Accounting Graduate

Learning Outcomes/Goals:

MS Program in accounting are to have students:

1. Be prepared to act ethically and in harmony with professional standards and responsibilities.

2. Be effective accounting and business communicators.

3. Achieve disciplinary competence in specialized accounting knowledge and processes.

4. Be competent users of accounting and business-related research resources.

PhD Program in accounting are for students to:

1. Have knowledge of the scholarly accounting literature.

2. Satisfactorily critique scholarly accounting literature.

3. Create new scholarly accounting knowledge.

Activities in Support of Goals:

1.  Program goals are differentiated through advice from both internal and external constituencies. Internally, program goals and learning outcomes are developed through Department and College level curriculum committees:

·  Department Curriculum Committee

·  Masters Programs Committee—masters goals and outcomes

·  PhD Programs Committee—doctoral learning goals and outcomes

2.  Externally inputs to help differentiate goals and identify learning outcomes include:

·  Department’s External Advisory Board

·  Benchmarking information (EBI data)

Assessment Methods:

  1. Developing instruments (e.g., assignments, cases, exam questions etc.) to directly measure each of these learning goals
  2. Determining rubrics to ascertain whether students are meeting, exceeding or failing to meet the goals
  3. Collecting and reporting the results of these assessments to our faculty on an annual basis
  4. At our annual faculty retreat, the data and results are reviewed and recommendations for making changes and improvements are discussed and acted upon. The Department Chairperson has the responsibility for implementation of the assessment system, leading discussion of the results, and implementing processes for developing changes or improvements recommended by the faculty. The faculty/staff director of each of the programs assist the chairperson in this continuous improvement process.

Assessment Results:

  1. The new goals listed in the response to question 1 (learning outcomes) were specified this summer.
  2. In addition, this summer we developed a new monitoring system for ascertaining our success in achieving these new goals by creating instruments to directly assess and measure our students abilities to achieve these learning outcomes.

Action Taken:

In the past as the result of similar processes we created faculty committees to propose changes in curriculum to improve students’ abilities to reach key learning goals and objectives.

Future plans:

  1. During this academic year we are in the process of administering the instruments and collecting data to evaluate the degree of our successes/failures. Based on this information we will decide at our faculty retreat next August what, if anything, we need to do in terms of curriculum and/or pedagogy to help our students better achieve these objectives.
  2. We currently are in the process of assessing each of these goals. Previous learning assessment processes caused us to address different learning goals.