Ethics education in Romanian economics faculties, members of AFER

This paper aims to provide a high-level overview of whether and how ethics is taught in Romanian accounting and business faculties, members of the Association of Economics Faculties of Romania (AFER), at Bachelor or Masters’ level (accounting, audit or business administration programs).

While there are numerous research papers on how ethics is taught in general and some national surveys in other countries, this is the first analysis of its kind in Romania and it can be helpful for faculties to compare themselves to what their counterparts are doing to teach this important topic for professionals in accounting and business. We analysed the publicly available (detailed and most recent) curricula of 60 programs (22 bachelor and 38 masters) from 14 faculties in 8 Romanian cities. We found out whether ethics is included as a self-standing course or ingrained in the curricula (based on our own hypothesis which we then verified) and whether it is predominantly an optional or a mandatory discipline. We found that, with a few exceptions, the majority of programs analyzed approached ethics (academic or professional) and that the Ethics self-standing courses (or the courses where ethics is included as a secondary subject) have a relatively high importance (judged from the number of credits allocated to them). There are many other variables to analyze in order to make the research more relevant for professors that would want to update their ethics curricula. One would be for instance to analyze whether currently ethics is taught more towards senior years or at the beginning of students’ education.