Working with today's students.

• Author: Raabe, William A.

Teaching tax courses today requires adjusting learning methods to engage students and help them prepare rigorously for the CPA Exam and for demanding jobs.

It always has been difficult to teach tax at the college level, with heavy technical material, law changes galore, and students who may come into the class with a dread of studying tax. Many undergraduate tax students will not enter tax practice immediately, and several might already have jobs in hand by the time they take their first tax course, so, combined with "senioritis," these factors often make it difficult to keep the students' interest at the needed levels.

This is in a context of an increasing amount of material that the tax course must deliver. Just in the past 10 or so years, tax syllabuses typically have added a serious dose of accounting for income taxes; tax aspects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, PL. 111-148; multijurisdictional taxation; and changes in how the IRS operates and how clients and their advisers work with the agency.

Now factor in the reality that students today can be much different from those of prior years. Interviews, focus groups, and field experience show that students today are more goal-oriented and have been raised to expect instantaneous information and entertainment from various social media outlets they regularly access. Tax professors often find that:

* Students are not well-prepared for class, in that they probably did not read any assigned material ahead of the session;

* If they are not engaged fully during class, they may turn to electronic devices and tune out class activities;

* They are CPA Exam-oriented to the point that they may not invest time or effort on materials that are unlikely to appear on the exam;

* Their verbal communication skills are better than how others would characterize them, but their computational and analytical skills almost certainly are less developed than they would self-assess, especially spreadsheet and planning/consultative skills;

* They have experienced different learning approaches in their earlier classes, even in accounting: Lecture time may have been minimal, group work often is the norm, and online materials may have been common. This all means that it is harder than ever to deliver an effective tax course of the traditional type: lectures focusing on the Code and regulations, quizzes and exams completed individually, and "Professor Kingsfield"-style grilling and drilling during class time.

Complain as they might in the faculty lounge about the current students, instructors should adjust their teaching styles and learning techniques in tax classes to accommodate current student characteristics. This does not mean that tax professors should "dumb it down" or talk about taxes rather than develop the skills and attitudes that students need to succeed in today's tax profession. More than ever, students need a solid technical foundation in the tax law, not a "highlights of taxation" or "tax lite" course that may yield favorable evaluations of the instructor but not challenge the students.

Rather, students need to be ready to perform well on the job, often in a matter of months, and they need to be able to grab points on the CPA Exam on the tax...