Abstract This paper reports the results of an empirical study of the following question: Are senior accounting students who have been exposed to the AICPA's Code of Professional Ethics in their classroom studies more or less likely to view business practices in ethical terms than senior business students in other majors? Questionnaire responses to a case study are compared for 68 accounting students and 132 nonaccounting business students. Results indicate that there are differences between accounting students and some other business students in the way ethical issues are perceived, with accounting students tending toward a more ethical viewpoint, The differences, however, appear to be found in perceptions only, not in actions. If applicable across all business schools, these findings may have implications for the teaching of ethics in accounting programs.
Fulmer et al. (Tue,) studied this question.