Accounting for Change
It’s been said that the one constant in life is change. Moving forward—and improving—from one stage to another, much like a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly, is a natural part of the world around us. The year 2020 has certainly proven to be a year of substantial change around the world. For BYU Marriott’s School of Accountancy (SOA), the unexpected challenges of COVID-19 were an added curveball in a year already full of transformation, as major adjustments to the SOA’s foundational program were underway when the pandemic struck.
In 2019 the SOA formed a committee, held discussions, examined curriculum, made decisions, and ultimately obtained approval to significantly change the school’s junior core program. While various adjustments to the junior core have been made over the years to ensure that curriculum remained cutting edge and graduates were well prepared to enter the job market, such alterations have been minor and gradual.
“This is the first major revamp of the junior core program since it was formed about thirty years ago,” says Scott Hobson, an SOA associate director and teaching professor. “Complicating this was the fact that none of us expected the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions to impact our first year of the revamped junior core.”
A Tradition of Innovation and Excellence
In the early 1990s, BYU Marriott’s SOA pioneered the junior core concept. The idea entailed dividing SOA students into five sections, with integrated topics and uniform instruction for each section. Faculty members rotated rather than the students, with everything—including faculty schedules— revolving around the curriculum and the subject matter. The junior core program quickly proved to be a revolutionary educational model, one that other universities have since tried to emulate.
In order to make this nontraditional approach work, a high level of coordination and collaboration had to exist among faculty members, with everyone working cohesively to prepare lesson plans, harmonize schedules, and build unity in their teaching methodologies. The SOA’s long tradition of success attests to the efficacy of this approach. The school is consistently ranked in the top three accounting schools in the nation; in 2018 and 2019, BYU had the highest pass rate for first-time CPA exam takers among all large US programs.
So why mess with success? Other than undergoing small, incremental changes through the decades, the original structure of the junior core program has remained fundamentally intact—until now.
“We’ve made small changes, turning little dials here and there,” says Cassy Budd, junior core coordinator and the Nemrow Excellence in Teaching Professor. “But this wholesale change grew out of the feedback that we were getting from our advisory board that we needed to look at sort of a seismic shift.”
Winds of Change
As a result, fall 2020 brings major changes to the junior core program, changes that have been primarily driven by shifts occurring in the business world specifically and the accounting industry as a whole.
“After thirty years, why would we make these changes to the junior core? Everything’s working well; we’re highly ranked. Why would we do this?” Hobson asks. “We have a board of advisors that is composed of professionals from public accounting and corporate America. Over the years, they have been extremely helpful to us in identifying the skills, knowledge, and expertise our students need to have when they graduate in order to be productive in their first jobs.”
For the past five years, the SOA’s advisory board has been conducting an in-depth review of the accountancy program’s curriculum so it could make recommendations for needed adjustments. One significant area in which the board saw a need for increased focus was data analytics.
“The biggest reason for the changes was to make sure our program was up-to-date and reflective of the significant shifts in all of business to big data and analytics,” Budd says. “We needed to be able to bring that perspective into the classroom more deliberately.”
In a changing business world, accountants need to have the necessary skills to gather various kinds of data, parse that data, and then communicate the most important elements to key decision makers. “Data analytics is an area in accounting that has become extremely significant in terms of its importance,” Hobson observes. Critical thinking and practical application were also identified as essential areas of focus as the SOA prepares students to enter the accounting profession.
As a result of this feedback from the advisory board, beginning fall 2020 the SOA junior core includes Accounting 407: Data Analytics in Accounting, and in winter 2021 junior core students will take two block courses, Accounting 408: Critical Thinking in Accounting and Accounting 409: Integrated Topics in Accounting.
“The integrated topics in accounting course is going to draw from all of that knowledge that the students have learned over the course of the previous semester and a half, and they’re going to now be given cases and projects and things to work on where they have to integrate all of that information,” Hobson explains.
Making Room for Growth
In order to add the new courses, the SOA has made significant adaptations to the program’s current structure.
In the past, each semester of the junior core program consisted of three classes worth four credits each, totaling twelve credits per semester. Beginning this fall, the junior core program now consists of four classes per semester, with each class worth three credits.
To pare down the existing classes from four credit hours of information to three, SOA faculty members carefully assessed the material they teach to identify what could be trimmed to make way for the new curriculum. The process took a great deal of effort over the past year. Much time was spent discussing and evaluating what changes needed to be made to preserve—and strengthen—the heart of the junior core program.
Other Modifications
Historically, the junior core has been divided into five sections of students, with fifty to fifty-five students in each section. Starting in fall 2020, a sixth section has been added, which gives the SOA the potential to increase the total number of students admitted to the program. The target enrollment for the junior core has previously been about 265 students; with the addition of a sixth section, that target enrollment number now increases to more than 300 students.
“The university has been talking about increasing student enrollment at the university level,” Hobson says. “If that proposal receives final approval from the board of trustees, we’ve been told that BYU Marriott will be expected to accommodate a fairly significant portion of that increase. Expanding to six sections actually puts us in a good place to be able to accommodate the increased number of students that may be coming into BYU Marriott in the future.”
The class structure within the junior core is also undergoing changes. Historically, junior core students have been assigned to either a morning or an afternoon session, with professors rotating into the classes depending on topics being taught on a given day. Rather than follow the traditional Monday/ Wednesday, Tuesday/Thursday format seen elsewhere on campus, the SOA junior core program required students to keep their schedules open throughout the week to accommodate four days of instruction and a fifth day of soft-skills development.
“That approach meant there wasn’t a regular schedule as far as the faculty was concerned,” Hobson says.
With these changes, the junior core is transitioning to a more traditional Monday/ Wednesday, Tuesday/Thursday class structure, with Fridays remaining a lab day for group assignments and soft-skills instruction.
Future Changes
“Overall, fall 2020 brings major changes to the SOA, including: major changes to the structure of the junior core, the size of the junior core, and the content in the junior core,” says Hobson.
Because of these substantial changes, the SOA has decided that, for now, it will focus solely on implementing these adjustments successfully. In the future, Hobson says, the SOA will also consider adjustments to prerequisite classes within the accounting program. Eventually, changes to the MAcc program will also be contemplated.
“Hopefully what we’ve done will provide the students with invaluable information and skills that they need to be successful moving forward,” Hobson says. “My guess is we won’t be able to go another thirty years before making more changes. The pace of change in the field is increasing, and I wouldn’t be surprised if in ten years, we’re looking at it again. Our ultimate commitment is to ensure that BYU Marriott’s SOA junior core model continues to be the top educational model around.”
