- Title
- The Master of Professional Accounting: challenging sterotypes of international students
- Creator
- Chan, H.-T.; Ryan, S.; Bhattacharyya, A.; Rodrigs, M.
- Relation
- 2011 AFAANZ Conference. 2011 AFAANZ Conference: Proceedings (Darwin, N.T. 3-5 July, 2011)
- Relation
- http://www.afaanz.org/openconf/2011/modules/request.php?module=oc_proceedings&action=proceedings.php
- Publisher
- Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2011
- Description
- Students come to Australia for many and varied reasons, including the possibility of immigrating to Australia on completion of studies. Some programs of study are given higher priority for immigration than others and so are popular among those hoping to immigrate. The Master of Professional Accounting (MPA) is perhaps the most well known of these programs as the majority of its students are allegedly more interested in gaining permanent residency than becoming practicing accountants. Concerns over the quality of this program, its graduates and its impact on the reputation of Australian higher education have been expressed by a variety of stakeholders both in the media and in scholarly journals resulting in a stereotype of international postgraduate students as being motivated by immigration and without intrinsic interest in accounting nor engagement in learning. However, little has been done to investigate the experiences and perceptions of the students themselves to test these stereotypes. The focus of this paper is to more closely examine the motivations and learning behaviours of MPA students to test the accuracy of the stereotype. A population of postgraduate accounting students from an Australian university were invited to respond to an anonymous questionnaire survey adapted from the Australian Universities Survey of Student Engagement (AUSSE) to gain an insight into student engagement with learning. Our results demonstrate that motivation is not relevant to learning engagement. We find a cohort of students spending many hours in study but also facing barriers to learning because of poor English skills. Such findings do not accord with the stereotypical portrayal of international MPA students but lead to questions about the nature of accounting education and English language entry standards and support.
- Subject
- accounting education; immigration; student engagement; student motivation
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1325288
- Identifier
- uon:25232
- Language
- eng
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