The Importance of English Language Competency in the Academic Success of International Accounting Students

Abstract

The authors investigate the information content of two commonly used admission tests, namely the Graduate Management Admission Test and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). The analysis extends prior research by investigating the incremental information content of individual components from one admission test conditional on the information contained in the other admission test and undergraduate grade point average. The results suggest that for international applicants in master of accountancy programs, the TOEFL test is the only one that yields statistically significant incremental information content about academic success. If admissions officers were to eliminate one of the tests, it should not be the TOEFL.

Keywords:

• academic success
• admission tests
• information content
• international accounting students
• skills assessment

Notes

¹The partial F statistic, as the name implies, evaluates the significance of part of the model. When the difference between the complete (Model C) and the reduced model (Model A or B) is only one independent variable, as in equation 1(1) , the partial F is the square of the t statistic for that independent variable in the complete model (Model C) and the t statistic and partial F statistic reflect the same significance level for the incremental explanatory power.

²Because the GMAT integrated reasoning assessment was not required until June 2012, that component was not available for the master of accounting students included in this study.

³Because some students may have submitted paper-based, computer-based, and internet-based (iBT) TOEFL scores, all have been converted to iBT scaling using the iBT score comparison tables published by ETS. ETS has conducted an extensive research program since the 1970s to assure the reliability and comparability of the TOEFL scores.

⁴Because tests of significance for incremental information content depend on both changes in explained sum of squares and changes in degrees of freedom, which can be different from model to model, we focus on adjusted R² and partial F statistics from the regressions. The R² for each model in Tables 4–6 is also provided for the sake of completeness.

⁵Because both the GMAT and TOEFL admission tests provide assessments of writing ability, the methodological approach of this study was extended to consider the information content of GMAT-W and TOEFL-W. Consistent with the results reported for tests of the hypotheses in this study, only the TOEFL-W score was found to provide statistically significant incremental information content (at the.05 level) about academic success.