A quick update: I got in touch with the website that published the article that I talked about in a previous post. This article talks about the misconceptions that accounting students have about the subject they are studying.

The article is titled “The Seven Deadly Myths of Accounting” and was written by Dr. Pava, who currently teaches at Yeshiva University in New York.

The 7 Myths:

1. “Learning accounting is like learning the rules of a game”
   It certainly seems like it from the way people who memorize every piece can still do well in class! I’ve never been fond of memorization, but I’ve found it’s possible to get by (and easier) if you understand the steps you’re performing. Of course, in the end, you’re still just learning the steps. It wasn’t until my first semester as a masters of accounting student that I had a chance to learn how to use financial statements.
2. “I’m good at math, so I’ll be good at accounting”
   I never suffered from this misconception. I always felt that accounting was a strange middle ground between math and English–my two strongest subjects. My first classes reminded me of solving word problems in Algebra class. But if I were good at math, I would have been an Economics major, so I never really thought that you had to be a math whiz to do accounting–therefore, only being good at math won’t make you a good accountant either!
3. “There is such a thing as the bottom line”
   This myth deals with the idea that net income is the only answer. My favorite line from this part is when Dr. Pava writes about his students reactions when he asks them to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of net income: ” . . . the question makes little sense to them. It is almost as meaningless as asking them to evaluate the benefits and limitations of “subtraction” as a mathematical operation.”

   Again, I didn’t have any idea of what might be good or bad about the bottom line on the income statements we learned to make until I took Financial Statement Analysis last semester. In that class, we looked at financial statements as an investor would, and analyzed which pieces of information that made up net income that we would consider or not consider when evaluating a firm’s financial performance.

   During our class discussion, one of the students argued that we had learned this as undergraduates, because our professors had talked about how managers could manipulate earnings. However, I think that we still didn’t learn how they could manipulate those earnings. And how are we supposed to uncover unethical accounting practices as auditors if the managers are so much more intimately familiar with how to manipulate earnings than we are?

4. “Accounting is a ‘thing apart.’ Understanding other disciplines is a waste of precious time”
   I can attest to this myth being promulgated by my undergraduate education. I like accounting, but I minored in Spanish and often found myself appreciating the break it gave me from memorizing rules (see Myth 1!). It was the only time I got a chance to read literature and poetry and practice analyzing anything in written essay form in the last 2 years of my BBA.

   However, I was told by my accounting advisers that my grades in Spanish classes didn’t really matter, because all anyone would care about in the future were my accounting grades! Not true!

   If there is something you’d like to study in addition to accounting, go for it! It will make you more interesting, it might make you better at writing, it will give you a perspective that is slightly different than your fellow accounting students. I can guarantee that at some point in your life, what you learn in another discipline will be useful to you in your accounting career.

5. “All decisions are based on the cost-benefit criterion. If not, they should be!”
   Now this one, I’m not sure I agree with. Dr. Pava argues that decisions should be thought of in terms of ethical criteria, citing the recent scandals as a result of unethical decision-making.

   There’s nothing wrong with the cost-benefit way of looking at decisions, as long as you make sure to factor ethics into your costs and benefits! Will your product make millions but also make thousands of children sick? The costs outweigh the benefits!
   

6. “God gave GAAP”
   Again, this relates back to Myth 1,  that accounting is simply a set of arbitrary rules that must just be memorized. We are taught these rules with very little discussion of how they are determined, beyond also having to memorize the names of standard-setting bodies! This leads to students have a false sense that the standards are simply there, rather than created, and open to change.

   It wasn’t until my last semester of my BBA that one of my professors addressed the fact that these rules are set by groups of people who have conflicting pressures from investors, business, and government, and who may arrive at compromises that aren’t great accounting!

   The result of this is summed up in a great quotation from the article: Dr. Pava writes, “On those occasions when I can convince students that accounting principles somehow might be improved, students simply cannot fathom why the standards are not altered immediately.”

7. “I’ll learn what I really need to know when I get my first job”‘
   This is a myth I still believed in when I first picked up this article. Of course, we learn the ground rules in accounting class, but there is so much to learn once you get out into the work world, it can feel as though you learned nothing in school! However, if you did not have an accounting degree behind you when starting work as an audit or tax associate, imagine how much more they would have to teach you!

Our assignment was to respond to one of these myths, or come up with additional myths on our own. Does anyone have any myths to add to the list? Disagree or agree with one of the existing seven listed here?

Related posts:

1. A new semester
2. So this is what BEC looks like…
3. Accountants’ Liability

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