Abstract:

The European Higher Education Area has provided new challenges for all faculty involved in higher education. One of the major changes undertaken in the reform of university degrees is the need to develop generic competences in the curriculum which has conducted to a great change in the teaching-learning process, mainly in the innovative methodologies to achieve the new market and society demands.

Among the generic competences that arise in the curriculum, the necessity to behave in an ethical way appears in almost all the university degrees. The ethical competence is a very important one in all of them, but maybe, in particular, in the different degrees related to economic and business studies. The strong economic and financial crisis in which we are immersed, has its origins, almost in part, in the lack of ethical behavior of those acting in the market. The lack of ethical behavior has led to a reconsideration of university education. Society expects and demands a new role of universities in developing ethical professionals. It is not enough to train students in the technical aspects but also to give them the required ethical training in order to prepare them to resolve the multiple ethical situations in which they will probably be involved. It is necessary that they act as professionals and fulfill their role to society. In this line, it seems unavoidable to develop, as a priority objective, the ethical competence in future business professionals.

Today, different studies show that universities, especially those dedicated to business education, are increasing the ethical training of the students. The current debate is not centered on the need to integrate ethics, because nearly everyone involved in the education system agree. The main debate which must be taken is how to integrate the ethical competence in the curriculum and how to assess the effectiveness of that integration. This is the great challenge we face at this moment at university level.

In the academic literature there are several studies in different areas. The main objective of this works is to design the methodology and content to integrate ethics in higher education. In some cases, they also try to assess the effectiveness of the integration in improving the ethical reasoning or behavior of students.
The main objective of this paper is to present the different instruments which are being used nowadays in the literature, and in particular, to make a proposal of an effective assessment of the development of the ethical competence in business higher education.

Keywords:

Ethical competence, Higher Education, assessment, business studies.