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To justify fully the inclusion of a business ethics course in the business school curriculum, it is necessary that the course achieve four goals. Yet two of these goals are not even addressed in the business ethics texts used today in business ethics courses. The other two goals are addressed in business ethics texts, and research indicates these goals are achievable. The best way to realize these attainable goals is to incorporate the teaching of ethics into regular business courses.

This paper aims to examine how the Master of Business Administration (MBA) curricula of top-ranked business schools are offering stand-alone courses on ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR). To provide additional evidence, this study tests some hypotheses to contrast the effect of different variables on the inclusion of stand-alone courses on ethics and CSR. Also, the paper provides a comparative analysis in two ways: one comparison aims to analyse how the presence of ethics and CSR stand-alone courses in the MBA programmes over the past 10 years has evolved, and the other comparison seeks to explore whether there are differences between different rankings with regard to the inclusion of ethics and CSR stand-alone courses in the MBA curricula.

A Web content analysis was conducted on the curricula of 92 of the top 100 global MBA programmes ranked by the Financial Times in their 2013 ratings.

The findings show that there is a trend towards the inclusion of stand-alone courses on CSR and ethics as electives. Empirically, the findings suggest that the presence of ethics and CSR elective stand-alone subjects in the MBA programmes is explained by the following variables: public/private, business school’s accreditation and cultural influence. Comparatively, the findings suggest that requiring CSR and business ethics stand-alone courses in the MBA programmes ranked by the Financial Times have not increased over the past 10 years. In addition, when we have compared the results of this study with other rankings, we have appreciated that there are important differences between top MBA programmes in accordance with the aims and scope of rankings.

The findings of this study seem to suggest that business schools included in the Financial Times ranking have not changed their view based on a shareholder approach, which is focused on providing an economics-centred training.

Shares reflections and experiences on teaching a business ethics course to students of business over the past three years in the hope that wider debate about this aspect of management learning will establish its place in the business education curriculum. Considers the problems of teaching ethics in an occupation where there is no commonly accepted code of ethics. Discusses design, aims and objectives of a business ethics course and describes and reflects on aspects of the process and content of the course with a view to improving its practice in the future.

Undergraduate accounting program at Umm Al-Qura University in Saudi Arabia is a unique case. The program includes 147 credit hours of which 28 credit hours are religious courses. This study aims to examine the effect of teaching these religious courses on students’ ethical perceptions and decisions.

A survey was conducted for a sample of accounting students at Umm Al-Qura University. The sample was divided into two groups; the first group includes students who did not study religious courses, while the second group includes students who study religious courses. The questionnaire contained three groups of questions that aimed to explore students’ perceptions of ethics in general, students’ perceptions of business ethics and explored their ethical attitudes regarding some accounting decisions that involve ethical dilemmas. Independent two-sample t-test and multiple regression analysis were used to determine whether the responses of the two groups were significantly different.

The findings of the study revealed that teaching religious courses led to an improvement in students’ perception of business ethics and an improvement in students’ ethical decision-making. However, the results of the independent sample t-test showed that this improvement was not significant. The results of the study also revealed that male students tend to make less ethical decisions than female students.

The findings offer an indication for those responsible for managing the accounting program at Umm Al-Qura University to start developing the program so that some of the general religious courses are replaced with specialized courses in accounting ethics that focus directly on ethical dilemmas faced by the accountant when practicing the accounting profession.

This study contributes to the current literature related to examining the effect of teaching ethics courses on the ethical perception of accounting students by focusing on accounting students in Saudi Arabia as a context that has not been examined before.

While the problem of unethical leadership is undoubtedly a global one, the urgency of generating ethical leadership to advance the development of Africa has never been more evident than it is today. The challenge for higher education in developing ethical leaders is of core importance, as it is responsible for providing the main recruiting ground of business leaders. The current paper reports findings of a qualitative study of postgraduate students’ ethical development at the end of courses in business ethics aimed to enhance moral reasoning and ethical decision-making. The paper aims to ascertain whether stand-alone ethics courses are more effective than integrated ones in achieving academic ethical competency.

The study adopts an idiographic approach which aims at eliciting individual student subjective perceptions of the effects of the direct and indirect courses of ethical instruction on their moral reasoning and ethical practice. The research design broadly follows Mill’s (2017) method of difference.

