The perceptions of academics and practitioners on the outcome of ethics education in Malaysia

Abstract

Ethics became of an important interest in the accounting field recently. Indeed, after many global scandals, higher education institutions became more involved concerning the ethical teaching for future accounting graduates and professionals. Therefore, researchers studied the outcome of that ethics teaching in order to assess its effectiveness and try to improve its quality. Most of those studies were conducted in developed countries more than developing countries. Malaysia is among those countries which have limited studies in ethics education particularly in accounting. Therefore studies in this area became imperative, especially after the compulsory integration of ethics course in the accounting curricula by the Ministry of Higher Education of Malaysia in establishing a reassessment report Halatuju 2 in 2006. This study obtained data related to the outcome of ethics teaching in Malaysia through two different angles, academicians and practitioners perspective, and compared between them. 119 questionnaires were collected via a survey that was disseminated to accounting academics in public universities in Malaysia as well as accounting practitioners in companies. Results showed that both academicians and practitioners seemed to share the same view about the significant positive effect of ethics teaching in accounting undergraduate programmes in Malaysia. The findings indicate that, based on the respondents’ perception, ethics education in Malaysia significantly improved the ethical decision making ability of accounting students and both academicians and practitioners shared the same viewpoint.