thus, accounting students may enter the workforce with inadequate ethical sensitivity, and entry-level accountants may therefore be prone to cognitively confuse the leadership attributes of political skills and ethics. The ability of accountants to differentiate between the ethical leadership and the political skill of leaders, and/or knowledge of how the political skills of leaders could mask their unethical guidance, is posited as an area of ethical sensitivity worthy of inclusion in accounting ethics pedagogy.

There has been much criticism that audit education has failed to bring real-world experience into the classroom. This claim challenges audit educators to develop learning activities that provide students with the practical experience necessary to become active learners in auditing. This study investigates how students became active learners through the completion of a mini-audit assessment involving all four stages of the widely acknowledged experiential learning cycle (Kolb, 1984). The learning context involved class lectures, group work, teaching case studies, group discussions and a mini-audit assessment. Student feedback on this learning experience was collected from reflective journals completed by the students as a part of their coursework. This study confirmed that students, completing a mini-audit assessment were active participants in all four stages of the experiential learning cycle, which encouraged them to become active learners. These findings will be of interest to auditing educators seeking to provide their students with active learning opportunities.

Both men and women pursue careers in accounting equally, but the percentage of women that remain in the public accounting profession dwindles among the higher-tier and lead positions of larger firms (Association of International Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) 2019). While there are many variables that could affect this trend, one factor might be fewer advancement opportunities for women due to implicit bias within the profession. Since decisions about what positions to pursue, who to hire, and who to promote will be important choices in a student’s future accounting career, we thought it would be essential to teach awareness of gender bias in the profession and to prepare students with techniques to recognize and decode implicit gender biases. For this instructional exercise, our students participated in a simple experiment, attended a lecture with discussion on gender bias and occupational stereotypes, and reviewed and discussed the compiled data from their responses. We found that sharing the data comparisons by gender helped to spark lively discussions and create memorable learning experiences. We explore the topics of gender bias and gender coded words in an activity that was developed to test for bias and to be used to build awareness of potential gender bias in hiring or promotion activities. As the profession seeks to understand more about creating an inclusive environment to retain employees, this timely experiment to explore how implicit bias could occur in hiring and promotion is an intervention itself.

The explosion of data coupled with firms’ desire to utilize it is driving rapid changes in the desired skillset for accounting and assurance professionals. Educational institutions are considering how to catch up to these requirements, while accreditors are also modifying standards to reflect changes in desired skillsets. We present evidence from two institutions’ efforts to update their courses to address contemporary skill requirements, accompanied by discussion from a Big 4 professional. We find that despite significant differences between the two institutions and their approaches, similar challenges were encountered, and similar feedback was obtained from students. We conclude with a proposal for four basic tenets that we believe should be considered by any institution updating curriculum in response to Big Data and related analytics skills.

This study investigated how students demonstrated their use and need for lecture capture transcripts. Lecturers and students from two accounting subjects (i.e., a large first-year introductory class and a smaller graduate seminar series) participated. Students’ stated how they used and needed the transcripts and these statements about behaviors were mapped to Blooms Taxonomy and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Findings focussed on how lecture transcripts influenced the learning process for students and suggested that the design of courses and student characteristics do not negatively influence how students use these transcripts. Implications for the value of transcripts to a students’ learning process is outlined with practical guides on how they can enhance pedagogical delivery while acknowledging the academic workload.

Prior literature suggests that Chinese students studying in Western Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) tend to underperform compared to local students. Yet few studies have explored the effect of learning and assessment tasks on the engagement and performance of Chinese students who are undergoing a transition into the Western learning environment. We design two online review exercises, which are summative assessments with a formative aspect, for an introductory financial accounting subject and study the effect of these tasks on a group of business students enrolled in the course at an international joint venture university based in China. We find that the online review exercises increase student engagement. Students spent a significant amount of time preparing for the online review exercises both before making their initial attempt and between each attempt. Students undertook a variety of learning activities in completing the online review exercises and their understanding of the subject improved as a result of going through the process. Student performance in the midterm and final exams is positively related to their efforts in completing the online review exercises. The findings are of relevance to accounting educators in both the Western HEIs and traditional Chinese universities who are interested in enhancing the learning performance of Chinese business students.