In accounting education, most Student Approaches to Learning (SAL) research has investigated the relationship between students' performance and their approaches to learning. Relatively limited research has been conducted on how assessment practices influence the quality of students' learning from the students' perspective. This paper seeks to address this gap in the accounting education literature. The research is centred on a large Australian undergraduate accounting degree delivered in Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong. Focus group interviews were conducted with students across the three locations. The research results reveal that: (1) it is the English competency of students that has the most important impact on students' completion of set assessment tasks and thus their approach to learning; (2) it is the way in which assessment is designed and written and the way lecturers convey their expectations about how assessment will be undertaken that is crucial to how students from various countries perform in that assessment; and (3) students' approaches to assessment and their preferred assessment tasks are not homogeneously based on cultural background.
[Copyright of Accounting Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09639280902836939]

Prior studies on the effects of high school accounting qualification on student performance in university-level introductory accounting courses have focused primarily on the United States and other Western countries. For this article I examined (a) the generalizability of U.S. results to Hong Kong and (b) the effect of strength of high school accounting qualification, by incorporating different accounting strength variables in the U.S. model. Results show that students who had passed accounting in a public examination at the end of either the fifth or seventh forms all significantly outperformed students without high school accounting qualification in the first, but not the second, introductory accounting course. Despite differences in culture and educational system, determinants of student performance in university introductory accounting courses were found to be similar to those in the United States.
[Copyright of Journal of Education for Business is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08832329909601702 ]

The purpose of this study is to identify attributes of public accounting firms that accounting graduates find most desirable in their job selection decisions, and the impacts of individual differences on these perceptions. Factor analysis performed on the responses of 167 final-year accounting students in Hong Kong to a 30-item questionnaire identified seven factors. The results indicate that accounting graduates considered help in finishing their professional accounting examinations and good staff relationships as the most important criteria in their choice of employers. In addition, female accounting graduates were more concerned about the possibility of being required to travel or be transferred, but were less concerned about the reputation and profile (such as the client base and the size) of the firms than their male counterparts. Accounting graduates with a higher grade point average (GPA) were less concerned about the working environment, but more concerned about a firms' reputation and profile than those with a lower GPA. The implications of these results are discussed.
[Copyright of Accounting Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09639280010010452]