College Accounting Curriculum Gets Reality Check
With Practical Problem Sets, Students Feel Better Prepared for Workforce

By John Savash

Somewhere between college and a career, accounting students face internships and entry-level positions packed with filing and photocopying, dreary yet perhaps necessary stops along the road to the actual profession. With any luck, and patient bosses permitting, these CPA hopefuls will get their hands on some practical experience to help them develop the skills they need.

Some graduates, however, will never see an audit working paper, or any other real accounting exercise, before they enter the workforce.

Accounting professors in New York state are trying to change that. Much to their students’ dismay, but eventual gratitude, many professors now use simulated practice sets to teach their students practical skills they need to become certified public accountants. They prove to be difficult yet invaluable assignments.

Apple Blossom Cologne Company, for example, distributed by McGraw-Hill/Irwin, offers a practice set involving the preparation of audit working papers for an imaginary company. In essence, it forces students to prepare audit working papers. Professors also use, among many others, Peachtree or QuickBooks accounting software in the classroom. And many professors simply invent their own case studies in which students study a real or fictitious company and then prepare a tax return or an audit, or whatever else the course curriculum aims to achieve.

Assignments like these, given to college seniors, can stand stubbornly between graduation and starting a first full-time job. Some students find them frustrating because, in addition to being a lot of work, the problem sets depart from theories they have grown comfortable with and instead ask them to apply actual skills.

In audit classes, for example, students learn first about the auditing profession in general, covering the legal environment, internal control and substantive and compliance testing. After learning the fundamentals, students apply those ideas of auditing to actual audits with the simulated practice set.

An accounting student who took auditing at Elmira College in 2000 said, “Apple Blossom is a good learning tool, but the assignments were very time consuming.” However, in the end, students in the same class found the concept of a simulated audit “effective” and felt “accomplished for finishing it.”

Accounting professionals who recruit new audit staff are also grateful for this shift toward more practical college curriculum.\

“Staff auditors who have completed the Apple Blossom Cologne Company case as students typically demonstrate a firm grasp of not only the mechanics of basic audit procedures, but the underlying accounting theory as well,” said Kristin Koppmann, who’s involved with recruiting new staff for Deloitte and Touche’s Buffalo office.

“These professionals experience an advantage over their peers in the first few months of their audit careers, as they immediately begin to build core skills based on this foundation,” Koppmann added.

Problem sets like Apple Blossom exist, of course, for all functional areas of accounting. Bill Dresnack, immediate past president of the NYSSCPA Rochester Chapter, uses them to teach tax, business law and financial accounting at SUNY Brockport. He says students there have the opportunity to complete actual tax returns, including individual, corporate, partnership and, occasionally, estate and trust returns.

“They’re a good way of applying textbook theories to real-world problems,” Dresnack said.

Dresnack remembers that his professors didn’t use practical problem sets when he was in college. “I think it’s a great development in education that professors expand their curriculum in this way,” he said.

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John Savash, CPA, is president of the NYSSCPA’s Finger Lakes Chapter and an assistant professor of accounting at Elmira College in Elmira, N.Y. He can be reached at jsavash@elmira.edu.