Marietta College Accounting students compete in AGA Challenge

by Tom Perry

Marietta, Ohio (11/08/2022) — Students in Marietta College's Accounting and Public Accounting capstone seminar participated in the recent Association of Government Accountants (AGA) Government Finance Case Challenge competition. This nationwide event had teams of undergraduate students preparing Citizen-Centric Reports for the City of Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Sydney Amore '22 (Heath, Ohio) and Justin Moser '22 (Murrysville, Pennsylvania), and Vincent Anderson '23 (Mount Vernon, Ohio) and David Fruner '23 (Parkersburg, West Virginia) were the members of the two Marietta College teams.

The Case Challenge required students to comb through the city's annual financial report and other publicly available data about the City, pull out relevant financial and non-financial data, and create a four-page newsletter-style report for the city's citizens. AGA judges also required each team to submit a narrative explaining how and why the team chose to include (and exclude) the data it did.

McCoy Professor Grace Johnson noted this was the first time Marietta's seniors were involved in the competition.

"The AGA Case Challenge takes place in the autumn, and prior to this academic year, our capstone seminar had always been scheduled in the Spring semester," she said. "For reasons not connected to the competition, I moved the capstone seminar into the Fall semester, and this gave our seniors the chance to be involved."

While the two Marietta teams did not advance to the final stage of the AGA Case Challenge competition, the students agreed it was a valuable learning opportunity.

Anderson and Fruner noted, "We had to put an immense amount of thought into deciding what to include in our report. The greatest difficulty was not in finding the information; it was determining the importance of the information."

The team of Amore and Moser commented, "We really enjoyed the freedom and creativity the AGA case competition allotted to the contestants. Our team learned a lot about navigating a government website and how to create an effective CCR for the community we were assigned."

Located in Marietta, Ohio, at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio rivers, Marietta College is a four-year liberal arts college. Tracing its roots to the Muskingum Academy back in 1797, the College was officially chartered in 1835. Today Marietta College serves a body of 1,200 full-time students. The College offers more than 50 majors and is consistently ranked as one of the top regional comprehensive colleges by U.S. News & World Report and The Princeton Review, as well as one of the nation's best by Forbes.com. Marietta was selected seventh in the nation according to the Brookings Institution's rankings of colleges by their highest value added, regardless of major.

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