Theory and "Intermediate" Accounting.

Abstract The article focuses on the role and function of the "intermediate" course in the accounting curriculum. According to the author, an acceleration in the issuance by standard-setting bodies of highly specific and definitive accounting pronouncements has burdened intermediate textbooks and intermediate courses with what has come to be called legal accounting. The issue of what to do about "intermediate" accounting is confounded by discord over the relative weights to be assigned in the accounting curriculum to preparing students to pass the Uniform Certified Public Accountants Examination and preparing students for longer-term assignments in the profession. Accounting teachers have placed almost the entire burden of conveying the contents of the most controversial accounting pronouncements on the intermediate course that precious little time remains for acquainting students with a theory of the field which they are about to enter. One reaction to this predicament has been to expand intermediate from three semester hours to four, or from one course to two.