For most people, graduating high school is important to becoming successful, but this wasn’t the case for an ISU accounting professor.

Susan Ravenscroft, Roger P. Murphy Professor of Accounting, dropped out of high school the last semester of her senior year.

“I was a rebellious teenager,” she said.

Ravenscroft said she dropped out of high school because she did not get along with her parents.

She was accepted to a college before she dropped out of high school. The college never checked her high school transcripts, so she was able to enroll in college courses.

Ravenscroft managed to get into a college in Michigan without having a high school diploma.

“I just kept taking classes; I loved taking classes,” she said.

She got her bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Wayne State University, but decided it wasn’t a very practical field.

During her junior year in college at Wayne State, she took the GED so she would be eligible for a master’s degree.

She earned her master’s in business administration from the University of Detroit, worked for six years and then went to Michigan State University to get her doctorate degree.

She taught at Eastern Michigan University before coming to Iowa State eight years ago.

Ravenscroft was officially appointed the Roger P. Murphy Professor of Accounting on Tuesday at a private reception.

Roger Murphy, associate professor emeritus of accounting, started a professorship in accounting in his name in 1994.

Murphy thought it was important to recognize undergraduate teaching, Ravenscroft said.

He gave his life insurance policy to the College of Business to start a professorship. He was also able to convince other people to give their life insurance policies to the university. There were also many donations.

Ravenscroft’s focus with her new title as Roger P. Murphy Professor of Accounting is to bring better communication to the College of Business.

She is in the process of starting a communication center in the college.

There are two part-time graduate students working with faculty members in the college to help with communication, although Ravenscroft said she would like to get a permanent fund for a communication center.

Brian Hentz, graduate student in English and one of the graduate students who has worked closely with Ravenscroft for the past two-and-a-half years, said he has “developed a very tight working relationship” with Ravenscroft.

Hentz is the managing editor for a journal that Ravenscroft works on called “Issues in Accounting Education.”

“I really respect the fact that she is a woman of conviction,” he said. “In that light she serves as a really terrific role model for me.”

Ravenscroft has also researched why students cheat after one of her colleagues called her and was shocked that some of his students had been cheating.

By giving a class of students a take-home exam after they had only been taught half of the information needed to solve the problem, they were able to determine whether the students had used the Internet to look up the answer.

“What got interesting was what we call ethical distancing,” Ravenscroft said. “A lot of people do this sort of behavior.”

The study found that many students claimed what they were doing wasn’t wrong, and many students used the excuse that they were just checking their answers.

“They would always distance themselves from the wrong,” she said.

Ravenscroft is also working on a book chapter about ethics for “Advancing Business Ethics Education in the 21st Century.”

Because Ravenscroft’s background is in philosophy, she has a special interest in technological and medical ethics.

The chapter will be about how to teach ethics based on how real people deal with everyday ethical issues.

Ravenscroft and her husband Al Ravenscroft, who is a retired plant pathologist, don’t have any children but they have a dog and a cat. The walls in their house and in Ravenscroft’s office in the Gerdin Business Building are covered with artwork. She is also on the art committee for the Gerdin building.