Ethics Homepage

Student ethics support tool

CIMA is committed to upholding the highest ethical and professional standards and to maintaining public confidence in management accounting. CIMA members and students are required to comply with the CIMA Code of Ethics and to adopt the fundamental principles of the Code to their working lives.

Part 1: Ethics and accountants

This part focuses on personal and professional ethics and the responsibilities of CIMA students and members, and why ethics are important to the accounting profession.

Part 2: Introduction to the Code of Ethics

This part gives an overview of the Code, 'threats and safeguards', and the ethics aspects of the BA4 paper in CIMA's entry level accounting qualification Certificate in Business Accounting.

Part 3: Ethical issues in exams

This part outlines what is expected from students when answering ethics related questions in Operational, Management, Strategic Level objective tests and integrated case studies, followed by a set of sample questions to work through.

The purpose of the student tool

This tool will give you an overview of the CIMA Code of Ethics, the importance of ethics in the workplace, and how ethical considerations may appear in the CIMA exams.

The material in this tool draws from past exams, practice tests and information in the Code. The tool also refers you to other sources of information on the CIMA website and elsewhere, to deepen your learning and understanding.

Applying ethical considerations to many aspects of the CIMA exams not only shows that you are able to act professionally but also awards marks. The tool will help your further understanding of applying an ethical framework - in relation to your working life as well as in your CIMA studies.

This tool is produced to assist students’ understanding of professional ethics in exams and in their working lives. The Student Ethics Support Tool is not a substitute for CIMA study texts, but a support to your studies, and an introduction to relevant initiatives, organisations  and other sources of information. CIMA study texts remain the key support to your learning for exams.

In case you need to know before you use any of the ethics tools, we don’t access any information that could be used to identify you. As a result, we can’t share it either! Nor do we retain any information about your answers or scores.

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Ethics CPD tool: doing the right thing

Take a look at our Ethics CPD Tool which will challenge you with a variety of different scenarios.

Find out more