News > January 18, 2007

By Blake Brittain

Staff writer

By Blake Brittain | Staff writer

The business school with the highest passing rate on this year’s CPA (Certified Public Accountant) exam for future accountants is not at Harvard, Yale or Princeton. It is, in fact, Wake Forest’s Calloway School of Business and Accountancy.

Calloway students ranked first in the nation in three out of four exam sections for the 2005 test period and first in total percentage of students to pass all four sections with 88 percent.

Since the Calloway School introduced a master’s degree in accounting in 1997, its students have had the first or second highest passing rate in all but one year. The program has garnered the number one ranking five times. This is the second consecutive year that Calloway students have had the top CPA exam pass rate in the nation, in what is quickly becoming a university tradition.

“Our students are very competitive,” Calloway Director of Graduate Studies Yvonne Hinson said. “No class wants to be the first to break the tradition. We don’t usually bring it up to them; they put more pressure on themselves to keep it up.”

“No other accounting program has the consistency that we have,” Director of Accountancy and Hylton Professor Lee Knight said.

Other schools that typically achieve the top tier of pass rates in the CPA exam include Miami of Ohio, Baylor, Brigham Young, Southern California and the University of Florida.

The exam consists of four sections: business environment and concepts, auditing and attestation, financial accounting and reporting, and regulation.

University students finished first in all of the sections except for business environment and concepts, in which they were second.

Hinson and Knight attribute the program’s consistent achievement on the exam to a number of different factors.

“The number one thing is that we have very intelligent, dedicated students,” Knight said.

Hinson and Knight also cited the unique structure of the accounting program as a reason for the success of university students on the exam.

“It’s very rigorous,” Hinson said. “Classes are structured so it’s not just regurgitation, but hands-on work and critical thinking.”

“Students often say that our three-hour exams are harder than the CPA exam,” Knight said.

Knight also noted that the internships built into the Calloway accounting program are a factor for CPA exam success. In these internships, students get to “see how their classroom knowledge applies in the real world and learn how to deal with uncertainty and time constraints, all of which will help them handle the pressure of the exam.”

The Calloway accountancy program recently switched from a 3-2 program in which students take undergraduate and graduate courses simultaneously and receive both bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the end of five years to a 4-1 program.

In the 4-1 program, students continue to take undergraduate accounting courses through the fourth year if they are admitted into the MSA program, along with a few graduate courses. This more focused program also helps contribute to the CPA exam success.

“Students have traditionally taken a CPA review course during the spring semester of their fifth year. We realized that the graduate coursework in the fifth year of the 4-1 was going to be too demanding to take along with the review course,” Hinson said.

“We have now changed the review course timing and are offering it during the summer, similarly to law review courses.”

With the rapid growth of the Calloway accountancy program, the university’s domination of the CPA exam does not appear to end any time soon.

“We’ve done well before and should continue to shine with the new format,” Hinson said.