Curriculum AY2023/2024 (for students who switched), AY2024/2025 and AY2025/2026

Graduates of the BBA degree programme with a major in Accountancy are qualified to directly enter the professional stage of the Singapore CA Qualification, the path to becoming a Singapore Chartered Accountant.

The Singapore Chartered Accountant (CA) Qualification is the national CA qualification, developed by the Singapore Accountancy Commission (SAC) and administered by Singapore’s national accountancy professional body, the Institute of Singapore Chartered Accountants (ISCA). This internationally recognised and portable qualification is unique as it offers an Asian perspective. Taken together with a 3-year working experience with an SAC Accredited Training Organisation, which are accounting firms including the Big 4, candidates will receive a well-rounded education with both technical knowledge and practical guidance. The Singapore CA Qualification is continually reviewed to raise the ease of taking the programme while maintaining its standards to ensure that professionals with the Singapore Chartered Accountant designation come with the reputation of being highly competent. In short, it is designed to develop future business leaders.

To uphold the high standards necessary to achieve the vision of developing Singapore as the leading global accountancy hub, registration of Chartered Accountants to be Public Accountants in Singapore and Reciprocal Membership Agreements (RMAs) are subject to periodic review.

David Mitchell Reeb, Head, Department of Accounting, will be glad to answer any enquiries at this email: acchead@nus.edu.sg

Accountancy students need to fulfil compulsory accountancy courses:

*Students who have completed ACC2709 Accounting Information Systems and ACC3701 Assurance & Attestation by AY2025/26, Semester 1 are not required to read the new set of courses, ACC2727 and ACC3727.

In addition to the above, the following accounting elective courses listed in the table may be offered. Do note that this list is not exhaustive. The accounting elective courses can only be read as Unrestricted Electives. Unrestricted electives do not need to be from accounting.

List of Accountancy elective courses:

With the increasing availability of computing power, decision making has undergone an evolutionary change, resulting in more use of data at all levels within an organisation. Business graduates thus need to be more numerate and analytical. We often see positions requiring a higher level of analytics know-how being advertised by recruiters to form decision teams with expertise in collecting and extracting actionable intelligence out of data. We aim to train our business students to the level where they can immediately be a valuable interface between data scientists and senior management, or qualify for the best graduate business analytics programmes globally.

This major will pivot on the core business knowledge already acquired by all BBA students, and will take good contextual management understanding as given. Graduates with this major should function very well as a data-savvy business consultant, either internally for their own organisations or externally for client establishments.

Business students will already have benefited from Business Environment and Function Courses such as DAO1704 Decision Analytics using Spreadsheets and AI and DAO2702 Programming for Business Analytics and AI.

Please visit our public interest group for more details.

To ensure that students in this major receive holistic training in business economics, the curriculum offers distinct alternative pathways from the second to the fourth year. To maximise synergies, the curriculum uses multiple courses from the Departments of Economics, Analytics & Operations, and Marketing.

Why Business Economics?

1. Offers a coherent specialisation for BBA students seeking careers in management or economic consulting, finance, or general management.
2. Develops a group of talent who will be well-versed in business and management practices and are also strongly proficient in economics.

Who should take it?

BBA students pursuing careers in management or economic consulting.

List of Business Economics Major Courses

The finance major aims to produce ethical, high quality and job-ready finance professionals with a global mind-set for the finance industry. This is achieved through the following dimensions: industry relevance, ethics, breadth, rigour, and cross discipline. The finance major is a Certified Financial Analyst (CFA) programme partner, meeting the CFA programme curriculum requirements which are updated frequently for industry relevance.

The major involves many distinguished industry professionals as adjunct professors and invited speakers, bringing to the classroom the latest know how and innovations in the industry. Other than internships, students complete a field service project with a company in the industry which involves solving real business problems faced by the company. Students take part and perform well in finance competitions organised by the industry. The finance major takes the development of ethics very seriously. All students go through an ethics workshop based on the CFA Institute Code of Ethics and Standards of Professional Conduct. The ethics dimension is often revisited in every finance course through discussions and case studies. Students are held to the highest standard of ethics requirement, with particular emphasis on non-plagiarism, honesty in assessment-related work, and professionalism in project work.

The major addresses the need for breadth through its three required finance courses: FIN3701 Corporate Finance, FIN3702 Investment Analysis and Portfolio Management and FIN3703 Financial Markets. This ensures that students know the basic workings in the various sectors within the finance industry. It addresses the need for rigour through its many elective subjects ranging from the area of asset management, to personal finance, banking and business finance. Students may package their electives freely to develop all rounded rigor or specialized rigor for a particular finance career.

The finance major integrates well with other majors in the Business School producing not just finance specialists but balanced business professionals with strength in leadership and technology. Students have enough elective courses to take another major such as marketing, decision science and management. The case studies and projects in the finance courses often require analysis in these other majors as well. The major supports overseas student exchange programme stimulating the development of global mind-set and perspectives in finance.

