Ethics in University: Cognitive Moral Development and Gender

Abstract

This study examines the accounting students' level of moral development at the university. In this study, we focused on the effects of ethics subject and gender on moral development. Therefore, we compare the moral development of male and female students. We evaluated 216 students in Cognitive Moral Development (CMD) from 17 universities in Indonesia. We measured CMD with the Defining Issues Test (DIT) model developed by Rest in 1986. The findings show that there is no difference in DIT scores between students who have taken the ethics subject and who have not taken. We also confirm female students have a higher DIT score than male students. Our study results show that gender plays an important role in the ethics issue. Our study strengthens the previous research about the effect of ethics study and ethics courses on CMD. This study has an implication for ethics education in university wherein the curriculum or the system should be prepared carefully. Although the results of this study did not show that ethics subject has a strong impact on students' CMD, we still believe that the ethics course plays a significant role in the accountants' morals. For that reason, we argue that morals need time to be developed, and cannot be taught in a short-term course. Future research is needed to explore more about this issue.