ISSN: 2456-9992 Performance Of An Accountancy School In .

International Journal of Advanced Research and PublicationsISSN: 2456-9992intensive enough to permit students to gain the professionalknowledge required for professional competence. Theprofessional accounting education consists of accounting,finance and related knowledge; organizational and businessknowledge; and information technology knowledge andcompetencies. Preparing students for the certified publicaccountant (CPA) licensure examination is a subsidiaryobjective which should blend with the primary goal ofpreparing students for a successful long-term professionalaccounting career. After completion of the program andpassing the CPA licensure examination, the graduates canpursue a career in any of the four major fields ofaccountancy: public practice, commerce and industry,government, and education [7]. The Professional RegulationCommission (PRC) is the agency established by thePhilippine government to secure the nation of a trustworthyand progressive system of developing professionals withpersonal integrity, globally competitive, and committed toserve the nation and the community. It is responsible for theadministration, implementation and enforcement ofregulatory policies on the regulation and licensing of variousprofessions [9]. Under the PRC is the Board of Accountancythat is responsible for the regulation and licensing of CPAs inthe Philippines. The licensure examination for CPA coversthe following subjects: Theory of Accounts, Business Lawand Taxation, Management Services, Auditing Theory,Auditing Problems, Practical Accounting Problems I, andPractical Accounting Problems II. To be qualified as havingpassed the licensure examination for accountants, a candidatemust obtain a general average of 75%, with no grades lowerthan 65% in any given subject [8]. Quite recently, thecoverage of the CPA licensure examination had been revisedto rationalize and integrate related subjects for bettercomprehension and more effective application of the theoryinto practice [10]. The revisions are as follows: reducing thenumber of subjects from seven to six, merging AuditingTheory and Auditing Problems into Auditing, distributing thetopics in Theory of Accounts, Practical Accounting ProblemsI and Practical Accounting Problems II to FinancialAccounting and Reporting and Advanced FinancialAccounting and Reporting, segregating Business Law andTaxation into Taxation and Regulatory Framework forBusiness Transactions, and renaming Management Servicesby Management Accounting Services. The revised sixsubjects in the CPA licensure examinations are now FinancialAccounting and Reporting, Advanced Financial Accountingand Reporting, Management Accounting Services, Auditing,Taxation, and Regulatory Framework for BusinessTransactions [5]. Graduates of professional accountingschool or program in the Philippines should be capable ofworking effectively as entry level professional accountantsand should have the capacity for growth to positions ofincreased responsibility. The total effectiveness of a schoolor program is to be evaluated in terms of the success of itsgraduates in obtaining employment and in advancing in theircareer as professional accountants. In addition, graduates ofthe BSA program should be capable of passing the CPAlicensure examinations. Poor performance of the graduates inten CPA licensure examinations within a period of five yearscould lead to the gradual phase-out and eventual closure ofthe school’s accountancy program in accordance with thepolicies and procedures of the Commission on HigherEducation (CHED) [7]. The quality of education of a schoolor institution is based on a variety of performance measureswhich include graduation rates, degrees awarded, productionand certification, academic progress of students and manymore [11]. Accounting programs, as well, employ multiplemeasures to assess students’ learning and evaluate theeducation provided [12]. Most of these measures are basedon data gathered internally by reporting institution but inacademic programs where external certification orprofessional examination is required, institutions include theexam pass rate as a success measure [11]. The accountingcurriculum of most higher education institutions, however, isnot geared towards preparing students solely for licensureexamination; instead it provides an accounting education thatprepares students for diverse careers [11]. It is unlikely thatan adequate measure of the quality of accounting education isby the success of the graduates in the CPA licensureexamination; nevertheless many believed that it is a goodapproximation [12]. Many institutions used the results ofCPA licensure examination in claiming the quality of theiraccounting programs [12] – [15]. The traditional view of theCPA designation is that it denotes evidence of competency inthe accounting practice [16]; CPA designation has been thehallmark of the accounting profession [17]. Moreover,Philippine higher educational institutions offering academicprograms with licensure examinations must have goodperformance in such examinations; otherwise, offering ofsuch program may be ordered to halt. In case of BSAprogram, poor performance of the graduates in ten CPABoard Examinations within a period of five years could leadto the gradual phase-out and eventual closure of the school’saccountancy program in accordance with CHED’s policiesand procedures [7]. It is therefore a must for every institutionoffering accountancy program to monitor and evaluate itsperformances in the CPA licensure examinations. Thepresent study is a quantitative analysis on the five-yearperformance in the CPA licensure examination of anaccountancy school in the Philippines. It aims to present theperformance trend of the subject accountancy school andcompare such performance with the performances ofcompetitor schools in the locality, of the schools with thesame category in the region, and of the top accountancyschools in the country. It may also serve as baseline study forfurther and more specific analyses of the BSA graduates’performance in CPA licensure examinations.2. MethodsThis study is a quantitative trend analysis on the performanceof an accountancy school in the Certified Public Accountantlicensure examination in the Philippines. The five-yearperformance of the school from 2012 to 2016 was consideredfor this analysis. The performance of the subject school,which is a state university, was also compared to those ofnine other selected accountancy schools in the Philippines.The nine schools considered for comparison were selectedpurposively. Three selected schools are the three leadingprivate higher education institutions in the same city as thesubject school or in the nearby city. The three other selectedschools are three state universities in the region who hadCPA licensure examinees for the past five years. And the lastthree are the top 3 performing schools in CPA licensureexaminations for the period covered in the study. The dataused in this study were taken from the website of theVolume 1 Issue 4, Oct 2017www.ijarp.org227

