To do better on accounting tests, college students should get a jump in the game and start in high school, said an award-winning NIU professor.

NIU Professor Sherry Hellmuth received the 1990 Delta Pi Epsilon National Doctoral Research Award April 11.

“I started the doctoral in 1982, and started collecting the actual data in 1986,” Hellmuth said.

Delta Pi Epsilon is the national honorary professional graduate society in business education, which recognizes outstanding business education doctoral dissertations in the United States.

Hellmuth’s study was “A Comparison of the Effects of First- Year High School Accounting on Student Performance on Selected Concepts Taught in First-Semester College Accounting.”

Hellmuth said she wanted to see whether NIU students who had one year of high school accounting did better than those who did not.

“There was no difference overall statistically in their performance on their exams,” she said. However, mathematically, students who had the high school class answered more test questions correctly.

Hellmuth received a bachelor of science degree in business education from the University of Nebraska-Omaha and a master’s of education degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.