Abstract
In the private and public sectors, the Auditor-General and accounting professional bodies have been hard hit and publicly criticised for their ethical failures. The accounting profession is seen to be acting contrary to their mandate as a guardian of the economy. Effective ethics education is imperative, and the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA), has tasked this responsibility to Higher Education Institutions (HEI)s. HEIs are actively working on best practices for ethics education, as part of accounting education. Thus, the objective of this study is to investigate the attitudes of accounting students in understanding the impact of experiential learning within ethics education.
To achieve this research objective, the research followed an empirical study and a quantitative method that consisted of a survey distributed to accounting students at a SAICA accredited institution. This survey was administered before and after an experiential learning activity (ELA). The literature highlighted that ethics is as important as it is complex. For ethical decision-making to prevail, accountants require an awareness of risk that self-interest might stand at odds with the interest of other stakeholders. The melting pot of unethical behaviour within the accounting network is further exacerbated by the mismatch of the speed of technological advancement and the lagging regulation, as well as the personal and corporate performance pressures that the impact COVID-19 had on the economy. HEIs are actively working on best practices for ethics education as part of accounting education. Experiential learning offers great learning opportunities within ethics education. This study aims to gain insight into accounting students’ attitudes towards experiential learning.
The findings indicate that participants rate their engagement in conversation on ethics as moderately high, and their interest in ethics, as high. Furthermore, when it comes to ethics education, participants had a lower level of comfort, enjoyment, and opinion on whether ethics can be taught, after an ELA. Contributors to this lower rating could be their challenges with groupwork and anxiety about presentations to external panels. This however did not impact their perception of the importance of ethics education. After the ELA, participants
4
rated that their knowledge of ethics improved to a large to extent, regardless of a preferred learning style.
Resulting from the analysis, it was found that accounting students have a positive attitude towards experiential learning within ethics education. The positive attitude is due to the great sense of importance and relevance of ethics, and the strong perception of value and knowledge gained from the ELA.
Keywords: Ethics, Business Ethics, Ethics in Accounting, Ethics Education, Experiential Learning, Attitudes on learning