AssessUrBook™ — Assessing Accounting Cycle Skill Software
Arfah Salleh
Accounting cycle skill is fundamental to the mastery of accounting. It is long established that one way to enhance this skill is for learners to continually practice akin to the learning of mathematics. And in order to gauge one’s performance, a feedback system from examiners is essential. Given the mass of data, assessing learners’ work accurately is very challenging to examiners especially in situation where the number of scripts is large.
Till today, assessment software in accounting education is uncommon, and even if available, is designed to deal with only objective answer-type questions. AssessUrBook paves the way forward for e-assessment both as formative and summative evaluation tool.
AssessUrBook revolutionises accounting education by offering a technology-based solution to mark
students’ work while providing valuable immediate performance feedback. More specifically, the software provides a question bank, flexible and easily maintained by individual instructor and with questions capable to be randomly generated during examination setting. It offers a comprehensive examination format covering all bookkeeping processes from journalizing to preparing financial statements. It also gives a user-friendly interface as medium for instructors to build their answer schemes and for students to key in answers.
AssessUrBook breakthrough features include providing instant / real-time feedback with:
• detailed, individualised performance evaluation by question for each examination candidate;
• overall performance report for each specific assessment exercise;
• reduction in examiners’ assessment marking time while increasing marking accuracy and standardization; and
• flexibility to accept different grading systems.
The software also incorporates access control features to ensure that user groups are able to perform only designated tasks.
The AssessUrBook initiative is an invention that opens up a new dimension in examination and assessment approaches for basic accounting. The feedback mechanism which is superior than traditional approach should contribute to students’ learning. Almost all of the usual marking time is shown to be saved using AssessUrBook with increased accuracy, while some possible unethical examination practices can be contained through individualised randomly generated questions.
Given that accounting cycle is fundamental to basic accounting, this software is suitable for use by many user groups and at all levels of education, formal and informal, face-to-face or remote. User to benefit from this software include not only accounting school teachers and students, but also those pursuing degree programs whether accounting on non-accounting and also professional courses. Examination bodies are also to benefit from AssessUrBook.
For more information, please contact
Dr Nayan Kanwal
Research Management Centre
Universiti Putra Malaysia
Email: [email protected]
Tel: +603 8946 6192
Fax: + 603 8942 6539