International Journal of Advanced Research and PublicationsISSN: 2456-9992Professional Regulation Commission, the government agencyin-charge of the all professional examinations in thePhilippines. The data were presented in tables and statisticalgraphs were also constructed through the use of MicrosoftOffice Excel program and utilized as aids in the analysis.3. Results and DiscussionsThe CPA licensure examination in the Philippines isconducted twice a year in the months of May and October. Inthis study, however, only the October examinations weresubjected to analysis since the regular annual graduates ofmost accountancy schools take the CPA exam during thismonth. Table 1 presents the performance in terms of passingpercentage of selected accountancy schools for the past fiveyears including the five-year total and the national passingpercentage. The number in parenthesis is the total number ofexaminees for the specified school and exam year. School Zis the subject school; schools A, B and C are the competitorprivate schools in the locality; schools D, E and F are theschools with the same category as school Z in the region withCPA examinees in the last five years; and schools G, H and Iare the top performing accountancy schools in CPAexamination in the Philippines. One measure of the school’slicensure examination performance is by comparing itspassing percentage with the national passing percentage. Ifthe school’s passing percentage is higher than the nationalpassing percentage, then the school is said to be performingwell.Table 1: Passing Percentage and Number of Examinees in CPA Licensure Examinations of Selected Philippine AccountancySchools in the Past Five )100%(94)93.09%(405)100%(48)47.98%(9987from 7)92.86%(56)40.84%(10396from 8%(42)37.02%(11137from )90.11%(91)41.06%(13317from 8.66%(97)36.48%(14390from 462schools)ABCDEFGHINatio-nalTotalComparing the passing percentage of subject school Z withthe national passing percentage, it is evident that school Zperformed well in the past five years. School Z had a passingpercentage which is 80% above the national passingpercentage in 2012, 49% above the national passingpercentage in 2013, 55% above the national passingpercentage in 2014, 14% above the national passingpercentage in 2015, and 17% above the national passingpercentage in 2016. For the five-year total, the passingpercentage of school Z is 36% above the national passingpercentage. The disparity between school Z’s passingpercentage and the national passing percentage can be clearlyseen in Figure assed50Z020122013201420152016National TotalExam YearFigure 1: Comparing School Z’s Passing Percentage andthe National Passing Percentage from 2012 to 2016However, it is also noticeable from Table 1 and as shown inFigure 2 that there was a continuous decline of school Z’spassing percentage from 2012 to 2016 while the nationalpassing percentage is almost uniform in the past five years. Itis also evident that the best performance in the past five yearsof school Z was 86.21% in 2012 and the worst was 42.67%in 2016 with a difference of 43.54% or a drop of more than50% while the national passing percentage has a range ofonly 11.5% or a drop of 24% from 2012 to 2016. TheVolume 1 Issue 4, Oct 2017www.ijarp.org228

International Journal of Advanced Research and PublicationsISSN: 2456-9992Percent Passeddiscrepancy between school Z’s passing percentage and thenational passing percentage also significantly decreased froma difference of 38.23% in 2012 to only 6.19% in 2016.Figure 2 also clearly shows the performance trend or passingpercentage of school Z alongside with the national total.same city and nearby city. The performances of fouraccountancy schools, which are considered competitors interms of recruiting the best students in the locality forenrolment, were also ranked. The number in parenthesisgiven in Table 2 is the rank of a school in the specified examyear.100Z50National Total02012 2013 2014 2015 2016Exam YearFigure 2: Comparing the Five-Year Performance Trend ofSchool Z with the National TotalIn Table 2, the yearly and five-year total passing percentageof subject school Z, which is a public or state university,were compared with the passing percentage of competitorschools A, B and C, which are private universities in theTable 2: Comparing and Ranking the Performances of Subject School Z and Nearby Competitor 457.38%(2)33.33%(4)50%(3)57.61%(1)Percent PassedIt is very evident from Table 2 that the subject school Zstarted as the best performer in 2012 among the fourcompeting schools in the locality but ended as the poorestperformer in the 2016 examination. School B on the otherhand, which is only rank 3 in 2012, became the topperforming among the four neighboring schools in 2016 andin the five-year total. From Figure 3, it can be seen furtherthat only school Z has a continuous decline of passingpercentage from 2012 to 2.67%(4)43.14%(3)64%(1)57.26%(2)Five-Year ies located in the same region as school Z. Theperformances of these four state universities offeringaccountancy programs in the region were also ranked. Thenumber in parenthesis given in Table 3 is the rank of a schoolin the specified exam year.100Z50A02012201320142015B2016CExam YearFigure 3: Performance Trends of School Z and ItsCompetitor Schools in the LocalityIn Table 3, the yearly and five-year total passing percentageof subject school Z were compared with the passingpercentage of schools D, E and F, which are also stateTable 3: Comparing and Ranking the Performances of Subject School Z and Schools with the Same Category in the RegionSchool2012201320142015Volume 1 Issue 4, Oct 2017www.ijarp.org2016Five-YearTotal229

International Journal of Advanced Research and PublicationsISSN: )26.73%(3)16.67%(4)As shown in Table 3, the subject school Z was the 2012 CPAlicensure examination best performer among th

Introduction Educational institutions are expected to prepare students for . economies with investments and operations crossing borders [7]. The Philippine government duly recognizes the . and progressive system of developing professionals with personal integrity, globally competitive, and committed to .