NICE NEWS and GREAT STUDENT ADVICE

I got the nicest email a few days ago from the president of the American Accounting Association:    “I am happy to give you some great news: you have been selected as the recipient of the 2013 Innovation in Accounting Education award for your blog, Joe Hoyle: Teaching -- Getting the Most From Your Students. The award was established to foster innovation and improvement in accounting education through ‘significant programmatic changes or a significant activity, concept, or set of educational materials.’”

I was really thrilled.

 

As a result, I will make a 90 minute presentation on August 7 at the AAA annual meeting in Anaheim.   If you are going to be at that conference, I hope you will stop by.   

And, I want to thank everyone who reads this blog for helping to spread the word.   We have now had 78,000 page views over the years and my guess is that most of those hits came from you guys telling other folks about the blog.   So I believe that the above award should be shared with you.   Thanks!!!

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For two days last week, Dennis Beresford – the former chairman of the Financial Accounting Standards Board – was on our campus.   He gave talks and presentations to several hundred of our students as well as over 100 members of the local accounting community.   It was a wonderful couple of days here at the University of Richmond. 

At one presentation, a student in the audience asked “What piece of advice would you give to us as college students?”   That was a very legitimate question to ask a person who has been so very successful in the business world and as a college educator. 

I did not try to write down every word that Mr. Beresford said in response but I did love his answer and I want to paraphrase it here.   He paused for a moment and then talked about students often being too interested in focusing on getting 120 hours of nothing but accounting.   He spoke about the importance of gaining a broader education and coming to appreciate classes outside of accounting and business.  

I wish I could have written down every word because it was a great answer.   I could not have agreed more to what he said.   A college education should be about creating a foundation for a thoughtful life rather than a quest for a first job.   Understanding accounting is, of course, important but college needs to be about more than just making sure the debits equal the credits.   If that is all a person wants to learn, life is going to be very dull.

After Mr. Beresford’s talk, I started thinking about how to encourage my students to develop that kind of attitude.   I certainly want my students to learn lease accounting and pension accounting but I also want them to appreciate art, literature, and the like.   How do you push a student to go outside of his or her comfort zone?

Luckily, registration for the fall semester is coming up so the selection of courses is on everyone’s mind at the moment.   I quickly wrote a note to our seniors graduating in accounting and asked each of them to hit reply and tell me the name of the best course they had ever taken at the University of Richmond outside of the Robins Business School.   I explained what I wanted to do and asked them to identify that special, non-business course.

Almost immediately, a long list of courses started pouring into my email account.   Several students listed multiple courses they would recommend.   I had not asked for any type of explanation but many of the students wrote out glowing comments about a particular course and what they had learned.  

To me, the list was thoroughly fascinating including such courses as Hebrew Prophets, Justice in Civil Society, The Propaganda State, Minds and Machines, Leadership and Economic Policy, Thomas Jefferson and Revolutionary American, Introduction to Film Studies, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Lincoln, Saints and Sinners in Muslim Literature, Elementary Symbolic Logic, Introduction to Environmental Studies, and Global Women Writers.

The list was so interesting that I was ready to go back to college and take many of the courses myself.

Then, I sent an email to all junior accounting majors here at the University of Richmond.   I started by discussing what Mr. Beresford had said.   Then, I added the entire list of “best courses” and explained that some other student just like them had picked each of those courses as the very best (outside of the Business School) that they had taken in four years here.  I strongly encouraged them to look at those courses and consider whether one or more wasn’t worth taking in the coming fall semester.

Did I change any minds?   I certainly hope so.   Students often need a little encouragement to explore going outside of their comfort zone.   But, from my experience, most of them do not need very much encouragement -- a little goes a long way.   This whole experiment probably took no more than 45 minutes of my time.   But I might have gotten some of our Accounting students to broaden their education a bit.   And, that, I think, is a worthy goal.   Just like Dennis Beresford suggested.

CREATING A TRUE SENSE OF URGENCY

I received the following email from Dennis Beresford about my previous blog posting.   In that earlier essay, I had indicated that I expected my students to study before each class as if a quiz were scheduled even though no quiz was going to be given.   I want them to motivate themselves to do the work rather than leaving the motivation up to me as the teacher.   It is their education.   They should care enough to have the discipline needed to do the work.

I have long argued that students will always do much better in any class if they feel a sense of urgency.   The only question is whether that urgency needs to be externally driven or whether the students can be expected to create it for themselves.  

As many of you will know, Professor Beresford served as the chairman of FASB (Financial Accounting Standards Board) from 1987 until 1997.   Since that time, he has been the Ernst & Young Executive Professor of Accounting in the J. M. Tull School of Accounting at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia.   Over the years, he has held an unbelievable number of other prominent positions in the business and accounting world.  

Professor Beresford writes here about his own undergraduate education and the method by which his accounting professor at the University of Southern California created that essential sense of urgency in his students.   I only have a few quick comments.

(1) – I would bet that the students walked into Professor James’ class each day extremely well prepared and, as a result, learned a ton about accounting.   He certainly understood motivation.   I just hope that none of the students had a nervous breakdown.  

(2) – Although this method of teaching seems a bit harsh, do note that it successfully created one of the most influential accountants of the past 50 years:   Dennis Beresford.   You cannot argue against that outcome.   I do not know what happened to all of the other students after graduation but this method worked extremely well in one case.

(3) – Faculty members often complain that students have changed over the years (they have gotten soft and lazy).   From this account, maybe it is not the students who have changed but rather the faculty members who have changed.   Perhaps faculty members were once more willing than today to put these kinds of demands on their students.

From Professor Dennis Beresford:

“I enjoyed your latest teaching blog, ‘There Will Be No Quiz.’  It reminded me of my own experience at USC where the professor who taught my two Intermediate classes and one Advance class had a policy of never announcing any of his exams (except for the final, of course). Yes, I meant to say exams and not just quizzes. So we came to class each period not knowing whether we would have a lecture and discussion of homework problems on the assigned topic or the entire period would be devoted to an exam. He announced this policy at the beginning of the semester and the students would start to anticipate an exam if we hadn’t had one for some time. But we never knew whether it might be in the fifth week, the seventh week, or so on. I can’t recall if we know how many interim exams we would have during the semester but I believe it was at least a couple before the final.

“Most students were aghast at this policy but I actually thought it was great. That’s because I was never a ‘study all night before the exam’ type of guy. I worked my way through school and almost always spent at least 20 hours at my outside job. But besides that it’s always been my approach to keep up to date with my classes or other obligations. I figured that if I didn’t read the materials and work the problems while they were fresh in mind I was losing the opportunity to take advantage of what I had heard in class and wouldn’t be able to ask timely questions to reinforce the material right away. I’m sure there were times when I went back to try to review things for an exam but not too many. I just tried hard to learn things well the first time around so I wouldn’t have to re-learn them again later. That served me particularly well in Professor James’ classes and it’s worked pretty well throughout my career too!”