Extract
A comparison of the ethics of business students: stated behavior versus actual behavior.
BACKGROUND
Today's business community has demonstrated a paucity of business ethics, and raised concern among business educators about the efficacy of ethics instruction as part of a business education. Ever since details emerged about the corporate scandals at Enron, Tyco, MCI WorldCom, and Arthur Andersen, among others, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) has struggled to determine what steps may be taken in higher education to prevent future ethical embarrassments (Verschoor, 2007). A study done by the Center for Academic Integrity found that 74 percent of business majors admitted to cheating. (Vierria, 2007). More recently, at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, nearly 10% of a first-year class was found guilty of cheating on a take-home final exam. This occurred in spite of the school's emphasis on ethical behavior. And as we go to press, the FBI is investigating the roots of the current financial crisis with probes of 26 companies, including Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and AIG Insurance, among others (Arena, 2008). One former FBI investigator has predicted that the scale of the financial fraud likely to be uncovered will dwarf that committed by Enron. While some business faculties are struggling to incorporate an increased ethics component into their curricula, others believe that ethics cannot be taught in the classroom. In an effort to contribute to our understanding of the dynamics of ethical decision-making by business students, this research was devised with several objectives: (1) to examine the ethical choices business students make when faced with an ethical dilemma in a controlled environment, (2) to examine whether business students will make the choices they stated they would make when actually placed in a similar ethical dilemma, and (3) to determine whether age, gender, student status, and grade point average (GPA) are factors that influ...See the full content of this document
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