CHAPTER 17: Core Knowledge Learning Objectives For Accounting Ethics Education Based on Bloom’s Taxonomy

“We have a learning objective for ethics. Do you know of a measure we can use to assess this?”

We have heard this question on numerous occasions from accounting colleagues desperately searching the listserv in vain for an easily administered measure. Why are so many schools struggling with the assessment of ethics education?

We assert that, in accounting, the problem has two interrelated causes. First, effort among accounting educators toward effective integration of ethics across the curriculum has been weak, completely absent, or, in some cases, directed toward its undoing. Seemingly more effort has gone into writing justifications in support of integration than has gone into the act of integration itself. If indeed ethics is not being adequately, effectively, and meaningfully integrated into the accounting curriculum, then measuring student competency will be difficult, if not impossible. The bottom line is that it is hard to find a measure that will produce results reflecting a positive student learning outcome for a topic that many faculty half-heartedly teach, may refuse to teach, or signal both implicitly and explicitly has no place in the curriculum. These educators are content to search for simplistic measures that could be used to signal to the accrediting bodies and other external constituencies that ethics is being covered adequately. This will allow them to return to teaching their technical material with the least amount of disruption.