The accounting core curriculum plus advanced financial reporting under IFRS — group accounting and consolidation, business combinations (IFRS 3), foreign currency translation (IAS 21), financial instruments (IFRS 9), leases (IFRS 16), share-based payment (IFRS 2), and the further technical standards. Taught by Pacioli and the authors of the standards themselves.
These three modules are taken once and count toward every diploma you pursue. They may be completed at any point — all three are required for the diploma certificate.
The first foundation course — mapping argument structure, identifying fallacies, testing claims against evidence with precision, and constructing the strongest version of a position before critiquing it.
What is the actual logical structure of this argument — not what it claims to be, but what it is? You will study how to map premises, conclusions, and the inferential steps between them (including hidden premises), distinguish deductive from inductive arguments, and identify formal and informal fallacies in real text.
Does the conclusion follow from the premises, and is your critique engaging with the argument at its strongest? You will study validity and soundness, the precision of claim (over-claiming, under-claiming, evidence fit), and the steelmanning practice — constructing the most defensible version of a position before attacking it.
The second foundation course — the paragraph as reasoning unit, CEA architecture, thesis construction and stress-testing, argument coherence, scope control, and the pre-submission review.
Is every sentence advancing the argument? You will study the CEA unit (Claim, Evidence, Analysis) as the fundamental architecture of academic writing, the paragraph as the smallest unit of argument, topic sentences as micro-theses, logical transitions, and the structural difference between an essay that describes a topic and one that argues a claim about it.
Does the argument on the page match the argument you intended? You will study thesis stress-testing (So what? Who disagrees? Is this demonstrable?), the section audit, scope control, academic register and voice, citation architecture, and the full pre-submission checklist.
The third foundation course — reading research papers for methodology and claims, stress-testing studies, verifying citations against the specific risk of AI hallucination, and using sources honestly.
Does the methodology support the claims? You will study how to read a research paper for method rather than content — identifying the research question and claims, the methodology type and its validity requirements, the gap between method and claims, common methodological limitations, the replication standard, and what statistical significance does and does not establish.
Is every citation verified, and is every source used honestly? You will study citation verification (including the specific risk of AI hallucinated citations and the verification procedure), source selection criteria, genuine paraphrase versus its imitations (mosaic plagiarism, patchwriting), and the attribution standard.
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