Determinants of Accounting Students’ Competency: Kuwait University

Abstract

Kuwait University is the only state university with accounting education that has commenced in 1966. So far, accounting education is offered by the College of Business Administration – CBA- as a full degree of 4 years span, in addition to some other private universities that started recently. CBA periodically reviews the accounting program particularly after earning AACSB accreditation in the late 90’s, which has pressed for more academic excellence. CBA has introduced an exit exam process in 2009 since inception. Results revealed some areas of concern such as the shallow technical background of graduates, ill-use of advanced accounting systems and software, and inadequate research ability. One would add to these, student's tendency toward the classical type of learning or “spoon feeding”, which questions their ability in the judgmental type of cases as well as their self-expression.

The purpose of this research is to explore factors associated with accounting student’s competencies at Kuwait University and subsequently to suggest remedy policies. A survey has been conducted through out the period from April 2018 till August 2018 exploring factors affecting accounting student’s competency. Multiple factors that influence student's competencies were entrenched within a statistical model which later resulted in comparable results. Moreover, stepwise multiple regression analysis was used to analyse the relationships between students' competency and the independent variables. Results expose that students lean heavily on in- class materials and do less reading in advance. Also, learning techniques used and practices by students are well classical as it depends primarily on lecturer delivering the materials. Finally, this study provides evidence that GPA earned by accounting students at CBA is the most important variable associated with their overall performance upon graduation. Other variables such as MGPA, external assistance (EA), in-class assignments (ICA), students' personal and technical abilities (PFT), and other financial and social factors (FT) have lesser degree of significance on their performance.