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C andidates with unsavory resumes might want to think twice before applying to The Wharton School or the University of California at Berkeley. In the last few years, each of these institutions has organized a system of background checks to weed out untruthful or otherwise unethical applicants to their business schools. Reportedly, Berkeley's Haas School of Business rejected about five percent of the initial candidates for fall 2003 because these background checks revealed inaccuracies on resumes. Some applicants fudged work dates to conceal lay- offs, for instance, or engaged in other forms of fibbing. It's hard to blame these elite schools for sifting out liars and cheats. In today's environment of corporate scandal, many business and political leaders have pointed to business schools as the logical institutions to instill ethics in today's executives. With the background checks, Haas and Wharton are attempting to em - phasize the importance of ethics to applicants for the next year's class before they're even enrolled. While many schools have been focusing on ethics education, opin- ion is divided on the best way to teach the topic. Should ethics be cov- ered in a stand-alone class or infused into a number of relevant functional courses? Should such courses be required of all students? And even after ethics courses have been added to the curriculum, how can we be sure we are teaching students what we wish them to learn? To answer that final question, Learning about Ethics To find what students were gleaning from their ethics cours- es, we asked them to rank seven possible outcomes of their classroom experience. Students indicated that they were learning the following, in order of importance: 1. Greater awareness of the ethical aspects of a business situation. 2. Ethical concepts that will help me analyze decisions. 3. Ethical principles that can help me make better decisions. 4. Ways to be a more ethical person. 5. Reasons my classmates see things so differently. 6. Reasons my classmates see things so similarly. 7. I'm not sure what I learned in this class. Since a key goal of an ethics edu- Discovering what and how students learn in ethics courses enables professors to design even more effective courses. by Archie B. Carroll one of my colleagues and I, both professors at the University of Georgia, have been conducting student sur- veys for three years. Our focus has been the stand-alone business ethics course taught at the undergraduate level. While MBA ethics courses get more media coverage, undergraduate ethics courses are no less vital and affect larger numbers of business students. With the study, we wanted to answer three questions: What were students learning in business ethics courses? How were they learning? Compared to other classes, how valuable were these classes in preparing students for their careers? With this information, we knew we would be better equipped to deliver an ethics education that would help pre- pare students for their careers in the corporate world. cation is to help students perceive ethical issues that might not be readily apparent, it seemed logical to us that awareness would rank highest. In fact, even awareness sometimes requires moral imagina- tion—the ability to perceive that a web of competing economic rela- tionships is also a web of moral rela- tionships. Potential ethical dilem- mas are not always immediately obvious; often they must be searched out by someone attuned to complex situations. We believe that an ethics education is successful if it can teach students to develop a sen- sitivity to such situations—and a willingness to explore them. The fact that ethical concepts ranked second indicated to us that our students generally appreciated, if not understood, their importance. Concepts are descriptive. In an ethics class, they include ideas such as "integrity strategy," "descriptive versus normative ethics," "stakeholder management," "busi- ness ethics," and "moral development." These concepts can be extraordinarily useful to students in their careers since they often act as frameworks or models that help executives in decision making and analysis. By contrast, principles are more abstract; and students sometimes find it difficult to apply them in practical situa- tions. Ethics textbooks generally explore three key princi- ples—rights, justice, and utilitarianism—and some ethics educators also discuss the Golden Rule. I found it encour- BizEd JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2005 37