Factors Affecting Student Achievement in Cost Accounting (Report‪)‬

ABSTRACT In the last 15 years, there has been little published research on student success in management accounting course work. To our knowledge, there have been no published empirical papers focusing on factors affecting success in upper level management accounting course work in an American classroom setting. In our research, we control for different grading schemes across instructors, and we find that student grade point average, performance in managerial accounting principles and performance in the first statistics course are all significantly related to success in cost accounting. Math achievement, student age, gender and the length of time between taking principles and cost accounting are insignificant. With regard to course sequencing, this paper considers issues not addressed before in the published literature. We find that students perform significantly better in cost accounting if they first complete Intermediate Accounting I. Performance in Intermediate I does not significantly differ between students who have already taken cost accounting vs. those who take cost subsequent to Intermediate I. We find that cost accounting students perform better in the first finance course if they delay finance until after taking cost accounting. These results may have implications for student academic advisement on course sequencing.