Best practices in higher education from audit faculty in the United States of America

Based on interviews with 16 auditing faculty members, we examine best practices for teaching excellence in auditing courses from audit faculty in the U.S.A. Overall, the most significant issue facing auditing classroom teaching and learning is the lack of real-world application. Auditing faculty members have provided suggestions for success from their own courses to help combat this and other challenges. Specifically, we report detailed interview responses from our sample to provide a treasure trove of ideas, activities, projects, resources, and assignments that have proven beneficial to the participants and their students. We hope this research will enrich the discussion surrounding teaching excellence in auditing and reflections on accounting education, spurring additional research and ideas for revitalizing the auditing classroom. We anticipate that our findings will be helpful to faculty assigned to teach auditing and serve as a resource for them as they plan and design their courses, as well as for those looking to refresh their auditing courses with new ideas and best practices. Our results may also be of interest to senior faculty who serve in a mentoring capacity to junior faculty, and many of the findings presented may have wider applicability to a variety of accounting courses and clubs.