Codes of Conduct and Ethical Perceptions: A Comparison of Accounting and Military Students

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the ethics education program of a military academy for potential enhancement of accounting ethics programs. The military academy emphasizes the core values of its honor code that are similar to the AICPA’s Code of Professional Conduct. Using a survey describing two ambiguous academic situations, the ethical perceptions of management students at the military academy are compared to those of accounting students at a control university to determine if there are any measurable differences attributable to the academy’s ethics program. This study found that military academy students were significantly more likely than the control group to perceive academic behavior as unethical when it directly violated their core values, but were not more likely to perceive academic behavior as unethical when it did not violate their core values. These results indicate that the ethics education program at the military academy may have been useful in aligning students’ ethical perceptions with their code of conduct. This implies that ethics education in accounting curriculums may want to emulate aspects of the academy’s ethics program, most notably emphasizing the accounting profession’s code of conduct to accounting students.