1995 Dr. Janet Greenlee Assigns Auditing and Consulting Projects to Students

Dr. Janet Greenlee, professor of professional accountancy since 1992, made waves in the academic community when she assigned real-life auditing and consulting projects to students in her Accounting Information Systems course. She tasked teams of students with projects such as looking at the Penn State Harrisburg undergraduate admission procedures, the graduate admissions setup, faculty recruitment, graduate school registration procedures, and career services procedures.

Greenlee said the projects were applied and practical, and they gave accounting students the chance to look at a system beyond financial statements. Students responded well to the projects, and one told Greenlee that it was “the most valuable experience of four years of college.”

Greenlee received a lot of media attention later when she published an article called “Spies Like Them” in the December 1996 Management Accounting journal. Because of her article, multiple media outlets called her daily to ask her advice as a subject matter expert on corporate spying and company fraud – topics she also taught in her Accounting Information Systems course. The whole experience, she said, was very exciting.