Internal Audit and Controlling: Summarising the Course Results

This year, the Internal Audit and Controlling course is being implemented in a new format. There are two practitioners on the course: Anna Logunova, Director of Controlling, PJSC Magnit, and Elena Yaskevich, Senior lecturer at the Finance Department, formerly an internal auditor at Gazprom Neft. Anna Logunova shared her impressions of the course.

For whom did the tests based on the results of my lectures at the Higher School of Economics become a real challenge?

 

That's the end of my lectures as part of the training course on controlling and auditing at the Graduate School of Economics. But if earlier the format of guest lectures did not provide for the control of students' knowledge with grades, now it was necessary to create two tests from scratch on the material passed. These are tests on the topics of "Risks and Controls" and "Internal Audit and Fraud Prevention".

During their student years and as part of their professional development, who did not take tests, answering open-ended questions in free form or choosing the right options among cunningly placed traps in closed-type tasks? Of course, this has happened many times in my life. But have you ever wondered who is there - "on the other side of the barricades", who compiled these tests? I have never thought about it either.…

And now I find myself in the role of a test compiler, whom no one limits either in the format or in the testing time.

 

When developing the tests, it was important for me to consider two points:

• informative – all questions should be as consistent as possible with the material covered and avoid ambiguity. A separate point is that it was not supposed to memorise definitions (the guys asked me if I needed to memorise the terms – please, no!). The understanding of the material, the ability to draw conclusions and think systematically were tested;
• technical – it was necessary to make it easy to check the printed forms filled out by students so that it would take less than one minute to summarise the results of one test. Thinking through the output forms at the stage of preparation for testing made it possible to make the verification process almost mechanical.

I liked the approach that I had heard about for quite a long time – give students the opportunity to use any sources, including lecture materials, but limit the testing time. An untrained student will still not have time to find the right slide in the materials. That is what I did, and I think this is the right approach.

In my opinion, everything worked out with the students - very good test results, supported by my confidence that the undergraduates learned the material without cramming.

 

It looks like I have also successfully passed my first test, the writing of tests.