Attitudes of accounting students towards ethics, continuous professional development and lifelong learning

Abstract

With a myriad of corporate scandals involving fraud and theft across the world, the auditing profession has been put under the spotlight with the prominence of promoting an ethical attitude within the profession and amongst its members. By way of an empirical study conducted with a group of students at a leading university in South Africa, it was found that the necessity for change and CPD are concepts not collectively agreed upon by all within the profession, even more so when it comes to a group of final-year undergraduate students at this university. This article provides a series of recommendations regarding the improvement of the current teaching and learning model in order to include a CPD approach when it comes to ethics.