Terry College of Business - Fall 2008 - (Page 27) Terry doesn’t believe in teaching to the exam, much less offering CPA exam review courses within the curriculum. credit colleague Dan Smith for jump-starting new hires and for passing on this unique delivery method to students. “I give a lot of credit to Dan,” says Call, who spent part of his first semester on campus as an observer in Smith’s class. He took notes, consulted with Smith on a daily basis, and felt enriched by the experience. “Dan has a way of presenting the material to the students that is intuitive, easy to remember, and is correct.” Smith’s method is a welcome departure from tradition. “Eighty percent of the people across the country who teach intermediate accounting do so as the memorization of a bunch of unrelated rules . . . whereas, Dan teaches it from a theoretical perspective,” says Bamber, who credits Smith’s technique with teaching students how an accounting rule was created through real-life cases brought to the Financial Accounting Standards Board. “If you can remember who won the battle, you can remember the accounting,” says Bamber. “That is nowhere in any textbook.” Smith provides students with a textbook, so they do have hypothetical problems to solve. But he estimates that probably 95 percent of what he teaches is a reflection of real-world scenarios that he has adapted into what and how he teaches. “I’ve won a few teaching awards, but whatever I learned about teaching I learned from Dan,” says Bamber, who recently was honored with an MBA teaching award for the accounting program. “Whenever I have an issue, I still come to him. I attribute a large part of our success on the CPA exam to the way he teaches the intermediate classes.” Isabel Wang (PhD ’05), who posted stellar evaluation scores as an instructor at Michigan State, wishes Smith would collect his teaching notes into a little book. “My teaching evaluations have been about an average of 1.4 or 1.5 (1 being the highest possible score on a scale of 1-5) in the past three years that I taught,” she says, “and I owe a lot of it to Dan’s effort in teaching me to be a better teacher.” For his part, Smith says he “discovered early on that students get disenchanted if you just tell them to go do something. I try to get students to understand more about the accounting standards we have to work our way through. What was going on that made this come to pass? Why was it important? And what does the FASB say we terry allen Schools with Highest Passing Rates Among First-Time Candidates Without Advanced Degrees (2006) Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 Terry College oF Institution University of texas at austin texas a&m University University of iowa University of kansas University of Georgia University of Wisconsin-madison University of virginia auburn University University of michigan-ann arbor University of Washington Southern methodist University Santa clara University University of tennessee-knoxville Brigham young University Florida State University University of illinois at Urbana-champaign colorado State University lehigh University University of northern-iowa University of arizona University of Florida University of Wisconsin-Whitewater University of notre Dame arizona State University University of california-los angeles Business Number Fail 29 20 8 7 15 11 12 16 13 9 8 7 12 11 10 69 10 10 38 14 9 14 10 14 28 Number Pass 96 55 22 18 38 26 26 33 26 18 16 13 20 17 15 95 13 13 49 18 11 17 12 16 31 Number of Candidates 125 75 30 25 53 37 38 49 39 27 24 20 32 28 25 164 23 23 87 32 20 31 22 30 59 Percent Passing 76.80% 73.33% 73.33% 72.00% 71.70% 70.27% 68.42% 67.35% 66.67% 66.67% 66.67% 65.00% 62.50% 60.71% 60.00% 57.93% 56.52% 56.52% 56.32% 56.25% 55.00% 54.84% 54.55% 53.33% 52.54% Fall 2008 • 27
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