Reviews the book "Cases in Controllership," by Russell H. Hassler and Neil E. Harlan.

The article focuses on the improvement of present curricula and methods of accounting teaching. The author argues that the there is a need for improvement in the methods of examinations. The greatest opportunity for improvement lies in the direction of a strong trend toward greater objectivity in those examinations. Accounting, like mathematics, lends itself naturally and easily to the objective techniques. The argument for the objective technique is usually based upon the ease and sureness with which it serves this grading function. Many early efforts at objective examining run into student resistance. Such resistance is often at least partially justified because most early attempts in the new medium are likely to include a few bad items, and students, especially the best ones, are quick to spot such ambiguous, unanswerable items. The cure for this is item-analysis of the results of every test. The ability to analyze and organize is basically the ability to recognize and appraise significant relationships among insolated factors each of which is by itself a simple statement of fact.

The primary case for the uniform achievement tests of the American Institute's Committee on Selection of Personnel has been argued in these columns. A secondary use to which they may be put has been developed at the University of Michigan and may well find useful adoption elsewhere. One of the most difficult judgments which a college admissions officer, or department head, is called upon to make is the evaluation of credits brought in by students transferring after one or more years at some other college. There is always a human desire to be as generous as possible, for the sake of the transferee as well as for reasons of inter school policy. This desire must be balanced by the need to protect the school's own. reputation when it is staked upon the eventual graduate. The fundamental welfare of the transferee himself as well as the welfare of the advanced. classes into which he will go also demands the accurate appraisal of his achievement to date. The problem is especially pressing in subjects such as accounting where each course in the "accounting major" sequence so directly relies upon the mastery of the accounting courses which have preceded it.

The author in this article focuses on the need of control of detail in inventory valuation. He insists that there is an aspect of the inventory problem which has been very largely neglected in the literature of the subject, though in practice it must be faced every time a decision is made to change the method of valuation. The problem is that how can the entries in perpetual inventory accounts be handled so as to keep the book figures for control and for detail accounts in agreement with each other, and, at the end of the period, to bring them into agreement with the inventory as priced under the various suggested methods? To bring the problem into sharpest focus for the discussion, the author considers it as applying to the raw-materials inventory in manufacturing business which operates on a job-cost basis. In those rare instances in which all raw materials can be marked when purchased with their specific individual unit costs, and charged out to production at those specific costs, the control account will be a direct summarization of the entries on the detail cards.

This paper is predicated on the assumption that the usefulness of various forms of objective tests have been established in the field of college accounting courses beyond the need of further argument. It is the purpose of this paper to discuss certain procedures for further testing and improving such objective-type examinations. The writer has observed that an objective type examination which has been carefully drawn up probably does not contain any higher percentage of poor items than does a problem or essay type, but it so happens that in the typical objective examination the "boner" items stand out so that they can be spotted much more surely than unreliable items of the older type. If this observation is correct, it of course constitutes one more argument in favor of the objective-type examination. The general technique discussed has appeared in some of the education texts for ten or fifteen years and has also been in use extensively by the Federal Civil Service Commission, but some of its implications do not seem to have been fully discussed, nor does it seem to have been developed as thoroughly as it deserves-certainly not in university accounting circles.

The author's general topic is "putting across" the bookkeeping phase of the elementary accounting course. More specifically he is interested in the types of tests or examinations, which can be given to bear directly on the students' acquisition of bookkeeping technique. Perhaps he is being unpleasantly honest when he say that this matter of bookkeeping is a phase of the elementary course which is often unduly slighted in one's eagerness to get at what one consider material more worthy of a college course. Bookkeeping training naturally falls into the first course. To teach it well enough so that the student until after graduation will retain it and in the meanwhile constitute a reliable background for work in other accounting courses, is a task well worth careful consideration. According to the author, the bookkeeping sets used should represent as great a variation of types as is possible from the simplest to those of a considerable degree of complexity. His policy has been to require the students to rule all of their books working from written descriptions, or from suggested blackboard models.

Many accountants, both in public and private accounting, have been striving mightily in recent years to see their way through the maze and mists of electronic data processing. To some extent, the highly placed controller or the partner public accountant will be able to dodge the necessity for this new learning by delegating it to the "systems" or department. Controllers discharging this responsibility through their systems departments have the direct responsibility for determining the feasibility of adoption of some electronic data processing layout. Public accountants, if they are rendering management and systems service, face the same problem of adoption and installation with and for their clients. In many respects, the present situation is not unlike that faced by the public accountants twenty-five years ago when punched card accounting techniques were sweeping into the accounting office. For the fully "electronified" areas of the accounting system there will be virtually nothing left of old on-the-scene audit techniques.

This article presents the findings of the report of the committee, appointed by President Charles J. Gaa as a task committee operating under the Joint Committee on Education, to receive and review the Ford and Carnegie reports for the American Accounting Association. The two reports--"Higher Education for Business" by Gordon and Howell, and "The Education of American Businessmen" by Pierson were financed and sponsored by The Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York respectively. The authors of Ford and Carnegie reports, in their extensive surveys found glaring examples of bachelor's degrees given for programs of study, overloaded with business in general or with accounting in particular. The Committee urges that the faculty of each school should read the entire reports so that by carefully trying on each shoe of criticism they may find those, which fit their particular situations. It is also expected that the Ford and Carnegie reports will have an impact on collegiate education for business.