Peta Alana Stevenson-Clarke

Perceptions of the Prevalence and Seriousness of Academic Dishonesty in Australian Universities

Academic dishonesty is a fundamental issue for the academic integrity of higher education institutions, and one that has lately been gaining increasing media attention. This study reports on a survey of 1206 students and 190 academic staff across four major Queensland universities in relation to student academic misconduct. The aim of the survey was to determine the prevalence of academic misconduct, and to investigate the extent to which perceptions of dishonesty are shared between students and staff, as preliminary steps toward developing effective strategies to deal with the academic dishonesty/misconduct problem. Results indicate a higher tolerance for academic misconduct by students in comparison to staff, particularly with respect to falsification of research results and plagiarism, as well as considerable underestimation by staff of the prevalence of virtually all forms of student academic misconduct. Overall, the study’s findings confirm the significance of the issue of academic dishonesty within the Australian tertiary sector, indicating considerable divergence between students and staff in terms of perceptions of the seriousness and prevalence of student academic misconduct. We suggest that university administrators need to examine this issue closely in order to develop mechanisms for managing and curtailing the level of academic misconduct, since a failure to do so may lead to a further undermining of the academic integrity of the Australian tertiary sector.

Earnings, cashflows and returns: Functional relations and the impact of firm size

The relation between stock returns, earnings and cashflows is of importance because it directly addresses the issue of whether accounting data provide value relevant information. The empirical evidence to date, however, has documented low explanatory power for earnings and inconclusive incremental information content for cashflows. This research re-evaluates the incremental information content debate using Australian data. Our research is motivated by: recent innovations in research design, including the specification of nonlinear functional relations between accounting variables and prices, and the fact that differences in firm size characteristics may influence the relative information content of the accounting variables. We observe that: (i) a nonlinear functional relation provides greater explanatory power for both earnings and cashflows; (ii) the results are consistent with more transitory earnings components for smaller firms; and (iii) contrary to received theory, cashflows add greater incremental explanatory power for large firms.

Difference of purpose: The usage of railway accounts in Victoria and Queensland (1880–1900), a comparative study:

In both the New and Old Worlds, the railways were invariably the largest business enterprises of the nineteenth century in terms of both employment and capitalisation. This article explores whether Australia’s railroads were also seminal institutions for the employment of accountants and the advance of their discipline, through a consideration of the effects of commonalities and differences with the American experience. Commonalities exist in the similar roles played by American and Australian railways in the global economy, while differences principally relate to ownership structure – the former being privately owned and the latter state-owned. State ownership is found to have had a more significant influence than economic commonalities. Financial accounting was retarded due to (1) dealings with investment markets being the responsibility of Parliamentarians and (2) the abstinence of Australian railways from financial endeavours such as land speculation. The domination of cost accounting by professional engineers also left little room for qualified accountants.

Estimating the value added by Big 8/6/5 auditors using earnings and cash response coefficients

This paper estimates the value added by Big 8/6/5 auditors after controlling for the permanent and non-permanent impact of earnings and cash flows using linear and nonlinear (arctan) regression models. The linear model shows significant value added for industrial firms that utilise Big 8/6/5 auditors; while an arctan model shows that large auditors value-add by attesting to the permanence of earnings for large firms. We demonstrate that refinements to the audit research can be made by using response coefficients to filter out the different timing components inherent in earnings and cash flows.