EVALUATION IN AN ACCOUNTING COURSE

According to the Bologna plan directives, the current orientation of the educational system calls for continuous assessment materials, relying on the ongoing work of the student to ensure the success of the learning process. In the course of Accounting and Finance, evaluation is made out of three marks which are achieved during the course: one comes out from the evaluative tests performed in the class sessions along the semester, a valuation obtained in laboratory practice sessions, as well as the mark related to the development of a project throughout the course.
The experience in this subject -this combination of classroom activities, laboratory and tutorships- has been proved as beneficial to students and has motivated them to perform well and it has also had its reflection in the global computation of marks.
This paper aims to determine the grade of acceptance of continuous assessment among the students and to give evidence of the differences in the results obtained by students who opted for a system of continuous evaluation against those achieved by students who only made a final assessment test. Differences have been detected by an analysis of variance (ANOVA) which provides a statistical test whether the means of several groups are equal or not. This test has been applied to a sample built from data of continuous assessment, practice and final marks of the course 09/10. To conclude, we have also included the feedback obtained on this evaluation system.