Grove City College alumna Kathryn Claudy ’15 received one of the prestigious Elijah Watts Sells Awards given to the highest scoring candidates in the nation on the CPA Exam in 2015, according to the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA).

She was one of the top 75 scorers out of the more than 93,000 people who took the exam. Sells Award winners passed all four parts on their first attempt, scoring 95.5 or above on each part. Michael Decker, vice president of the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA), which presents the Sells Award, called her performance “truly extraordinary.”

Claudy is employed as an associate in Grossman Yanak & Ford LLP’s Assurance and Advisory Services Group in Pittsburgh, Pa. She was recently recognized as one of the top scorers on Pennsylvania’s uniform CPA exam in 2015, according to NASBA. She was one of the top 15 scorers out of more than 750 candidates who successfully passed the state exam.
The Elijah Watt Sells Award program, named for one of the first CPAs in the U.S. was established by the AICPA in 1923 to recognize outstanding performance on the CPA Examination. Sells, one of the first CPAs in the U.S., was active in the establishment
Grove City College Department of Accounting graduates outpace their peers on the national CPA exam.

The College’s accounting graduates ranked 17th in the nation on the 2015 CPA examination among medium-sized programs, according to the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy, which oversees the test. It was the third time in four years that the College’s graduates were in the top 25 nationally.

Grove City graduates’ passing rate of 79 percent for first-time exam takers was nearly 25 percent higher than the national passing rate of 55 percent, NASBA statistics indicate.