How Well Did UMPI's BA in Accounting Actually Teach You Accounting?

[bjcheung77]

Virtually nobody feels prepared to sit for the CPA or CMA exams right out of college without a prep course. So, if people are unprepared with only the UMPI degree, that isn’t a valid criticism IMHO.

I intentionally slowed down and tried to learn the material. I typically took 1 and never more than 2 accounting classes in a session. If you finish a class in a week or two, you probably aren’t going to retain a lot of the information.  If someone does 10 accounting courses in 15 weeks, good for them being able to speed-run through the courses, but it isn’t reasonable if they turn around and complain that they don’t retain what they learned long-term. That isn’t how the vast majority of people’s brains work.

If you actually read the materials, work through problems and examples, and really try to learn and understand the material, I think the UMPI accounting program is great. If you want a degree as fast as humanly possible and just want to cram enough to pass your classes and don’t care about retention, the UMPI accounting program is great. But don’t think you can speed run and cram and expect to retain a lot.

This snippet pretty much summed up what I wanted to type... Everyone learns differently, an institution is supposed to teach you a class and the student is supposed to study the material for that specific class. Institutions use different learning systems, teachers, text, etc, there are so many variables at play, you will learn 'the basics of the material or subject'.

Having said that, content at one college may be similar but not identical to another college, this goes with alternative providers as well. It's up to the student to 'study' what is taught at each school and supplement it with the trifecta of certs, degree, experience to get really familiar with the subject matter. You then need to ladder upwards to know more...

This is the same for any subject, an example, you take 5 Biology classes with various names, it really doesn't teach you the entire subject as there are so many sub categories or sub fields, that's why there are many more classes in undergrad and graduate school, when you're at the undergrad level, that's the tip of the ice burg, it opens 'specific' doors...