From Knowledge Transmission to Collaborative Intelligence: Reconstructing Auditing Pedagogy from a Human-AI Collaboration Perspective

Abstract

Auditing as a profession has changed considerably in recent years, yet the courses that train future auditors have not kept pace. This paper reports on a curriculum reform effort at a Chinese business school that tried to close that gap by building human-AI collaboration into the center of an undergraduate Auditing course, rather than treating it as a supplementary topic. The reform was motivated by three recurring problems we observed in our own students: an inability to connect isolated auditing concepts into coherent engagements, limited exposure to the digital tools now standard in practice, and almost no experience working within a structured audit team. To address these, the course was redesigned around three coordinated changes—reorganizing content into a progressive module sequence, embedding an AI pre-screening workflow into regular instruction, and replacing end-of-term examinations with a semester-long simulation project. The underlying logic throughout was to keep AI in the role of assistant, handling data extraction and initial screening, while students retained responsibility for interpretation and judgment. For accounting educators facing similar pressures, the approach may offer a workable model.