Accounting programs are typically housed within the business school of a university. Many top-tier business schools require a separate application process after a student is initially admitted to the university and completes certain prerequisites for the program. Simply being admitted to a university does not mean that you are automatically admitted as an Accounting major in a business program. Pay particular attention to the process for the schools you are researching. Students who are not admitted to an Accounting program automatically as freshmen will complete their freshman and/or sophomore years as "pre-Accounting" or "pre-Business" students while taking general education classes and covering prerequisites for their intended program. At the end of this probationary period, the review process for business majors, such as Accounting, will focus much more on how a student has performed so far at the college than the work they did in high school.
Before students are admitted to a specific major, they must first be accepted into the university itself. Colleges measure competitive admissions factors using the middle 50 percent average of the most recently admitted class. The middle 50 percent means that 25 percent of admitted students scored higher than these averages and 25 percent of admitted students scored lower. According to College Board, the organization that administers the SAT, the middle 50 percent SAT scores for the top 10 "Best Undergraduate Accounting Schools," as reported by U.S. News & World Report, were 590-700 Critical Reading and 620-730 Mathematics.
Six of these top 10 schools will admit high-caliber students to the business program directly as freshman, while the rest require a separate admissions process after freshman or sophomore year. According to a recent survey by BusinessWeek, of those six schools, the average SAT score for admitted Accounting majors was 1380 in Critical Reading and Mathematics.
In their 2011 ranking, U.S. News & World Report named the University of Texas' McCombs School of Business the top Accounting program in the country. College Board lists the average SAT score of their most recently admitted class as 1318 in Critical Reading and Mathematics. Continuing down the list, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign averaged 1340; Brigham Young University averaged 1233; the University of Pennsylvania averaged 1441; the University of Michigan averaged 1363; the University of Southern California averaged 1393; Indiana University averaged 1300; the University of Notre Dame averaged1410; New York University averaged 1449; and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill averaged 1340.