The effect of industrial training on ethical awareness of final year students in a Malaysian public university

Abstract

Studies (for example, Dellaportas in Making a difference with a discrete course on accounting ethics. J Bus Ethics 65(4):391-404, 2006; Saat in An investigation of the effects of a moral education program on the ethical development of Malaysian future accountants, 2010) on final year accounting students show that industrial training has a positive impact on the ethical development in a way that students improved in their ethical judgement after attending a 6-month training. Thus, this research aims to evaluate the influence of industrial training in the development of ethical awareness among final year students from a Malaysian public university. These students were from multiple academic backgrounds-engineering, science and social science. A pre and post study was adopted in order to achieve the objectives. A set of survey was distributed to students before and after they have attended industrial training. In assessing students' ethical awareness, 15 business-related and workplace ethical situations were given and students had to rate their acceptance on these situations from not acceptable (1) to most acceptable (7). From the findings, it can be observed that although the level of ethical awareness among students is fairly good, industrial training has minimal impact in improving or developing students' ethical awareness. The impact is such because students who undergone industrial training may have observed certain behaviour that they thought are acceptable in a workplace; this may have changed the way students perceived their acceptance on the situations.