Integrating Ethics Across the Curriculum: A Pilot Study to Assess Students’ Ethical Reasoning

• Published date: 01 June 2012
• Author: Nancy Reeves Mansfield,Susan L. Willey,Margaret B. Sherman
• Date: 01 June 2012
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-1722.2012.01107.x

Journal of Legal Studies Education

Volume 29, Issue 2, 263–296, Summer/Fall 2012

Integrating Ethics Across the

Curriculum: A Pilot Study to Assess

Students’ Ethical Reasoning

Susan L. Willey*, Nancy Reeves Mansfield,**

and Margaret B. Sherman***

Introduction

At Georgia State University (GSU), undergraduate and graduate business stu-

dents are introduced to ethical theory and decision making in the required

legal environment of business course, but ethics instruction in the functional

areas is sporadic and uncoordinated. After a broad overview of the history

of ethics in the business curriculum in Part I, this article examines initial

attempts at GSU to measure undergraduate and MBA student ability to as-

sess legal and ethical issues. Part II describes results from the Management

Education Exit Assessment test administered by Educational Benchmarking

and the Major Field Test administered by Educational Testing Service. Based

on preliminary assessment data, faculty in the Robinson College of Business

developed and approved a Model for Ethical Decision-Making to be used

in all business courses. After teaching the model in the introductory legal

environment of business course, faculty assessed undergraduate student re-

sponses to a common ethical dilemma to determine their awareness of the

ethical issues raised by the scenario. We report this data in Part III of the

article. The conclusion discusses plans to implement that model across the

business curriculum to ensure consistent and continual exposure to ethical

decision making in the functional disciplines.

∗Associate Professor of Legal Studies, Georgia State University.

**Professor of Legal Studies, Georgia State University.

***Associate Professor of Legal Studies, Georgia State University.

C2012 The Authors

Journal of Legal Studies Education C2012 Academy of Legal Studies in Business

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264 Vol. 29 / The Journal of Legal Studies Education

I. Ethics in the Business Curriculum

A. Historical Development of Business Ethics Instr uction

Ethics education in early American colleges consisted of a course taught by

the college president and required for most senior-level students.1Profes-

sional schools, on the other hand, did not show “much interest in providing

lectures on moral conduct or surveys of ethical theory. Many of them have

simply ignored moral education altogether.”2In fact, “by the middle of the

twentieth century, instruction in ethics had become confined almost exclu-

sively to the department of philosophy and religion.”3

Wharton opened the first undergraduate business school in the world

in 1881, and for the next several decades, U.S. business schools examined

the “relationship between ethics and commerce.”4It was not until the 1970s,

however, that the phrase “business ethics” came into common use as scholars

began to study business and ethical theory, leading to the first academic

conference on ethics and business in 1974 at the University of Kansas.5The

Society for Business Ethics was formed in 1980. The Journal of Business Ethics

commenced publication in 1982 and Business Ethics Quarterly in 1991.6

As business ethics began to emerge as a discipline, business schools also

began to teach courses on ethical issues,7prompted by the Association to

1Ronald R. Sims & Serbrenia J. Sims, Increasing Applied Business Ethics Courses in Business School

Curricula,10J. Bus. Ethics 211, 213 (1991); see also Derek C. Bok, Can Ethics Be Taught?,8

Change 26, 27 (1976) (noting college presidents’ teaching of ethics and their methods).

2Bok, supra note 1, at 27.

3Sims & Sims, supra note 1, at 213.

4Alexei Marcoux, Business Ethics,Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Apr. 16, 2008),

http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/ethics-business/ (noting that this emer-

gence was mainly in Catholic colleges and universities).

5R. Edward Freeman et al., TeachingBusiness Ethics in the Age of Madof f,41Change 37, 37 (2009);

see also Richard T. De George, A History of Business Ethics, http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/

focusareas/business/conference/presentations/business-ethics-history.html (last visited Mar.

21, 2012) (discussing the emergence of “social responsibility” of business courses in the 1960s,

followed by business ethics as an academic field in the 1970s that “sought to provide an explicit

ethical framework within which to evaluate business, and especially corporate activities”); Lisa

Newton & Walter G. Ryba, Jr., Integrating Ethics into Business Education,3J. Legal Stud. Educ. 1,

1–14 (1985) (discussing the implementation of ethics into a business curriculum).

6De George, supra note 5.

7Id.

2012 / Integrating Ethics Across the Curriculum 265

Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) requirement that ethics be

included in the business curriculum.8By the mid-1980s, DeGeorge reports

that schools offered more than five hundred courses in business ethics to forty

thousand students.9Despite this initial push for ethics courses, American

business schools did not universally embrace the teaching of business ethics.

A 1988 survey of MBA schools found that “only one-third had a required

ethics class,”10 and critics of business ethics instruction continued to maintain

that “ethics was not teachable or should have been learned elsewhere and

earlier.”11

Corporate scandals since 1980 provided a major impetus to incorporate

greater ethics instruction in business schools.12 In 1987, for example, John

Shad, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1981 to

1987, donated more than $30 million to the Harvard Business School to start

a business ethics program.13 The scandals at Enron, World-Com, and Arthur

Anderson in 1999 to 2001 “made it impossible for business schools to ignore

the absence of ethics in their curricula any longer.”14 In the aftermath of

these scandals, the AACSB issued a report based on the premise that the

nation’s business schools needed to “renew and revitalize their commitment

8AACSB comments regarding Business Accreditation Standard 15: Management of Curricula,

state: “The AACSB Business Accreditation Standards affirm the importance of ethics education

for business graduates and emphasize its position among curricular requirements. Ethics educa-

tion is called for in the general knowledge and skills portion of the standards for undergraduates

and in the management-specific portion of the standards for undergraduate and master’s stu-

dents.” AACSB Int’l, Standards for Business Accreditation Standards,Standard 15: Management

of Curricula, http://www.aacsb.edu/resources/ethics-sustainability/relatedstandards.asp (last

visited Mar. 21, 2012).

9DeGeorge, supra note 5.

10Amitai Etzioni, When It Comes to Ethics, B-Schools Get an F,Wash. Post, Aug. 4, 2002, at B4. But

see Sims & Sims, supra note 1, at 213 (showing conflicting evidence of the 1988 survey revealing

that ethics curriculum was up sixteen percent from 1978).

11Damian Grace, For Business Ethics,31Austl. J. Mgmt. 371, 371 (2006).

12Marcoux, supra note 4.

13Id. As head of the SEC, Shad responded to the Wall Street insider trading scandals involving

Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, and Dennis Levine.

14Beth Castiglia & Enrique Nunez, A Moral Imperative—Overcoming Barriers to Establishing an MBA

Infused with Ethics,13J. Legal, Ethical & Reg. Issues 33, 34-35 (2010).