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October 05, 2005
Flying colors!
It may be that pigs can fly after all, because last week's tax exam came back, and somehow, I managed a score of 90. I'd estimated an over/under of 75 or so, because that's about how I did on last semester's exam (which was provided for practice). But I was able to avoid most of my usual silly mistakes and ace the thing, including nailing the last question, which was a present value analysis of a net operating loss (NOL), the objective being to find out whether it would be better to carry the loss back or forward (tax law allows you to carryover an NOL back two years or forward 20).
Of course, 90% may sound good to a student, but if you're a tax accountant, it's not good enough. Still, it's a lot better than I was expecting -- and it's my first exposure to this material, except as a taxpayer. Jack and Barbara (the tax experts Meg and I trust to get it 100% right) would be proud!
100% of precincts reporting!
This afternoon, I got back the last exam from last week -- and, as it turned out, notched a better-than-expected result on that one, too, with 81%. Sighs of relief all around! This being the over-the-hump semester, it's now starting to look as though I might actually have what it takes to get this degree and get on with it.
(I should add, for those of you who aren't accounting majors, that there is no grade inflation at the College of Business Administration. It's a lot tougher than my first time through college, and the grading is much more severe. At Clark, I'd say the average grade, in a liberal-arts program, was a comfy B, and you had to try pretty hard if you wanted to fail. At the NAU business school, they hand out every grade from A through F, repeating a course is common even among successful business majors, and if the median grade isn't C, it's darn close. The accounting program aims to toughen us up for what we're going to run into in the professional world, and there is no coddling students. Last semester, I had to get used to the fact that 70% was a good exam score, in ACC 356 and 302. In the 400-level courses, it's more of the same.)
Posted by Urbie at October 5, 2005 08:32 AM