ETHICS INTERVENTION ASSESSMENT IN MBA CORE AND UNDERGRADUATE CAPSTONE MARKETING COURSES

Abstract

The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business Schools (AACSB) requires the attainment of ethics education accreditation standards by its member institutions (AACSB International, 2018). The AACSB does not specify any courses or program template for assessing and meeting these requirements. While ample research has been conducted on the higher educational impact on the students’ ethical development, the issue that this study addressed was to examine the moral education effects of a minimally studied segment. To deal with this problem, the purpose of this study was to examine whether classes of first year MBA/MS students and undergraduate seniors in core and capstone marketing courses, respectively, measurably exhibited positive changes in moral judgment from having participated in an individual marketing ethics simulation game as compared to classes not assigned any ethics instruction. This research used a quantitative, quasi-experimental, nonequivalent control group design with marketing students at a large, private, urban university in the U.S. Northeast as subjects. The Defining Issues Test-2 (DIT-2), measuring a subject’s moral judgment, was used for the pre-test and the post-test. Analysis of the change in the DIT-2 scores showed a significant improvement in the treatment groups as compared to the control groups. The potential implications from this study included suggesting approaches by which business schools can start to develop embedded ethics modules that may prepare students to become more ethical business professionals. Keywords: Moral judgment, schema, ethics, dilemmas, assessment, accreditation, DIT-2, stakeholders, Kohlberg, moral cognitive development theory, AACSB, business scandals, business education, marketing, simulation games, experiential learning, mixed ANOVA