مزایای برقراری تماس با متخصصان در جلسات میزگرد: درک دانشجویان کارشناسی از تجربه  The benefits of providing contact with practitioners in round table forums: Undergraduate student perception  of the experience

1. Introduction Many universities around the world offer extracurricular activities, from sports to training or professional activities. Some of them can be round tables, lectures from business professionals, conferences, or workshops, among others. The aim of many of these activities is to give students the possibility to orientate their future employability decisions and to improve their capacity for critical thinking. Consequently, some accounting and auditing real life cases are presented as part of an extracurricular activity and not under the pressure of students’ grades with the aim of analysing the perceptions of undergraduate students about certain ‘hot topics’ affecting the role of auditors. Indeed, the auditor’s role is a key factor in market confidence and financial stability, founded on the public interest and legitimacy theory on the auditing profession, as the quality of the financial information and relevance and reliance of the corporate figures are mainly based on auditors’ reports and opinions. An academic approach to the public interest concept can be close to the legitimacy theory where public interest is defined by the AICPA as ‘the collective well-being of the community of people and institution the profession served’, and the FASB mission is understood to “serve the investing public” (Baker, 2005). Following Deegan (2002, p.292) ‘organizations exist to the extent that the particular society considers that they are legitimated, and if this is the case, the society “confers” upon the organization the “state” of legitimacy’. In this paper, we want to test the perceived utility and difficulty of the content of a round table forum as a measure of the utility of this kind of supplementary activities. We expect that a high perceived utility of the activity will bring students higher motivation in accounting and auditing related subjects and will help them design their professional career. Thus, it will improve their learning process and enhance the interest of the students in the presented topics conveying a more positive image of the auditing profession. We employed a sample of 388 undergraduate students of Business Administration related degrees from six different colleges and universities in Spain. All of them attended one of the two training round tables entitled ‘Accounting, regulation and financial crisis: Analysing banks’ behaviour’ and ‘Internal control and the prevention of money laundering’, organized by the Madrid section of the auditors’ association called the ‘Instituto de Censores Jurados de Cuentas de Espana~ ’ (Institute of Chartered Accountants in Spain). We decided to use these two hot topics as the role of an auditor is related to strong ethical requirements, and that way students would get a practical approach to real life and hear firsthand about the world of work, not only with the multidisciplinary approach to the profession but also with its social interest position.