Corporate scandals have led to renewed calls for ethics education for the accounting profession. One of the oldest university and trainer of accounting students in Zimbabwe for more than three decades introduced a two semester course on ethics for accounting students beginning 2012/13 academic year. Prior to this development a survey was carried out in 2011 to find the preparedness of the accounting faculty to embrace accounting ethics education. Faculty perceived ethics as extremely important in personal, business and accounting education. Respondents considered the development of abilities needed to deal with ethical dilemmas as the most important. Offering ethics as a discrete course was the popular option. Most faculty expressed an interest in teaching ethics topics
Academic dishonesty is a perennial problem the world over. Financial scandals that have rocked the world of business have refocused attention on the education of business students in general and accounting students in particular. Both accounting students and accountants have been found to have a low moral campus by some studies. The study examined the perceptions and behaviours on cheating of 61 accounting freshmen prior to any university instruction. Accounting freshmen had a remarkable understanding of what constituted cheating, and had indulged in one form of cheating or the other. Cheating behaviour varied with gender, religiosity, age and Advanced level points. The study recommends among other things staggering of courses within the examinations venue and universities coming up with clear policies on academic dishonesty and recycling of examinations.Keywords: Academic dishonesty, cheating, cheating behaviour, accounting freshmen
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.