DSST Business Ethics and Society — passed with 75, here's my study breakdown
I took the DSST Business Ethics and Society exam last week and passed with a scaled score of 75. It was my fourth DSST overall so I had a sense of how to approach it, but this one felt more conceptual than the others. It's worth 3 semester hours of credit and the exam runs 100 questions in 2 hours, though I finished in about 65 minutes.
The content I studied most was stakeholder theory, corporate social responsibility frameworks, ethical decision-making models, and the major normative theories — utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics. Those four areas probably covered 60 to 65% of what I encountered. I also spent time on the legal dimensions of business ethics, which showed up in maybe 8 to 10 questions — things like whistleblower protections and fiduciary duty.
I used the Peterson's DSST guide as a baseline and supplemented with a business ethics textbook from my local library. The Peterson's guide is decent for identifying what's in scope but the practice questions aren't quite as nuanced as the real exam. I'd give yourself 3 to 4 weeks if you have no ethics background, or 10 to 14 days if you've taken any philosophy or business courses.
One thing I wasn't expecting — there were several questions about global ethics and international business practices. Cultural relativism vs. ethical universalism, bribery in international trade, that kind of thing. I'd seen that listed in the DSST fact sheet but assumed it was minor. It wasn't.
Business Ethics and Society is one of the more conceptual DSSTs compared to something like Principles of Statistics. The questions reward understanding frameworks over memorizing facts, which some people find harder to prep for.
Peterson's guide is fine for scope but the practice question quality varies a lot by subject. For ethics specifically I'd recommend finding a free intro ethics course syllabus and using that as a reading list instead.
65 minutes on a 2-hour exam — I finished mine in about 55 minutes and spent the rest reviewing. The questions aren't wordy so you can move through them quickly if you know the material.
The international business ethics questions got me too. I knew stakeholder theory and CSR cold but the cultural relativism content was something I hadn't really dug into. Passed with a 70 which was enough but barely.