Findings indicate perceived differences in the relative effectiveness of stand-alone and embedded ethics courses among students but also show that most students hold positive overall evaluations of the effectiveness of the both types of ethics instruction.

Limitations to the study include that it is cross-sectional, involves a small sample of postgraduate students and is restricted to two management courses at one institution of higher learning. Furthermore, while Mill (2017) provides a useful research design in this context, it is not able to indicate causality, as there are other possible unidentified “third variables” that may be the actual cause of student differences between embedded and stand-alone ethics courses. The study is not able to show the durability and transfer of ethical competencies into students’ later working lives.

The study provides a useful practical educational contribution to the extant knowledge in the field in that it suggests that ethical courses aimed at giving students a moral reasoning “toolkit” for ethical decision-making are more effective when delivered in the stand-alone format, whereas practical decision-making skills are best honed by embedded business ethics courses.

The problem of corruption in business and politics in South Africa is widely documented and has been regarded as responsible for creating a serious developmental drag on the alleviation of poverty and quality of lives of the majority of people in the country. The moral/ethical competency and behavior of future business leaders is partly the responsibility of institutions of higher learning. The study aims to find the most effective means of imparting moral awareness in postgraduate students who are likely to take up business leadership positions in their future careers.

The study provides useful contribution to the extant knowledge in the field in the African context in that it suggests that ethical courses aimed at giving students a moral reasoning “toolkit” for ethical decision-making are more effective when delivered in the stand-alone format, whereas practical decision-making skills are best honed by embedded business ethics courses.

The purpose of this paper is to identify whether ethics is incorporated into the curriculum in postgraduate banking and finance programmes. There is growing concern that moral failure preceded the global financial crisis with waves of ethical scandals overwhelming the global banking industry highlighting a lack of integrity. Consequently, banking and financial institutions have received much criticism for focusing on higher financial returns that bring personal rewards with significant costs to the majority of society.

The population for this study is Australian universities offering banking and finance postgraduate programs. The data for this study were collected from information available on university websites. The study uses content analysis to examine course content in 897 courses offered within banking and finance programmes.

Findings reveal that 809 (90 per cent) out of 897 courses do not incorporate ethics into banking and finance programmes. Most of the 88 courses incorporating ethics as include the course as “core”, with a relatively small number offering ethics as an “elective”. Only a few courses were offered as stand-alone ethics courses. It appears from the information available that little focus is given to assessment of ethics.

This is the first study to explore whether ethics is featured in postgraduate banking and finance programmes.

As data-driven tools increasingly shape our life and tech ethics crises become strikingly frequent, data ethics coursework is urgently needed. The purpose of this study is to map the field of data ethics curricula, tracking relations between courses, instructors, texts and writers, and present a proof-of-concept interactive website for exploring these relations. This method is designed to be used in curricular research and development and provides multiple vantage points on this multidisciplinary field.

The authors use data science methods to foster insights about the field of data ethics education and literature. The authors present a semantic, linked open data graph in the Resource Description Framework, along with proof-of-concept analyses and an exploratory website. Its framework is open-source and language-agnostic, providing the seed for future contributions of code, syllabi and resources from the global data ethics community.

This method provides a convenient means of exploring an overview of the field of data ethics’ social and textual relations. For educators designing or refining a course, the authors provide a method for curricular introspection and discovery of transdisciplinary curricula.

The syllabi the authors have collected are self-selected and represent only a subset of the field. Furthermore, this method exclusively represents a course’s assigned literature rather than a holistic view of what courses teach. The authors present a prototype rather than a finished product.

This curricular survey provides a new way of modeling a field of study, using existing ontologies to organize graph data into a comprehensible overview. This framework may be repurposed to map the institutional knowledge structures of other disciplines, as well.

The paper aims to evaluate the effectiveness of ethics courses provided to Malaysian accounting students and their impact on ethical judgement‐making ability.

Third‐year accounting students from six Malaysian universities participated in a pre‐ and post‐ethics course study. The sample consisted of four universities which provide an ethics course (experiment group) and two universities which do not provide an ethics course (control group). Rest's Defining Issues Test instrument was employed and the p‐score was calculated. Univariate tests were used to compare levels of ethical judgement‐making ability.

Students who attended an ethics course improved significantly in their ethical judgement‐making ability compared to students who did not attend the course. Male students, non‐Muslim students and students in private universities benefit more from attending an ethics course compared to their female and Muslim students and those students in public universities.

