| The accounting profession faces a current crisis of ethics, which has resulted in a loss of public and institutional trust. There is a clear need to address the lack of professional judgment in the accounting profession. Previous literature indicates that socialization into the accounting profession begins in college. Thus, the purpose of this study was to establish whether there is an ideal ethical orientation and academic discipline that would result in a graduating accounting student with a superior propensity to use professional judgment. The research questions were focused on relationships between ethical orientation, professional judgment, and academic discipline. A quantitative study was conducted, with a group of lower level accounting students ranking 8 ethical vignettes on a multidimensional ethics scale indicating whether they believed the actions contained in these vignettes to be ethical and whether or not they would perform such an action. A series of chi square and MANOVA tests were conducted to analyze the collected data. A statistically significant relationship was found to exist between ethical orientation and use of professional judgment. Furthermore, the study showed that a majority of the accounting students exhibited a teleological ethical orientation, prompting this researcher to recommend increasing the ethics content in accounting curricula. The role of trust in this study implies great potential for positive social change. Increasing the use of professional judgment in accounting students could decrease the level of unethical activity in the profession and potentially restore both public and institutional trust. |
