Knowledge that Transforms

Students sometimes have difficulty in fully understanding the implications and applications of behavioral concepts to accounting. A reason for this difficulty may be because these concepts are frequently presented, illustrated, and discussed in contexts that are unfamiliar to the student. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a general approach which may be used in discussing this topic in the classroom using illustrations and questions that may be both more understandable and meaningful to students in their college environment.

Reviews the book "Accounting Trends & Techniques," 13th ed.

In this article the author comments on several books related to accounting. The book "Management Accounting--State of the Art," is an excellent publication consisting of three lectures and critiques of each lecture. An Inland Steel executive presents a survey of the usage of financial modeling, a Canadian executive relates his company's experience in using replacement cost accounting in planning, control and performance evaluation. The book "Skew Distributions and the Sizes of Business Firms," vol. 2, by Yuji Ijiri and Herbert A. Simon, deals with the quantitative approach to problems in the social and administrative sciences. The book is of direct interest to those accountants who study industrial organization and industrial concentration. Another book "The Cultures of Management," by Robert H. Roy, is based upon the premise that managers must understand the cultural forces that pervade all organizations. It is a study of management cultures in four principal areas: organization, technology, quantitative methods and behavior. Should be of interest to those accountants who have a special interest in management, organizations including non-profit ones and behavior.

The often substantial amount of uncertainty associated with unit volume, unit variable cost, fixed cost, or even unit price in cost-volume-profit (CVP) analysis has made apparent the need for an easy-to-use and accurate means of making probabilistic statements about profit. Over the last dozen years, three main approaches to stochastic CVP analysis have evolved. They are Chebyshev-type inequalities approach, direct simulation approach and theoretical distribution approach. The study of Ferrara-Hayya-Nachman (FHN) considers an important aspect of the third approach. However, the purpose of this paper is to show that the study of FHN is based on inappropriate statistical methodology and their recommendation is, therefore, invalid. Thus, at the current stage of development, it appears that a practitioner should seriously consider using the direct simulation approach. This approach, is easily implemented on even a small computer and provides reasonable levels of accuracy. On the other hand, the facility of application of the theoretical distribution approach to CVP analysis continues to be attractive.

This paper updates information on accounting education reported in previous surveys published in 1968, 1971 and 1974. Data is provided on schools offering doctoral degrees, candidates in course-work stage, candidates in dissertation stage and degrees awarded between 1974 and 1976. Doctoral degrees granted in 1976 fell to the lowest level since 1969. A small increase is forecast for 1977, with a larger increase anticipated in 1978. Total enrollment in doctoral programs has increased very little over the past ten years although the number of candidates attaining degrees has increased about 70 percent. No immediate surplus of doctorates in accounting is forecast for the next five years.

Most accounting curricula do not provide students with practical reinforcement of EDP audit/retrieval system concepts. This paper reports on a computer program package that has been designed to fill this educational void. The MARS package consists of five different routines that enable students to gain hands-on experience similar to many features of larger commercial audit/retrieval systems. Student testing of the package and related case studies has proven them to be effective and efficient pedagogical tools.

Reviews the book "Principles of Auditing," 6th ed., by Walter B. Meigs, E. John Larsen and Robert F. Meigs.

Reviews the book "Corporate Financial Reporting: Text and Cases," by David F. Hawkins.

Reviews the book "Cost Accounting: Accumulation, Analysis, and Control," by Benny R. Copeland and Nelson G. Sullivan.

The purpose of this paper is first to describe the options available in the use of interactive Computer Systems (ICS) to generate and administer examinations and then to report on experimentation involving use of ICS to generate and administer examinations. The results of this experiment indicate (1) that measurements of student achievement obtained through the use of ICS will be consistent with those which might be obtained through conventional means and (2) that the security of ICS examinations appears to be good enough that the "same" examination can be administered at different times without significantly affecting the scores of students who take the examination later.