Students of accounting sometimes suggest that teaching more courses in ethics will produce more ethical behavior in accounting. Do you believe this suggestion has merit?

Studies, such as the one by Johnson, McGuire, and Cooper (2016) cited below, show that teaching ethics as part of undergraduate business courses has a limited effect on students' responses to situations that involve ethics. Though ethics courses have become commonplace in business studies, they have been shown to have limited effects.
The effectiveness of an ethics curriculum in fields such as accounting may depend on several factors. First, the leaders of the university must model ethical behavior for students, and, second, the consideration of ethics has to be present not only in the ethics class, but in every class. Students in accounting should not regard ethics as its own field, but rather as a way of thinking and behaving that has implications in every field. If ethics is made just part of one course, students will not learn to apply ethical decision-making to their work and practice in the field of accounting.
Source:
Jonson, Elizabeth Prior; McGuire, Linda; Cooper, Brian (2016). Does Teaching Ethics Do Any Good? Education & Training, v58 n4, 439-454.