Accounting Students Cheat Too

Before the big three ratings agencies, there was the big five accounting firms (which now, of course, have been reduced to four).

While the number of accounting scandals in the post-Sarbanes-Oxley world has dipped, that doesn't mean the prospect for future misdeeds has vanished. So what better place to find out the ethical makeup of future accountants than where they're trained?

And the results aren't very pretty: In a new study, 54 percent of accounting majors said they had cheated in college. (Other business majors reported a cheating rate of 52 percent.)

Unfortunately, other research (pdf, page 61) suggests that cheating in high school and college can lead to misconduct in the professional sphere.

The study, by David E. Morris of North Georgia College and State University and Claire Kilian of the University of Wisconsin, surveyed 569 undergraduate business majors in seven southern universities.

The researchers argue that although cheating habits get cemented at an early age, it's still possible to change behaviors by both increasing the discussion of ethics in college and by better communicating what is expected of students. (For this study, Kilian and Morris found that about 80 percent of cheaters said they had also cheated in high school.)

But as surroundings and incentives change, is it safe to assume that the level of cheating drops off significantly (but not enought to stop the Enrons and WorldComs of the world)? In college the only person's dollars you're wasting when you cheat is your own (and part of the professor's salary). But outside academia, cheating usually means a much larger group of people is not getting the money they deserve, and that's always harder to get away with.