Financial Accounting
This assignment is designed to develop students' knowledge and application skills around three course objectives:
1. be able to apply the International Accounting Standards in the context of a group of companies
2. recognise and appreciate the conceptual, statutory and professional requirements that impinge upon the preparation of general purpose financial reports
3. appreciate issues related to the preparation of general purpose financial reports.
Importantly assignments are an opportunity for students to develop their Threshold Learning Outcomes (TLO) of the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) that are essential for graduates to gain employment. As well as developing your understanding of the accounting setting process through the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) that apply internationally and that you will need to use when you are an accountant, this assignment is designed to develop skills highly sought after by employers.
Specifically this assignment aims to develop the AQF TLOs of:
- Written communication skills: Hence the high weighting on grammar in the criteria
- Collaborative working skills: This will be provided by extra resources and will also be reflected in the assignment's criteria
- Self management skills: These will be developed through working on the assignment.
Written Communication Skills
Written communication skills are essential for an accountant. To this end 15% of the marks for this assignment are allocated to correct grammar. Students will lose 1 mark for each grammatical error up to a maximum of 15 marks. The following tips and websites are recommended to help you improve your grammar prior to completing the assignment:
1. Use a good dictionary such as a Macquarie. Some online sources cannot be trusted. (Make sure you use an Australian or UK dictionary, as US spelling would not be appropriate in the context of this assignment. As academics we change spelling according to whether we are writing for an Australian or a US journal.)
2. Be careful with punctuation, especially apostrophes, because misuse can unintentionally change the meaning of a sentence.
3. Make sure the subjects and verbs of your sentences agree. For example, ‘The icing on the cakes was white.' not ‘were white'.
4. Take care with tenses so you don't confuse the times when events happened.
5. When writing formally, use complete sentences. Broken sentences are acceptable in speech, not in print.
Group Assignments
The assignment may be done in groups of two or individually. We are aware that group work may not fit with some students' commitments and so you may choose the do the assignment individually. If you choose to do the assignment in a group of two please be aware that we expect this will take each person in the group more time than if they do the assignment individually. This is because group work properly done will involve:
- Meeting as a group to discuss the assignment and to allocate tasks
- Individually researching and preparing the section of the assignment for which you have the primary responsibility.
- All group members reading and editing the work prepared by the other members of the group.
- Meeting again to discuss all of the proposed edits to the whole assignment.
- Rewriting the assignment with the agreed amendments.
- All group members rereading the completed assignment to ensure that it has answered the questions of the assignment and reads like it is written with one "voice".
So why would you do the assignment in a group? You will learn valuable team-work skills and the final assignment is likely to be of a higher standard and you will learn much from each other.