"Cheating on ethics exam" sounds bad but it amounts to not taking some boring corporate CYA compliance training seriously, it's not actually unethical in my opinion. If anything it speaks to how bad corporate training is generally, not the ethics of the people "cheating".
Probably similar to you, I couldn't read the FT article because it's behind a paywall; however, I'm familiar with the general story. It's not some corporate training. They, plus many other accounting firms, cheated on professional licensing exams. Egregious because the accounting firms are doing the opposite of their sole purpose - add trust to the financial system.
