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  • Completion of h of education was significant in

    2020-02-11

    Completion of 150 h of education was significant in virtually all prior studies of the 150-h requirement (Allen and Woodland, 2006, Boone et al., 2006 and others). While the 150-h requirement applies to licensure, students are often permitted (as in California) to sit for the CPA exam with fewer total hours completed. Having completed a typical minimum of 120 semester hours (180 quarter units) of undergraduate education to obtain the required degree for entry to the accelerated program, plus an additional 45 quarter units (30 semester hours) of accounting in the program, we assume the accelerated students meet the 150-h requirement for licensure. While we do not have access to post-graduation records for the traditional-program alumni and thus cannot precisely measure their units completed at the time of the exam, a substantial majority of our undergraduates typically obtain 150 h before graduation via course overloads, summer courses, advanced placement high school credits, and internship credits. Those who fail to graduate with 150 h typically complete online or local college courses to meet the 150-h requirement. Consequently, we do not specifically control for meeting the 150-h requirement prior to taking the exam. Because of the nature of the alumni groups we are comparing, all subjects in the sample have completed at least 45 quarter units in accounting. Success on the CPA exam has commonly been linked to participation in a preparatory review course (e.g., Becker, Kaplan, Roger, etc.). Reviewing our data, we find that virtually all respondents who attempted the exam used such a course, and thus do not include this Zinc protoporphyrin IX as a control variable. A number of studies have considered program quality as manifested by faculty research productivity, program selectivity, and AACSB accreditation as control variables in comparing CPA exam pass rates (Boone et al., 2006; Howell & Heshizer, 2006; Bline et al., 2016a, Fogarty et al., 2016, Howell and Heshizer, 2008). Our research institution is accredited at both the business school and accounting department levels by the AACSB. The certificate program, by definition, cannot be accredited by the AACSB, which does not extend accreditation to non-degree programs. However, since the traditional and accelerated programs are taught in most cases by the same tenured faculty, using the same textbooks, and with the same pedagogy, such accreditation-related differences should not affect our study. Finally, we recognize homeostasis students who have graduated more recently have less time to pass the exam. To control for this, we consider the number of months between graduation and responding to our survey (MOTOSURVEY) as a control variable. Table 3 provides sample sizes and mean values of our control variables for traditional, summer, and weekend alumni. The sample sizes vary as a result of some respondents not answering specific survey questions and the fact that the weekend accelerated program is relatively new in comparison with the summer program. Comparing the summer and weekend alumni, we find the summer alumni are significantly more likely to possess another professional certificate and have been out of the program longer. The time-related differences are readily explained by the fact that the weekend program began graduating students in 2008, while the summer program began much earlier. Given the few differences between the summer and accelerated weekend programs, in subsequent tests we sometimes pool these programs to focus on a comparison of the traditional and accelerated alumni. Recognizing that some students will never seek to become CPAs and thus will never attempt any part of the exam, we look at two things: (1) whether students attempt the exam and (2) for those students who do, their performance on the exam. While the majority of alumni report attempting the exam, many do not. We find that almost 80% of the traditional students have attempted the exam (results shown on Table 2). Among the summer and weekend accelerated program students, 69% and 65% have attempted the exam, respectively. To assess whether the various programs differ in contributing to alumni attempting the CPA exam we employ the following modelwhere ATTEMPT_EXAM equals 1 if a student has attempted the exam, and 0 otherwise. We employ two alternative dummy variables for PROGRAM: (1) to compare the accelerated and traditional alumni, ACTR equals 1 for accelerated program alumni and 0 for our traditional alumni and (2) to compare the summer and weekend accelerated students, SUWE equals 1 for summer accelerated alumni and equals 0 for weekend accelerated alumni. All the other variables have been previously defined.