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Hello EYARC friends,
Welcome back! I hope the beginning of this new academic year will be a great one for you both professionally and personally. I am so thankful for all that you do for your students and for the profession.
The EYARC has several interesting new curricula and resources that I am excited to share with you. I hope each of you will find something useful to include in your classes this fall. You’ll find additional information on each of these items below.
- Introductory accounting: attract and adapt mini case study series
- Innovation mindset: DataSnipper (intelligent automation Excel plug-in tool) Byte Me Consultants and Needles, Inc. case studies
- Diversity, equity and inclusion: EY Neurodiverse Center of Excellence (NCoE) brochure, Designing learning for inclusion
- Cybersecurity: Login Analysis and Escape from the Digital Dungeon case studies
- Long-term value and sustainability: updated Pepsi and Coke reporting exercise and added a new comparison exercise; additionally, slides from EY Chief Sustainability Officer, Velislava Ivanova’s presentation at the AAA Annual Meeting
- Innovation mindset or artificial intelligence: ChatGPT video with EY Chief Innovation Officer Jeff Wong
We hope you find the following information useful in your classes and in your academic life. As always, you are welcome to share this newsletter with any colleague you believe would be interested. EYARC account requests can be made through the link below.
The EY Academic Resource Center
For full access to this content as well as videos, lecture notes, case studies, data sets, analytics workbooks and many other tools, visit the EYARC.
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Introductory accounting: attract and adapt mini case study series
The EY organization is committed to developing and maintaining a strong pipeline for the profession by attracting more students to the Accounting major. The EYARC is thrilled to introduce new curricula that will enable educators to integrate real-world examples into their introductory accounting courses.
Many introductory accounting courses focus learning on traditional debits and credits, which can lead to disengagement and a loss of interest among students. Our eight mini cases aim to provide students with an understanding of how the foundational concepts and principles they learn in class are applicable to real-world accounting careers. Through active participation in these mini cases, students will learn that accounting involves critical thinking, problem-solving and strategic decision-making, making accounting a stimulating and rewarding field of study and career choice.
For those who appreciate EYARC curricula but seek more concise content, the mini cases shorten some of our more popular EYARC cases. Each individual case can be completed in 20 to 30 minutes and without any additional technology.
Innovation mindset: DataSnipper case studies
DataSnipper is an intelligent automation platform within Excel that can automatically extract, cross-reference and validate source documents through simple “snips.” The EYARC DataSnipper curriculum highlights how technology can accelerate the speed, accuracy and quality of audit and financial procedures. This curriculum has been classified under the innovation mindset topic because it is still emerging in practice, but it can easily be classified under the analytics mindset topic.
The EYARC currently has two DataSnipper cases: Byte Me Consultants and Needles, Inc. Both cases were developed to help students advance their ability to redefine how to work faster, more simply and accurately, as well as their comfort, acceptance and willingness to try and fail with something new. The DataSnipper curriculum is designed so that it could be used in various courses, including audit, financial, accounting information systems, data analytics or managerial.
Byte Me Consultants
The students will review expense reimbursement receipts for an IT consulting firm. Students are asked to review the legitimacy of the expense and to review compliance with established company policies and procedures.
Needles, Inc.
The students will perform a cutoff analysis, which is used to test management’s assertion that recorded transactions occurred during that period and provides evidence of the accuracy and completeness of a company’s financial statements. Students will review bills of ladings and sales invoices to determine if the transactions were recorded in the appropriate accounting period and if they are accurate, complete and comply with generally accepted accounting standards.
Diversity, equity and inclusion: Neurodiverse Center of Excellence (NCoE) brochure
Neurodiversity is the idea that people experience and interact with the world around them in many alternative ways. How we, as individuals, perceive, process and present information can vary significantly. The word neurodiversity refers to the diversity of all people, but is often used to describe neurodevelopmental differences such as ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia and others. Approximately 20% of the adult population is considered to be neurodiverse. As faculty, you have, and will continue to have, neurodiverse students in your classroom. The EY NCoE partnered with the EYARC to create a brochure to help faculty know how to best design learning for inclusion. The brochure uses the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people.
