COURSE MAP
International Financial Reporting Standards
There is an assignment for the first class!
See the Session 1 assignment
Course Schedule 3
Goals 4
Assessment 5
Group Work 5
Registering Groups & Submitting Reports 6
Declining an Opportunity to Participate 6
Tips for Group Work 7
No Sharing Work Across Groups 8
Preparing for Group Class Discussions 8
Group Grading 8
Graded Written Assignments 8
Graded Group Participation 9
Reasons for Group Policies 10
Course Participation Scores 10
Session Participation Points 11
Breadth-of-Involvement Points 11
Determining Course Participation Scores 12
Course Projects 13
Gauging Reading Intensity 14
Additional Optional Content 14
Will this be a Challenging Course? 14
Session 1 15
Session 2 19
Session 3 24
Session 4 29
Session 5 34
Session 6 38
Session 7 44
Session 8 46
Session 9 49
Session 10 53
Session 11 55
Sessions 12-14 60
Course Schedule
This Course Map describes the course goals, policies, and assignments. We hope it will give you a sense for our commitment to our collective effort to make the course a rewarding experience.
Goals
· Help you learn differences between US GAAP and IASB GAAP for events and circumstances where these differences and their financial-statement consequences are particularly pronounced.
· Help you make informed judgments while preparing, auditing, or using IFRS financial statements.
· Help you learn to think critically about issues that are of paramount importance to accounting thought leaders. Hopefully, you will increasingly influence them as you continue to hone your skills and perhaps ultimately join their ranks.
Your rate of career advancement will likely be greatly influenced by the extent to which you master all three goals. Applying IFRS generally requires considerably more judgment than applying US GAAP, meaning there is much more room for objective experts to reasonably disagree on the appropriate accounting under IFRS. This is a consequence of IFRS providing less implementation guidance than US GAAP.
If you become a preparer of accounting reports under IFRS, your role will be to make these judgments and to convince those who audit and use the related numbers that they comply with GAAP and faithfully represent the underlying business events and circumstances. This will require a much more sophisticated understanding of the business context and relevant IFRS authoritative guidance than is needed under US GAAP. In particular, as you transition from US GAAP to IFRS, you will encounter many situations where there is not a clear answer and where you will need to do much more than simply apply a rule to determine whether the accounting complies with GAAP.
You will also make more judgments if you plan to audit or use IFRS financial statements; in these roles, you will need to assess the level of confidence you have that preparers appropriately exercised judgment permitted under IFRS and more generally, that the related numbers faithfully represent the underlying events and circumstances.
Assessment
Your course grade will be based on: (a) your total course score (out of 100 points) and (b) the way grades are assigned to course scores to form the grade distribution.
Three factors will determine your course score:
Class participation 35%
Written reports for sessions 2-11 35%
Course project 30%
We have not yet determined the cut-offs for the various grades – how grades will be assigned to scores. However, they will likely fall within the ranges you encountered in other accounting courses.
Group Work
The weekly assignments are generally far too demanding for one individual and typically for groups smaller than 4 members. As discussed below, your course score will likely be based entirely on group work, including class participation as discussed.
Considering the way group work will be graded (discussed later), differences in students’ learning styles, course and work experiences, aptitudes, and ambitions, and the coordination and free-rider problems that can occur within large groups, we decided that once you get to know each other, you will be in the best position to determine the group size and membership that are most effective for your learning. The following guidance is consistent with this objective.
· Group size: Generally, groups must have 4-6 members and we recommend 4-5. This said, we will consider requests to form smaller or larger groups after Session 2. Special consideration will be given to groups that split up, as discussed later.
· Groups for Session 2 assignment: Students who wish to be in the same initial group can do so by informing us of the names of the members in their preferred group prior to the start of the first session (preferably by email, prior to 3:00 PM). If your preferred group has fewer than four members, we will randomly select additional members or merge your group with another small group. Students who do not specify group preferences prior to the start of class will be randomly selected to groups.
· Groups for subsequent assignments: Subject to the size restrictions stated earlier, students have the option to form new groups throughout the course.
Registering Groups & Submitting Reports
· Notify us of group members names via email before noon on the assignment due date. If we do not hear from you by this deadline, we will assume your group has not changed from the prior session.
Declining an Opportunity to Participate
· To allow for absences, tardiness, and unusual circumstances that would make it difficult for individuals to prepare adequately for the assigned questions or otherwise hinder their performance, each group member has one opportunity during the course to elect not to be included in the random selection procedure (described shortly) without any negative consequences on the participation scores he or she and others in his or her group receives.
· However, students must inform us they will be absent or otherwise not participating in the random selection via email no later than noon on the day the assignment is scheduled to be discussed in class. The participation scores of students who do not notify us by this time and the scores of others in their group will be reduced significantly if these students are subsequently selected to answer an assigned question and they are late for class, absent, or not prepared to give a respectable performance.
· Students can elect not to participate in the random selection more than once but they must still notify us no later than noon the day the assignment is scheduled. If they notify us in time, their participation scores (but not those of others in their group) will be reduced but this penalty will be considerably smaller than the one they and others in their group will receive if they are subsequently randomly selected to participate, and are late for class, absent, or not prepared to give a respectable performance.
