Improving Ethics Education in Accounting: Lessons from Medicine and Law

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to offer accounting educators additional perspectives for ethics education by considering teaching approaches from medicine and law. It takes the form of literature review and argument. The paper finds that ethics education in accounting shows deficiencies in terms of code-bound content, less systematic formal training, less informal hands-on training, and less usage of partnering in comparison to ethics education in medicine and law, thereby producing students with higher moral cognitive capabilities. Based on these findings, the authors provide some recommendations for improvement.

Keywords:  ethics, accounting ethics education, ethics education methods, medical ethics education, legal ethics education, collaboration between the academics and practitioners

Chunhui Liu is an Associate Professor at The University of Winnipeg, Lee J. Yao is a Professor at Loyola University New Orleans, and Nan Hu is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire.

Source : Chunhui Liu, Lee J. Yao, Nan Hu (2012) Improving Ethics Education in Accounting: Lessons from Medicine and Law. Issues in Accounting Education: August 2012, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 671-690.