To expose students to Internal Auditing, an aspect of the accounting profession to which they have little/no other exposure throughout their academic career.

Each semester I have the students split into three teams and perform background research on three food companies as well as Internal Auditing guidance. During the next class, I have the students meet me on Brown Street where they role-play Internal Auditor at the company assigned to their team. When they are done, we meet at one of the local restaurants (Dewey’s Pizza in Fall 2019) and debrief the exercise over food and fountain drinks.

We have a conversational debrief where I probe students with thoughtful questions and ask them to relate the answers to those questions to their role-playing observations.

I assess through both the conversational debrief on the day of the exercise and through questions on their final exam.

This exercise provides the students (graduate Accounting majors) with Practical Wisdom over an aspect of their profession that most students across the country have little exposure to (only a small percentage - less than 2% - of US universities have official Internal Audit course offerings). Even though most of the students will not begin their careers as Internal Auditors, they will work alongside Internal Auditors and some may ultimately transition to an Internal Auditing career, so exposure to this aspect of the profession is more important than most universities acknowledge.