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Recent changes to the Uniform Certified Public Accountant (CPA) Exam provide an occasion to widely and broadly reflect about the longer run trajectory of the nature of this exam and about professional licensure. Based on a review of recent changes, we develop a set of general purposes served by the exam. We discuss the relative consistency between these purposes and academic values with the goal of evaluating the alignment of exam objectives with academic values. Concluding that accounting education and admission to accounting practice are not perfectly parallel, the chapter reviews the possibilities for academics to adjust our values or to alter our pedagogical practices. Furthermore, for a variety of reasons, the CPA Examination makes fewer appearances in the accounting education literature than it did in the past. We offer recommendations to reduce the points of schism and propose research relevant to the problem.

This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.