Online test
PERDISCO VIRTUALTUTOR PRACTICE SET STUDENTCOMPANION & HELPFULHINTS PAGE 2 VIRTUALTUTOR AUSTRALASIAN EDITION 3 (VSA3q) STUDENTCOMPANION & HELPFULHINTS Manual Accounting Practice Set VirtualTutor, Australasian Edition 3 This student companion to the VirtualTutor accounting practice set provides you with information about how the VirtualTutor practice set works and what you will experience when you complete your practice set and provides some helpful hints to get you through. This companion is based on the experiences of, and feedback from, the thousands of students who have completed our accounting practice sets before you. Taking the time to read and understand the information provided here will enhance your overall experience and help you avoid the common mistakes that students make when completing the practice set. This STUDENTCOMPANION & HELPFULHINTS contains the following sections: How the VirtualTutor practice set works .................................................................... 3 What you will experience........................................................................................... 6 Hints to ensure your success .................................................................................. 10 How the VirtualTutor practice set is graded ............................................................ 13 Conclusion and how to get technical help ............................................................... 15 This student companion is not a detailed set of instructions for how to undertake the practice set. It is just a simple overview of what you will experience. The detailed instructions you need are provided online on every page of the practice set and you should read and follow those instructions carefully. PERDISCO VIRTUALTUTOR PRACTICE SET STUDENTCOMPANION & HELPFULHINTS PAGE 3 VIRTUALTUTOR AUSTRALASIAN EDITION 3 (VSA3q) How the VirtualTutor practice set works This is a manual practice set The VirtualTutor practice set requires you to complete a one month accounting cycle for one business from a range of fictional retail businesses that supply various types of goods. The practice set is designed to be a similar experience to completing paper-based practice set books except that this practice set is delivered online using a web browser (without any software to install). In this context, the word "practice" does not mean "a casual attempt" but rather an opportunity for you to demonstrate your accounting skills in your own simulated "accounting practice". The accounting cycle implemented in your practice set is shown below. This practice set adopts a manual approach. This means it requires you to complete the accounting cycle of your allotted company, entirely by hand, albeit using the Perdisco website instead of paper. During the accounting cycle, you will manually record transactions into the general journal and special journals of your company and then manually post those transactions into its general ledger and subsidiary ledgers. At the end of the month, you will construct a trial balance, record adjusting and closing entries, and manually prepare the financial statements. None of the above steps are automated. For example, journal entries are not automatically posted to accounts, running balances in the accounts are not automatically maintained, and totals are not automatically calculated. This is by design. Our website is not an accounting software package and is not meant to perform any accounting software functions. Instead, our website is used as a teaching tool designed to give you direct experience in all elements of a manual accounting cycle – it does not hide any of those elements behind automated computing processes, no matter how mundane they may seem. Please remember that the manual nature of this practice set is a matter of deliberate design – we did not accidentally forget to let your computer add up totals! In fact, while doing all tasks by hand will take you additional time, its point is to allow you to really understand what computers do in the background when the accounting cycle is implemented in a software system. This is the activity that your instructor has chosen for you to complete. PERDISCO VIRTUALTUTOR PRACTICE SET STUDENTCOMPANION & HELPFULHINTS PAGE 4 VIRTUALTUTOR AUSTRALASIAN EDITION 3 (VSA3q) The practice set helps you using its VirtualTutor Technology So, why is the practice set online? Delivering this manual practice set online allows: • our VirtualTutor functionality to provide you with real-time feedback • our AutoGrade functionality to score your attempts automatically • our Back-On-Track functionality to prevent you from carrying forward mistakes, and • our AntiCheat functionality to deliver a different version to every student in your course. Your VirtualTutor practice set is divided into 14 sections that are submitted to our website as separate units of work. Every section includes multiple journals, ledgers, trial balances, and/or financial statements that will often require more than 50 responses from you to complete. As you submit each section, Perdisco’s AutoGrade functionality corrects that section and our VirtualTutor technology provides you with feedback on your attempt. At the start of each new section, you are brought back-on-track in a way that ensures you do not carry an error throughout your entire practice set. An important implication is that you cannot print your entire practice set, complete it offline as a single unit of work, and then enter all your answers in one session. Instead, the practice set is designed so that you can not move to the next section until you have submitted the current section. That said, any individual section can be printed and worked on offline – you do not have to stay online all the time. This structure has been set up to help you. After each step, you receive feedback so you can avoid making the same mistake twice! Further, at the start of each new section, you will be brought back-on-track by resetting all of your journals, ledgers and account balances to their correct values in a way that ensures you cannot be penalised for follow on errors (unlike what could happen if you submitted the entire practice set at one time). Sample exercises We have designed two sample exercises to help you familiarise yourself with the functionality of this practice set. These exercises are provided for demonstration purposes only and your responses will not count towards your overall score for the practice set: PERDISCO VIRTUALTUTOR PRACTICE SET STUDENTCOMPANION & HELPFULHINTS PAGE 5 VIRTUALTUTOR AUSTRALASIAN EDITION 3 (VSA3q) Tracking progress This practice set is a large activity that is expected to take between 12 to 20 study hours to complete over many days or weeks. Don’t leave it to the last minute! Do not expect to complete the practice set the night before it is due – you will just not have enough time to finish it. To help you understand where you are up to in the practice set, you are provided with a ‘progress map’. The map, shown on the right at a very early stage of the practice set, is in the format of a puzzle that you complete piece by piece until you reach the end of your practice set. This progress map provides a visual image showing you what you have done (the faded completed pieces), where you are right now (the highlighted active piece), and what still remains to be completed (the grey puzzle background with its directional arrow). Below the progress map, you are shown the percentage of the practice set you have already completed (based on the estimated study hours for each section). You are also told how many study hours the current section might take, and how many study hours are likely to remain before the practice set is fully completed. You also receive information on your progressive score so that you know the points available on each page of the practice set and so you are aware of how well you have performed and so you can realise the opportunity that remains to improve you final score. Note that you can only move in a forward direction. Once a page is submitted, it is not possible to return to that page (or to change the answers submitted on that page). It is, however, possible to bookmark your current page (prior to submitting it) and to return to that page at a later date. This allows you to complete your practice set over multiple settings. Information from previous pages In addition to the progress map, every page of the practice set provides links to all of the information required to complete the current page as well as the information from all previous pages. This includes the background information on the company and its accounting policies, transactions to be recorded, and so on. While you cannot literally go backwards to previous