How well do accountancy students understand a set of accounts?

This paper compares the performance of students entering first year accountancy who have previously studied the subject with those who have not in answering questions about the accounts of a fictional company. It also compares their responses with those of students entering second year.

While no significant differences in performance was found between the first year students with previous accounting experience and those without, second year students' understanding was found to be significantly better than that of both first year groups.

When performance was compared to students' self-assessment of their ability, second year students were found to be reasonably good at judging themselves, but over 80% of the first year students with previous accounting experience overestimated their ability.

Gender was not found to have had any noticeable effect upon the results, other than that the second year male students had a higher and more accurate perception of their own ability than their female colleagues.