Registered Mentor with OBU since 2020
Face – to – face mentoring available in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Remote mentoring via Zoom available world wide locations
The degree is an award aimed at ACCA professional accounting students and professionals. It gives an opportunity for those who have completed the Applied Knowledge and Skills papers (previously known as Papers F1 to F9) of the ACCA qualification to develop and demonstrate some key graduate skills.
Based on the combination of professional and technical skills shown in professional examinations and the key transferable skills involved in successfully completing the Research and Analysis Project, students achieve the required learning outcomes for the award of the BSc Applied Accounting degree.
The degree programme gives due recognition to knowledge, skills and attributes developed through the combination of professional examinations and the Research and Analysis Project; provides students with the opportunity to gain a degree where this may have been otherwise impossible because of lack of opportunity or because of life choices; abilities which are increasingly important in professional accounting life, such as information gathering and critical analysis.
The Oxford Brookes website has more information on the degree https://www.brookes.ac.uk/business/undergraduate/bsc-applied-accounting/
The Research and Analysis Project (also known as the RAP) comprises two elements: the Research Report and the Skills and Learning Statement.
The Research Report
Students are required to select one from a list of 20 available topics and undertake a Research Report related to an organisation of their choice. The report is 7,500 words and students must demonstrate the following skills:
1. Understanding of accountancy or business models
2. Application accountancy or business models
3. Evaluation of information, analysis and conclusions
4. Presentation of project findings
5. Communication
6. Information gathering and referencing
7. Use of information technology
The Skills and Learning Statement
In addition to the Research Report, students are required to complete a Skills and Learning Statement (2,000 words) in which they discuss what they have learnt by undertaking a RAP. This involves discussing how their interpersonal skills developed through meetings with their mentor and how they developed their presentation skills.
The criteria for assessing the Skills and Learning Statement are
1. Self-reflection
2. Communication skills (including the presentation)
It is hoped that students will take forward the ability to reflect on their learning so that future learning (both technical and personal) can be made more effective by building on their experiences of undertaking this significant and new task.
Students who undertake the Research and Analysis Project will have already shown themselves adept in learning and applying technical professional skills. The Research and Analysis Project makes demands which are different:
- Undertaking an extended piece of writing which must planned and structured and presented
- Gathering information from a wide range of possible sources, selecting that which is most relevant, including good referencing style
- Analysing complex situations and organisations and arriving at conclusions
SEN-PI Mentoring is one way in which students can be helped to overcome these new challenges.
We help students arrive at considered decisions at many points in the course of facing this challenge. Our mentors do not solve students’ problems. Instead, the approach is to provide a prompt for thinking through difficulties. A student may have problems early on, in choosing a suitable topic and company, for example. The choice must be the student’s, but the mentor can help through asking suitable questions and discussing responses. ‘Which topic looks most interesting to you?’ ‘Why do you think choosing a large listed company would create problems for data gathering? What could you do about this?’ And so on.
It is clear that the Research and Analysis Project is the student’s responsibility and that decisions regarding finding information and analysing it come from the student. (Naturally, if there are clear errors it would be perverse not to point them out. ‘This ratio calculation looks strange to me. Are you sure that you have applied the ratio correctly?’)
This approach should prompt a series of reflections in the student about difficulties of writing the Research Report and the way they have overcome them. This can lead them to engage in a cycle of reflective learning. It also provides material for their Skills and Learning Statement which is intended to include a reflective account of their three meetings with their mentor and a discussion of the problems encountered in writing a research report. To what extent have these problems been overcome, and how did they overcome them? Given the experience of writing the Research Report and the mentoring received, what might they do differently on a future occasion?
Reflective learning is a powerful skill, since it makes professionals more resourceful in a world in which demands are continually changing. The mentoring process can encourage its development in their mentees.
Our mentors are registered by OBU and as per guidelines they are required not to be a tutor.
They are not necessarily an expert in the student’s chosen topic area
They will not assess the student’s work
They do not provide directive guidance
They are not responsible for the quality of the student’s work
The mentor helps the student to arrive at their own decisions about key aspects of their work through a mentoring approach.
It is essential that the work submitted to Oxford Brookes University is the student’s own work. It is not acceptable for the student to submit a pre-prepared reference list, an already constructed spreadsheet or powerpoint presentation as this would not be their own work.
As part of the assessment process, Oxford Brookes University use a text matching software (Turnitin) that can identify if a student has copied another student’s work. This is considered cheating which the University takes very seriously.
We will provide, the Information Pack which contains lots of useful information. It is structured as:
Part 1 – General Information
Part 2 – What you (the student) have to do
Part 3 – Guidance: how to do well
Part 4 – Further Information
Part 5 – Appendices