The Importance of the Changing Demographic Profile on the Success of Post Graduate Accounting Students

Predictors of academic success in postgraduate auditing in the Chartered Accountancy programme at a South African university

“…Jansen and De Villiers (2015) investigated the importance of grade 12 subjects, age, gender and type of school attended for third year students only, but excluded prior academic results from their study. Although Steenkamp (2014) and Ungerer et al (2013) investigated the prediction of success for postgraduate studies, only Steenkamp (2014) included past undergraduate academic performance in her study. Gammie et al (2003) as well as Buckless and Krawczyk (2016) confirms the statistical importance of undergraduate performance on the prediction of postgraduate success and reports that the majority studies use an average of grades for performance.…”

“…They classified students with a mark of less than 50 per cent as low performing and those that achieved a mark of more than 50 per cent as high performing students. Ungerer et al (2013) defined academic success at postgraduate level as those students who achieved a final mark of more than 49 per cent and they included students who attempted the modules more than once, thus a pass mark regardless of the number of attempts at a module. Academic success in this article is defined as passing a module on the student's first attempt with a mark of 50 per cent or more.…”

“…The number of research initiatives undertaken in the past few years investigating the possible predictors of success of accounting students at higher education institutions (HEI) (Baard et al 2010;Jansen and De Villiers 2015;Matarirano et al 2019;Muller and Prinsloo 2007;Rossouw 2018;Ungerer et al 2013) illustrates that it is a contentious issue in South Africa. This has resulted in a large and growing body of literature on the underlying predictors of academic success for students in accounting programmes.…”