Assessment Plan

The School of Accountancy (SOA) maintains a comprehensive teaching and learning assessment process to ensure that such activities effectively support the respective and complementary missions of the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business and the SOA. At the core of this process are the program-level teaching and learning goals. These goals were developed by faculty curriculum committees with significant input by both the professional and student advisory boards. They were also influenced by the written pronouncements of professional, academic, and accrediting bodies, as well as professional licensing agencies.

The SOA teaching and learning goals are divided into three areas: (1) professional knowledge; (2) professional skills; (3) and professional values and attitudes. The SOA curriculum design process seeks to ensure that courses will be designed to effectively meet these goals and thereby support the mission of the school. The SOA Curriculum Committees (both graduate and undergraduate) identify the appropriate courses in which SOA program-level learning goals are to be covered and/or reinforced.

Learning goals are generally assessed in the courses where the most intensive coverage occurs. Embedded assessment tools are employed to directly assess the effectiveness of the learning activities that purport to meet program learning goals. Additional measures of teaching and learning effectiveness are also employed to provide evidence of teaching and learning effectiveness. They include student satisfaction surveys, employer satisfaction surveys, alumni satisfaction surveys, recruiter satisfaction surveys, student course evaluations, student focus groups, peer teaching evaluations, outside curriculum reviews by professionals, and performance on the ETS and CPA examinations. These output measures become inputs into data-driven decision making for continuous improvement.