Challenges Facing Professional Accounting Education in a Commercialised Education Sector

Abstract

Aligning curricula and assessment with the skills required by employers and, more recently, government standards is easier said than done. Through detailing a case study in failure to incorporate required graduate attributes into a postgraduate accounting programme, we explore the tensions among competing interests within Australian universities and their impact on teaching and learning. A content analysis of programme documents and results from a student survey demonstrate the ease of aligning formal programme and course outcomes with students' perceived learning while ignoring the graduate attributes required by the profession. While examples of best practice in curriculum development are common, analyses of failure are few. Understanding failure highlights common but taken-for-granted practices and assumptions that once recognised may lead to reflection and correction. Through our description of a simple means to review an accounting programme, we invite discussion among accounting educators about the opportunities for, and barriers to, programme improvement.

Key Words:

• Accounting curriculum
• alignment
• graduate attributes
• content analysis
• master of professional accounting

Acknowledgment

The authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful suggestions made by the AE editor and reviewers.

Notes

¹ ‘Graduate attributes' are also known as transferable/key/core/generic/lifelong learning skills; personal/graduate attributes; competencies and capabilities (Sumsion and Goodfellow, 2004, p. 329).

² Only 25% of Australian educated, foreign born, English as a second language graduates, seeking work in Australia as accountants, have obtained professional employment (Birrell and Healy 2008).

³ MPA programmes allow graduates from non-accounting disciplines to satisfy the entry requirements of the major professional accounting bodies in Australia.

⁴ For Australian universities, international student fees represent an average of 15% of total revenue (Beaton-Wells and Thompson 2011).

⁵ Masters programmes typically have half as many courses as an undergraduate accounting programme.

⁶ CPA Australia, the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia and the Institute of Public Accountants.

⁷ Graduate attributes can be divided into two broad skill types, cognitive and behavioural. Among the most commonly cited graduate attribute deficits are the higher-order cognitive skills of problem-solving and judgement and the behavioural skills of communication, teamwork and self-management (Hancock et al., 2009).

⁸ However the programme was subsequently completely revised.

⁹ The term ‘course’ refers to a subject (or unit) that forms part of the MPA programme.

¹⁰ Refer to Table 1 and a later section (‘Content Analyses for Declared and Assessed Curricula Elements') for greater detail on cognitive and behavioural skills dimensions.

¹¹ The professional accounting bodies specify the professional standards to be met for accreditation of accounting programmes. The Government's requirements for skilled migration include type of degree and length of time spent studying in Australia.

¹² All MPA courses were offered multiple times.

¹³ For example, in some cases there appeared little connection between the learning outcomes and the nature of the assessments and, further, assessments would change in nature without change in learning outcomes or vice versa between offerings. It is likely that changes in assessment approach were not informed by a critical analysis of the connection between the learning outcome and the previous assessment approach.

¹⁴ A copy of the survey instrument is available, by email, from the authors.

¹⁵ Ethics approval was granted by the University.

¹⁶ A ‘drop box’ was made available in the administration area of the campus for students to return the completed survey.

¹⁷ The Australian survey is based on the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), which has been used extensively within the United States since 2000 (Kuh, 2009). NSSE provides ‘high-quality, behaviourally oriented data about aspects of the student experience that are related to student success' (Kuh, 2009, p. 14). However, some studies have disputed the NSSE's predictive ability and criticised it for not fully capturing academic challenge (Kahu, 2011; Payne et al., 2005).

¹⁸ In 2009, 35 institutions participated in the AUSSE and 643 institutions from the USA and Canada took part in the NSSE (Radloff and Coates, 2010).

¹⁹ For example, financial accounting, management accounting, finance, tax, auditing, law, economics and statistics.