Cybersecurity case studies
Escape from the Digital Dungeon
Escape from the Digital Dungeon is a thrilling simulation that will excite your students. For the purposes of this case, an organization has been hacked and received an email containing a riddle that needs to be solved within the hour. If the organization fails to solve the riddle, the hacker is threatening to release all of the organization’s sales data. The hacker typically enters systems through old software versions with vulnerabilities. Students need to use the provided data sets to find outdated software versions, then use JSON sales files to discover the hacker’s secret code. Once solved, they enter the code into a website to obtain a secret password.
In addition to the data responses, the case asks students to consider the impact of outdated software versions. The problems are intended to help students practice dealing with data and are patterned after tests performed as part of a cybersecurity engagement.
The case can be implemented in class, as homework, as a student project or as part of an exam. Solutions are provided in Alteryx. This case is accompanied with a simple to use user guide and how-to videos for the Alteryx solution.
Suitable courses include: Cybersecurity, Accounting Information Systems, Auditing (external or internal), Fraud and Data Analytics.
Login Analysis
Login Analysis is a five-part case where students perform employee authentication testing. A log file analysis is useful for SOC engagements, cybersecurity audits, forensic analyses, security analyses and criminal investigations. This case is patterned after tests that would be performed as part of a cybersecurity engagement. In addition to the data responses, the case asks students to think critically about what the data is telling them. The data for this case is simulated and contains nearly 1.3m login attempts. The case is designed to be flexible so that instructors may do all or only a portion of the analysis.
- Part 1 – Familiarization and basics: total and average login attempts per employee and the percentage of failed logins.
- Part 2 – Employee analysis: login failure rate for each employee, which employees are attempting to or logging in after termination, etc.
- Part 3 – Data integrity: identify missing logins
- Part 4 – Employee holiday login analysis: does login activity on holidays make sense
- Part 5 – Location of login exercise: students review login behavior by location relative to their previous location
The case can be implemented in class, as homework, as a student project or as part of an exam. Solutions are provided in Alteryx. This case is accompanied with how-to videos for the Alteryx solution.
Suitable courses include: Cybersecurity, Accounting Information Systems, Auditing (external or internal), Fraud and Data Analytics.
Long-term value and sustainability: case study and presentation
Pepsi and Coke reporting challenge: The EYARC’s long-term value and sustainability curriculum has been introductory, designed to expose any business student to the concept of sustainability. We are excited to share that a new and more challenging exercise has been added to the measurement and reporting (Part 4) portion of the case.
As a reminder, the Pepsi and Coke reporting challenge is a series of separate exercises designed to expose students to environmental, social and governance (ESG) matters and to the various types of reports where companies disclose ESG matters. The exercise has been updated to reflect current year numbers and has a new, more challenging exercise added. The new exercise asks students to complete a year-over-year comparison of PepsiCo’s and The Coca- Cola Company’s Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) report disclosures. Students will explore the change in emissions data reported over the last two years and investigate the drivers in both organizations’ progress toward their emission reduction goals.
Sustainability slides: At the 2023 AAA Annual Meeting, EY Chief Sustainability Officer Velislava Ivanova discussed the current market developments in sustainability and shared an ESG reporting update. She also discussed what organizations need to do now to prepare for the SEC’s ESG reporting decisions, potentially coming this fall.
Innovation mindset – artificial intelligence: ChatGPT
In this short video, Jeff Wong, EY Global Chief Innovation Officer, discusses how ChatGPT could impact the way we work, interact and create with one another. He hosts an entertaining discussion of ChatGPT’s possibilities and current limitations.
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Summary
The Ernst & Young Academic Resource Center (EYARC), sponsored by the Ernst & Young Foundation, is an innovative collaboration between faculty and professionals to support higher education. The EYARC develops and provides free curriculum resources and other educational support to address leading-edge issues impacting the accounting profession. The EYARC is yet another example of the commitment of the global EY organization and the Ernst & Young Foundation to the academic community. The Ernst & Young Foundation is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt corporation associated with Ernst & Young LLP, which funds the Foundation, together with its present and former partners, principals and staff.