Shaping Ethical Minds: Ethics Education and Student Perceptions of Academic and Business Misconduct

This study examines student perceptions of academic and business misconduct to explore whether perceptions of academic dishonesty are associated with perceptions of workplace dishonesty and how these perceptions differ across cohorts surveyed at two stages of a campus-wide ethics initiative. Using a repeated cross-sectional design, students evaluated paired academic and business misconduct scenarios at two time points 7 years apart. Results indicate a strong positive association between perceptions of academic and perceptions of business dishonesty. Students surveyed during later stages of the ethics initiative viewed misconduct as more unethical than earlier cohorts, with larger differences observed for academic behaviors. The findings suggest that academic integrity is closely linked to broader ethical awareness and may provide a foundation for understanding misconduct in organizational settings. Implications are discussed for the design of ethics education in management curricula, emphasizing the value of embedding ethics across courses and supporting faculty and student engagement to promote ethical awareness relevant to organizational life.