Determinants of academic cheating behavior: The future for accountancy in Ireland

Abstract

This paper considers the potential for improving the reputation of the Irish accountancy profession by exploring undergraduate accounting students’ intolerance of academic cheating as a predictor of future attitudes to unethical workplace practices. The study reports that females are significantly more intolerant of cheating than males. Further, with regard to ethical ideology, idealism was found to have a significant positive association with intolerance of cheating while relativism reported no association. It is anticipated that the growing admission of women to professional accountancy membership together with educational intervention to increase idealism may improve ethical attitudes and help restore the profession's reputation.

Keywords:

• Irish accountancy profession
• Cheating behavior
• Gender
• Idealism
• Relativism

Notes

1 See for example, Ryan (2011) which discusses the case of Anglo-Irish Bank.

2 As is to be expected with Likert scale variables, each of the 10 items of cheating behavior is non-normally distributed.

3 It should be noted that the variable ‘WBEH_t (before rounding)’ is presented in Table 3 for informational purposes only and is not included in model estimation.

4 The vast majority of students who study accounting at university level go on to become Irish chartered accountants. For example, 84% of entrants to Chartered Accountants Ireland in 2012 held a relevant accounting degree (Irish Auditing and Accounting Supervisory Authority, 2012, p. 22).