The finance major employs the latest and best pedagogy for education including blended learning. Some courses are conducted in our trading and computer lab complete with industry software such as Bloomberg and MSCI Barra, producing job-ready graduates. The major enjoys the support of its numerous enthusiastic and dedicated alumni. They regularly come back for networking sessions with undergraduates and provide mentorship and career guidance. This adds to the vibrancy and colourful learning experience in the major.

List of Finance Major Courses

The Innovation and Entrepreneurship major aims to equip our students to become visionaries and change makers to lead the transformation of Singapore businesses into the future economy. The pace of innovation means the industries our students enter will drastically transform over the course of their careers. Economic growth will come from leaders who understand the organisational and business challenges inherent in these changes and are comfortable managing an uncertain environment.

This major will furnish our students with broad theoretic lenses to lead change effectively, whether in an entrepreneurial venture or a large multinational corporation. Partnered with rich experiential projects and courses, students will enter the workplace comfortably applying these theories with the broader skills developed in the BBA programme.

This major will interest a broad cross-section of BBA students from those planning specific careers in management consulting or entrepreneurship to those who want to be well-equipped for the dynamic industrial environment.

*Must be letter-graded and taken on NOC
**Taken on NOC for cohort 2022 & onwards

Leadership is the linchpin in organisations and teams. By understanding leadership, students will place themselves in a central node of influence to inspire people, create organisational outcomes, and ultimately realize the full potential of human capital.

To keep the major current and relevant, keen attention will be paid to the shifting business landscape that forms the backdrop to leadership, for instance, trends on human resource (HR) big data analytics, controversial new organisational structures, and the impact of technology and globalization. These will be addressed in advanced seminar classes in collaboration with other departments where we probe the evolving role of leadership and how to lead organisations to stay ahead in a rapidly changing world. At the same time, Human Capital Management will proactively address the changes in the environment, especially on its horizontal and vertical alignment with strategy and culture to obtain sustainable competitive advantage for the firm and people.

Students who achieve this major can look forward to careers in management consulting, HR consulting, organisation development, HR generalist/specialist, and HR policy maker.

Marketing, more than any other business functions, deals with customers. It is also the revenue-generating department in any organization.

Marketing is about managing profitable customer relationships by satisfying customer needs better than competition, thus creating superior value for customers. Hence, students majoring in Marketing should understand not only the company and its customers, but also the competition in the context of the political, economic, socioeconomic, and technological environment to identify opportunities and harness them through well thought out product, pricing, distribution and promotion strategies to bring value not only for the customers but also to the company.

As such, marketing courses are developed and offered at various stages of the curriculum to enhance learning progression and outcomes consistent with what Marketing is. All students begin with learning Principles of Marketing (MKT1705) in their first year. The second marketing course (MKT3701 – Marketing Strategy: Analysis and Practice) builds on the principles by sharpening students’ analytical proclivity and going in-depth in key topics especially from a managerial and strategic perspective. The Consumer Behaviour (MKT3702) course drills deep into understanding customers – the fundamental premise of marketing; specifically, how consumers affect business practices and also how marketers influence them. These courses are the building blocks upon which electives are offered.

Our electives cover comprehensively the strategies involving what is often termed the marketing mix – product and brand, pricing, retailing and promotion. As Singapore is a service economy, our curriculum also offers a Services Marketing course to equip students for this important sector.

Beyond these marketing mix courses, we keep current with offerings concerning Digital Marketing as well as Customer Relationship Management, among others. As data analytics is an important driver in today’s businesses, we offer MKT3722 Research for Marketing Insights as well as MKT4812 Marketing Analytics to train Marketing majors in understanding the quantitative bases underlying the strategies.

Managing business operations effectively is crucial to the competitive advantage of any organisation. This major is not only designed for students who are keen to venture into the functional area of operations, logistics or supply chain management, but also for anyone who will play an effective role in contributing to the competitiveness of any organisation regardless of industry sectors. Building upon the BBA core course DAO2703 Operations and Technology Management, students are equipped with foundational knowledge in supply chain management and service operations, which are applicable to both manufacturing and service industries.

Electives relating to project management, information management and business analytics further provide students with essential knowledge and skills needed for sound decision making and effective management of business processes. Given growing environmental concerns, sustainable operations management becomes a highly relevant and hence included topic.

This major offers an elective project course to provide students with hands-on experience in addressing issues and resolving challenges in the operations and supply chain domain. Please visit our public interest group for more details.

The Real Estate major trains real estate professionals to create and manage wealth in the context of the built environment. Recognising that Real Estate is Space and Money over Time, this major is unique in providing an explicit link and interface between the spatial features of Real Estate and its financial attributes. Real Estate graduates play key roles in the development of the built environment as well as in the advancement of the quality of urban living through the transformation and management of real estate resources.

List of Real Estate Major Courses: