[PTGregD]

This course focuses on the management side of accounting. My friends who took accounting in high school said that they did not learn any of this material there, so unlike Financial Accounting I, everyone here starts on the same blank page.

PROF:

The prof who taught me the course was Eckhard Schumann. He was a very approachable professor who liked to teach by example. He often used excel spreadsheets to show examples of how the accounting concepts we were learning in class worked. He also used power point lecture slides and microsoft word. He was very knowledgeable and helpful when you had concerns about anything.

LECTURES:

As previously mentioned, the lectures mainly consisted of power point slides, while sometimes using excel and word documents as well when further clarification was required. As in Financial Accounting I, be prepared to write a lot during lectures. Make sure you attend every lecture as well, as the most painful thing would be to have to borrow notes in order to copy them out for yourself. You really want to be in class when you write your notes so that you get a first hand feel of how the concept he is teaching works. It is also very helpful if you have time to read the chapter ahead of the lecture so that you feel more comfortable when he teaches it.

BREAKDOWN OF MARKS:

The breakdown of marks is very similar to Financial Accounting I. You have weekly online quizzes worth 10%, two midterms worth 25% each, and a final exam worth the remaining 40%.

You also receive a 3% bonus to your final grade if you attend every tutorial.

Unlike Financial Accounting I, the weekly online quizzes were very long (the first few took anywhere between 4-6 hours to complete), before the prof listened to the complaints from the students and shortened the rest to be around 1-2 hours long. It is important to note however that we were testing out a new company for the online quizzes, and the following classes may go back to using something such as WebCT for quizzes. Therefore, the quizzes were not as much of a mark booster as students probably hoped they would be.

The midterms were challenging but fair. They were composed of multiple choice questions and 3-5 short answer questions at the end to test accounting concepts more in depth. An unofficial tip for them is that for the multiple choice portion of them, None of the Above was 99% of the time incorrect, so do not pick that answer. It was usually an answer that was there for people to select when they did not understand the material enough to get the correct answer. I guess that is the professor telling you to study harder next time.

The final examination seemed a lot less challenging than either of the preceding midterms, and also followed the exact same structure of multiple choice and short answer questions.

HOW TO SUCCEED:

First and foremost, attend all the tutorials. A 3% bonus is huge, and you have no reason to forfeit that kind of a free handout. The tutorials are also an amazing place to hammer in concepts from the lectures that you may not have understood. A lot of short answer test questions were derived from the problems taken up in tutorials -- so make sure you know how to do them.

Secondly, missing a lecture is very painful due to the emense amount of information covered in each one; try to avoid that as much as possible. Make sure to ask the prof any questions if you do not understand some of the concepts. Otherwise, it will just come back to haunt you on the tests.

Finally, do ALL the practice problems assigned for each chapter. A number of practice problems also ended up being short answer questions on the tests. If you can do all the questions successfully, chances are good that you will be fine doing the short answer questions on the test.

Between the tutorials and the practice problems, you should probably be going into each midterm knowing 2-3 of the short answer problems which is a great step in the right direction towards scoring well on the entire test.

I had Giri K. Not a hard course, just do all the practice problems and you will be fine. No textbooks required for his section. He gave 3 bonus marks for attending all tutorials. Exam was non-cumulative if the class average is above 70 on midterms. Midterms were all MC, Final was MC and Short answer.