Tips for Group Work
· In the past, groups have found it beneficial to meet at least twice for each assignment (or otherwise communicate as a group via email or phone):
o During the first meeting, divide the assignment into parts and assign these to various group members or subgroups. In this way, everyone does not need to complete all of the assignment on their own.
o During the second meeting, check the quality of each others’ work, combine and integrate your answers into a cohesive report, and teach each other what you learned. The primary reason we randomly draw a student to represent the group is to give groups an incentive to participate in this sharing of knowledge.
· Understanding group members’ strengths and weaknesses, coordinating work effectively to ensure the group capitalizes on members' strengths and helping each other mitigate weaknesses is essential for success. This requires clear and honest communication of strengths and weaknesses and a strong commitment to meeting deadlines and building a highly effective group. Here are some critical areas where group members can contribute: writing skills, analytical skills, computer skills, organizational skills, research skills, and, of course, accounting skills and general business knowledge.
· If your group is not working effectively as a team, such as a member is repeatedly not doing their share of the work, discuss this as a team to decide how best to address the problem. If the team has difficulty resolving the problem, set up an office appointment as soon as appropriate to discuss. We can meet with all or part of the group. Alternatively, select a new group for the next assignment: generally we have found that everyone is better off if they are on a team that has shared aspirations. If you decide to form a new group, be sure to notify everyone in the old group in time to permit members to form or join new groups. If you need help with this process, let us know as soon as possible.
· Warning: In prior years, a few students, who were essentially thrown off teams because they repeatedly did not do their fair share of the work, or failed to meet deadlines, couldn’t find other groups who wanted to work with them. As a result, they ended up doing all the reports on their own. This rarely happens and need not happen, but it can happen.
· It is quite acceptable for members to occasionally carry more than their fair share on one assignment to compensate for working less on others. However, the group must be aware of this arrangement in plenty of time to reorder work assignments and communication is essential!
No Sharing Work Across Groups
· As indicated earlier, while we prefer groups with 4-5 members, you can form groups of any size (after the first assignment) and thus work with as many classmates as you like without breaching the honor code. However, you can’t share information across groups and submit separate written reports. Doing so, will be considered cheating.
· Any violation of this policy will be considered a violation of the honor code and to ensure fairness to students who comply with the policy, we will do everything possible to ensure such actions have grave consequences.
Preparing for Group Class Discussions
Generally, students find they need electronic or hard copies of the following to participate effectively in the class discussions, with most students preferring hard copies:
· The questions and your group’s solutions.
· Source documents that support your solutions. For example, hard copies of companies’ balance sheets and referenced footnotes.
Group Grading
Graded Written Assignments
· Written group reports are to be submitted at the beginning of Sessions 2-11. Guidance for these reports will be included with the assignments.
· Everyone in the group will receive the same grade for these reports. Each report can earn a maximum of 100 points or 1000 points total for the ten written reports for Sessions 2-11. These assignments account for 35% of your course score so the assignment points are converted to course points by multiplying your total written assignment points times 35/1000.
Graded Group Participation
Except as indicated in the “Declining to Participate” section, everyone in the group will receive the same grade for participation when the assignments are discussed. See the general discussion on determining class participation scores described later.
Here is the process we will follow for participation:
· Numbers on Bingo balls will be assigned to groups prior to class, with more numbers assigned to groups that have been selected fewer times in the past (or where a majority of the group members have not been on teams selected often in the past, if new groups are formed). For session 2, this procedure guarantees that every group has the same probability of being selected. Thereafter, the probability of being selected decreases the more a group has been selected previously.
· For each question to be discussed during the class, a group will be randomly selected by drawing a bingo ball. No group can be selected twice during the same class unless all groups have been selected at least once.
· Within the selected group, a student will then be randomly selected to represent the group by the toss of a die. Everyone in the group gets this student’s participation score. No one else in this group can address this question thereafter.
· This student will have 5-10 minutes (depending on the question) to respond to the question. Prior to class, groups should prioritize the points they wish to make and organize supporting arguments and analyses succinctly to ensure the selected students makes the most of the allotted time.
· When there is enough time, other groups can volunteer to correct or elaborate on answers provided by the selected group representative. By doing so, they can earn group participation points without foregoing the opportunity to be selected randomly for another part of the assignment. However, groups must rotate their representatives such that a specific student can’t represent the group again until all group members have had a turn. (This restriction carries forward to future assignments.)
The individual who will represent his or her group for the first question will be selected 5-10 minutes before class. This will give this person an opportunity to discuss the group’s answer to this part of the question.
This procedure for selecting the group representative aims to ensure that everyone in the group understands the underlying concepts, procedures, and analyses and can communicate the group’s position on these issues. There is nothing wrong with splitting work into tasks that can be addressed by individual group members. However, to ensure that the course goal is met it is essential that the output from these tasks be integrated into a unified whole and that every member understands and can communicate the analyses proposed by the group.
Doesn’t the selected group member feel extremely pressured?
Actually, the selected students generally feel considerably less pressure than they would in courses where students are cold called: they have advance notice of most of the questions they will address and they have opportunities to discuss the answers with their groups prior to presenting them to the class. Additionally, because most groups will get opportunities to participate every week, the participation score for one question has a relatively small effect on the course participation score.