Raising Awareness of the Risk of Failure in First-year Accounting Students

Higher education institutions in the South African context are no exceptions to the international concerns on student throughput and retention. Against these wider discourses on student throughput, this article focuses on specifically the repeater student in first-year accounting at the University of South Africa (Unisa), an open and distance learning (ODL) institution. There is no grand predictive theory to explain successfully student retention or disengagement in all contexts. Published research furthermore reports on the impact of different interventions on student retention and persistence but these findings are context-specific and not in toto valid for other contexts. The possible impact of students becoming aware of their risk profile was the focus of this research. In the light of international literature on self-authoring and attribution, a self-assessment questionnaire based on a predictive model was drafted as a pilot study and sent to repeater students. This pilot study found that the completion of the questionnaire has impacted positively on repeater students' performance. The findings also provide pointers to increase such an intervention's reliability.