Professional Attributes: Teaching the Fine Arts of Being a Professional Accountant

One day during a junior-level cost accounting course, one of my colleagues tried an experiment. The topic was cost-volume-profit (CVP) analysis with a sales mix. Prior to class the students were told to read the chapter and complete a homework assignment. The class session included discussion of the homework assignment. At the end of class, the professor asked students to write a paragraph on the following question: ―When using CVP analysis for planning, how is it possible that managers might not know for certain what the sales mix will be?‖ After collecting and reading student responses, my colleague was surprised to learn that a large proportion of students did not know the meaning of the term ―sales mix.‖ These students had completed a homework assignment involving calculations and discussed the calculations during class, but they had not stopped to think about what the various terms used in the formula mean—or about how uncertainty in the data used for CVP analysis might affect an organization’s planning. In other words, the students had learned little, if anything, about CVP analysis and its use— other than to replicate computations shown in the textbook.