Ethical Judgment of Accounting Students

Abstract

Ethics is important for the accounting profession. The accountants prepare annual financial statements and auditors verify and provide an opinion about them. The public, shareholders and investors use financial statements for making decisions. Therefore, the financial information must present a true and fair view of the company. However, The accountants and auditors mat face ethical dilemmas. In ethical dilemmas, ethics can help the accountants and auditors make the right decision. The accounting students will enter the accounting profession in the future. They should be encouraged to maintain high  ethical standards in their accounting profession. Therefore, the objectives of this research were to investigate the moral and ethical judgment of the accounting students. A questionnaire was used to collect the data. The finding shows the samples that comply with ‘Idealism’ are less accepting of low ethical behavior than the sample that comply ‘relativism’. The groups  that  have different moral standards have different ethical judgments. In addition, this research finds that morality relates to ethical judgment. Idealism has a positive significant relationship to ethical judgment. On the other hand, relativism has a negative significant relationship to ethical judgment.