The findings indicate that providing ethics courses reshapes the ethical thinking of future accountants and thus are likely to improve the local ethical climate amongst professionals in the field. Results indicate significant improvements in cognitive moral development, although many students continue to apply conventional (Stage 4) reasoning skills when dealing with issues. The research provides a positive signal to the accounting faculties indicating that their effort in inculcating ethical values is worthwhile and this endeavour has to continue.

This study involves a controlled field study of a unique group of Malaysian accounting students and applies Kohlberg's theory of moral development to demonstrate the effect of an ethics intervention. Particular attention was given to examining conventional (Stage 4) judgment‐making processes and how this appears to be influenced by religious affiliation and university type. This adds value to the ethics literature as there are only a few studies examining the merits of Stage 4 reasoning. Most importantly, it helps to fill a gap in the literature by providing both cross‐sectional and longitudinal data from multiple samples of ethics classes, using both experiment and control groups.

The Corruption Perception Index (CPI) for 2016 shows Pakistan as among the more corrupt nations in the world with a ranking of 117 among 176 countries surveyed. This situation raises concerns about members of the society and especially about the business communities. This paper aims to examine whether the tendency to corruption is also prevalent amongst business students, the future leaders and executives of business organizations.

The study uses survey questionnaires in the manner of Parsa and Lankford (1999) to examine the ethical levels of business students. It uses Levene’s (1960) tests for equality of variances and the t-test for equality of means to examine whether there are difference in the ethical perceptions between: bachelors (BBA) and graduate (MBA) students; business students who have taken the ethics course and those who have not; and female and male students. The authors also examine the overall ethical perceptions of business students.

The results show that students seem to make a clear distinction in respect of what they consider as acceptable and unacceptable ethical behavior. They would not indulge in behavior that directly falls within the category of stealing, misusing of company’s resources and undertaking actions that are wrong or dishonest, which may stem from their religious indoctrination. However, they would consider as acceptable behavior the overlooking of safety violations, not telling on peers; and fudging of the truth to get the job done. The latter attitude appears to be in line with business objectives of achieving targets irrespective of the means employed and that inform business education. We do not find any differences between the behavior of women and men which may be the outcome of the same religious indoctrination and educational perceptions. While there is a difference in the ethical perceptions between students who have taken the ethics course and those who have not, the course is not able to counter the lack of ethics among business students. There is a need for some stronger measures to inculcate a set of ethical values within students. However, we did find that some of the unethical behavior is diluted at the MBA level in comparison to BBA students.

This study provides new insights into the ethical perceptions of students in an Islamic emerging country. There is a conflict between ethics conveyed through Islamic precepts, and the ethics of business education with a focus on profits/revenues, costs, performance and competition that endorses a Machiavellian attitude of achieving goals at any cost and the love of money (Tang and Chen, 2008). It is the first study to suggest a differentiation in the ethical behavior of business students that exhibit both ethical and unethical behavior. There appears to be a clear segregation between what students deem as acceptable and unacceptable ethical behavior that may result from their personal/religious beliefs, and their business attitudes that strongly informs their ethical behavior. It provides a basis for developing more customized and effective ethics courses in Pakistan and suggests more importantly that ethics needs to be integrated into business concepts imparted in business programs at universities.

This study aims to investigate attitudes toward cheating among business students at a private university in Kenya and examine if a significant difference exists in cheating perceptions among students who have completed one or two ethics courses, and those who have done none.

A total of 554 undergraduate business students participated in this research. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and the one-way ANOVA.

The results found that students perceived cheating in exam-related situations as quite serious, while cheating on written assignments was not considered a serious offence. Results of the one-way ANOVA indicate that there was a significant difference in the cheating perceptions ratings for the three groups. Post hoc comparisons using the Tukey HSD test indicate that the mean score for students who have done two ethics courses was significantly different from that of students who have done only one ethics course.

This study has a number of implications for educators and administrators. Ethics instruction cannot achieve its desired effect on student behavior without institutional support. Administrators also need to be cognizant of the influence that school environment has on student cheating. Faculty and university administrators can influence students’ behavior in the way they practice academic integrity in their teaching and administrative functions.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this research is the first study to explore academic cheating at a private Kenyan university where ethics instruction is taught to undergraduate students.