When the School of Accountancy (SOA) was made aware of a potential gap in teaching methods, they designed two new courses for the SOA junior core—hoping that the hands-on learning opportunities would help students at the BYU Marriott School of Business bridge the gap between knowledge and application.
All incoming SOA students take Accounting 408: Critical Thinking, which focuses on good analysis and decision-making processes, in their first semester of junior core. Bill Tayler, the Robert J. Smith Professor of Accounting, teaches several sections of this course and is a firm believer in its importance. He says, “We have critical thinking through all of our classes, but sometimes you just have to focus in and say: What is a good decision process? How do you define a problem? How do you use good judgment? How do you avoid biases?”
Tayler knows how important it is to practice using the processes he teaches—though they may seem like common sense to students at first. “We go through real-world examples where people—smart, educated, experienced people—have made horrible judgment calls because of a bad process,” he explains. “We lay those steps out because this process might be obvious, but people don’t use it, so we need to change our process and we’ll end up with better judgment.”
The skills students learn in ACC 408 apply far beyond the field of accounting. “As we learned the critical thinking principles, I quickly started to notice them in all aspects of my life,” says Jay Davis, a senior in the accounting program from Denver. “I would have experiences where after learning about, say, biases, I’d sit there and realize I totally just showed that bias.”
When junior core students finish ACC 408, they begin Accounting 409: Integrated Topics in Accounting the following semester. In winter of 2023, Associate Teaching Professor Jonathan Liljegren took over ACC 409 and has been reworking the class’s structure to mirror an accounting firm’s setup, with the students taking on the role of new associates at the firm. He hopes his efforts will help students become comfortable in a work environment and give them the opportunity to apply the skills they’ve learned in their other accounting classes. “We really built this out, all the way from technology to time sheets and performance management,” he explains. “So when they go wherever they go, yes it might look a little bit different, but they’ve got the understanding of what accounting practice is all about.”
Davis, who is also a teaching assistant (TA) for ACC 409, looks back on his time as a student in the course with appreciation. “When I was in class, I’d do the assignments but I didn’t necessarily understand why,” he says. “Then I showed up at my internship and had a week and a half of training to start, where I did mini-projects to practice before I got real projects. And every single one of the things I did in my internship I had done in the junior core, in integrated topics. Every single thing.”
This semester, Liljegren has incorporated different terminology into the curriculum: cases became “engagements” and TAs became “managers.” The enhancements didn’t stop there. Students can now interact with nine AI employees of a fictional company—encoded by their very own accounting faculty and TAs to represent a fictitious company—in real time as they gather information for their audit and look for signs of fraud. Liljegren hopes this will help students get used to finding their own information through inquiry, the way they will in the field, rather than by looking through a pre-prepared assignment packet.
After each group engagement, the students complete performance reviews for their groupmates, giving feedback on what could be improved with the hope of reinforcing good work practice. Students earn points by keeping time sheets to track how long they work on each project, and they contact each other, their “managers,” and their professor through the class’s communication channel. The class’s immersive work environment even includes their very own company name—CougarCore Financial Partners—and logo.
These courses are designed to provide students practice implementing good decision-making techniques and preparing them to apply the skills they’ve learned in the junior core to real workplace situations. “It’s the perfect way to finish off the junior core: seeing how everything you’ve learned will apply in your future life,” says Davis. “That’s what we’re trying to mimic.”
_____
Written by Melissa Een