IMPROVING TUITION AND STUDENTS’ PERFORMANCES IN ACCOUNTING PROFESSIONAL EXAMS: A STUDY FROM NIGERIA

Students seek success in exams by attending tuition centres to meet tutors who prepare them for exams. It could happen that a tutor is competent, passionate and willing to teach, while the students are also open, ready, and eager to learn but — in spite of these positive dispositions to studies — learning objectives may not be achieved, which could be understandably frustrating, unfulfilling, and time-wasting. One of the vagaries that may be responsible for such wedge in the knowledge transference process is the teaching method. The study was therefore undertaken in recognition of the place of teaching methods in achieving teaching effectiveness. We surveyed tutors and students of different professional accountancy exams in Nigeria to obtain their views on the subject. Statistics such as Mean, T-test, ANOVA and regression were used for analyses. Hypotheses were evaluated and inferences deducted on the basis of 1% significance level. We deduced that teaching effectiveness is a locus of five variables – competence of tutor, teaching methods personally adopted by a tutor, general teaching methods, use of technology for teaching, and success rates in exams. We observed that virtues such as technical competence, authoritativeness, assertiveness, approachability, patience, self-confidence, amongst others, contribute to teaching effectiveness. Tutors are therefore encouraged to imbue and improve upon these threshold attributes. Findings revealed also that students assimilate more readily when they can relate what they are taught to everyday life— in this light, we suggest the use of teaching methods that blend theory with practice to deepen understanding. Succeeding at both tuition delivery and professional exams is the joint responsibility of tutors and students. A cordial relationship between them is therefore a sine qua non for achieving teaching objectives.