An alarming number of learners in Accounting at a large distance teaching university fail an introductory course in computer literacy. The lecturers proposed over a period of three years various methods of studying and preparing for the examination in the subject, but with limited success. The problem seems to start at school level even as early on as primary school education. Distance-teaching institutions are furthermore faced with the absence of a classroom environment, a facility which many learners, fresh from school, still have a need for. However, having marked a few thousand scripts twice a year over the past three years, the lecturers identified a number of subproblems all part of the larger problem of learners having to use English as their second or third language to master a content subject. Other problems include an inability to determine the relevance of a formulated answer to a question.