Fifth Year Maintenance Report - AACSB - The University of Texas at ...

In response to these findings, the faculty undertook a complete redesign of the MACY degreewhich resulted in the program as described earlier in this report, with theoretical foundations, adisciplinary focus, electives and a capstone. The capstone is designed to be an orientation to theprofession with significant involvement of professionals in the presentations and discussion as well as anemphasis on research methodologies commonly used by professional accountants. These changes wereincorporated in the 2009-2011 catalog with further refinements in the 2011-2013 catalog.PhD in Business with a concentration in accountingThe learning goals for the Master of Accountancy (MACY) program are as follows.1. Students will evaluate accounting research and apply statistical methods to accountingquestions.2. Students will identify research questions in accounting and perform research and provideanswer to those questions.3. Students will acquire skills to teach at the university level and will effectively employ those skillsin the classroom.The most recent learning outcomes, methods of assessment and most recent academic year results arepresented in Table 6.5 that is included in the Appendix.The assessment of learning effort for the PhD program has gone through a series of iterations.As noted earlier, the PRT from the last accreditation exercise noted that some of the learning goals werenot measurable. Consequently, a new set of AOL objectives and measurements tools were developed atthe direction of the college and university. The faculty who teach in the PhD program also developednew student learning goals beginning in Fall 2010.The most notable development resulting from application of the AOL goals was the recognitionthat students were not progressing through the program in a timely manner. Most students were notfinishing their dissertations in four years and many were not completed in five years. An analysis of thetiming of the student’s progress pointed to a decision made in 2007 to move the first accountingseminar to the second semester of the first program year. This effectively moved the comprehensiveexamination from the end of the second summer to the end of the third fall semester. The remaininghalf year of the third program year was lost because students were not immediately moving on to theirdissertation proposals. Beginning with the Fall 2010 semester, the first seminar was moved back to thefirst semester on campus with comprehensives coming at the beginning of the fall semester of the thirdyear. Thus the third year will not be spent entirely on comprehensive examinations as had become thenorm.A second change that was made because of our assessment of learning evaluations was topetition and obtain a change in the required support coursework for the PhD. As a PhD in business, allPhD students are required to take a common set of preparatory courses. One of these courses,Research Methods II, is a course primarily covering experimental design topics relevant to behavioralresearch. Giving our faculty decision to emphasize archival research this course was not relevant for ourstudents. It became evident through evaluating the student research that they would benefit frommore econometrics so the faculty petitioned the college to add econometrics as an alternative toResearch Methods II.Evaluation of student research papers also indicated a need for stronger skills in handlingarchival data sources. In response to this need a new directed elective course in archival research44