Posted on 10/28/2006 4:51:20 AM PDT by Flavius
Graduate business students take their cue from corporate scandals
The corporate scandals that have plagued Wall Street in recent history are setting a fine example for young students looking to make their mark in the business world: They are learning to cheat with the best of them.
Students seeking their masters of business administration degree admit cheating more than any other type of student, from law to liberal arts.
"We have found that graduate students in general are cheating at an alarming rate and business-school students are cheating even more than others," concludes a study by the Academy of Management Learning and Education of 5,300 students in the U.S. and Canada.
Many of these students reportedly believe cheating is an accepted practice in business. More than half (56%) of M.B.A. candidates say they cheated in the past year. For the study, cheating was defined as plagiarizing, copying other students' work and bringing prohibited materials into exams.
"To us that means that business-school faculty and administrators must do something, because doing nothing simply reinforces the belief that high levels of cheating are commonplace and acceptable," say the authors of the academy report, Donald McCabe of Rutgers University, Kenneth Butterfield of Washington State University and Linda Klebe Trevino at Penn State University.
However, what's holding many professors back from taking action on cheaters is the fear of litigation. To that end, the academic world is becoming much more like the business world where those who walk with a heavy legal stick can swat others out of the way; it may be time to impose a whistleblower statute for students and teachers.
Yes, it seems to have come to that. With 54% of graduate engineering students, 50% of students in the physical sciences, 49% of medical and other health-care students, 45% of law students, 43% of graduate students in the arts and 39% of graduate students in the social sciences and humanities readily admitting to cheating, something must be done to correct course.
McCabe notes that many more students probably cheat than admit in the study. He and the others recommend a series of efforts based upon notions of ethical community-building be put into practice at the graduate-school level. The essence of an ethical community is that by doing wrong -- cheating in this case -- all of the stakeholders in the community are harmed, not just the wrongdoer. .
urriculum and education go along with the community-building, so there is greater awareness of actions and ramifications as well.
In the real business world efforts are being made to create greater transparency and show shareholders, for instance, that they are a community of stakeholders with a common vested interest. This should be obvious, but to many investors it isn't. Profit is achieved in a vacuum and the awareness of fellow shareholders (and their actions) is relatively nil.
Shareholder resolutions are items around which bands of investors can unite. But even while resolutions are on the rise only a minority of shareholders bother to vote on them.
In other words, shareholders, much like professors these days, largely choose to look the other way when it comes time to curb abuse. That is until after the fact when all those M.B.A.s get caught cheating in the real world.
Honor code
More has to be done to enforce ethical codes well before the bad act occurs. By then it is too late. Teaching graduate students that ethics matters in business should be a matter of course, not a direction to avoid.
Faculty, the authors say, should "engage students in an ongoing dialogue about academic integrity that begins with recruiting, continues in orientation sessions and initiation ceremonies, and continues throughout the program." It may also include initiating an honor code, preferably one that emphasizes the promotion of integrity among students rather than the detection and punishment of dishonesty.
Promote the good not the bad. Yet at the top of those companies most ensnared in ethical scandal sat a chief executive with an M.B.A.
Graduate students in journalism weren't singled out in the study. Interestingly, however, last week Newsweek announced that it is teaming with Kaplan Inc., the education service provider, to offer an online business degree called Kaplan University/Newsweek MBA.
Ethics in journalism meet ethics in business, and Styx be crossed.
Graduate students in journalism weren't singled out in the study. Interestingly, however, last week Newsweek announced that it is teaming with Kaplan Inc., the education service provider, to offer an online business degree called Kaplan University/Newsweek MBA.
Ethics in journalism meet ethics in business, and Styx be crossed.
I have an MBA....According to the article, I guess I am a big cheater!!! lol.
I have an MBA....According to the article, I guess I am a big cheater!!! lol.
Since I have one too, I'll just copy plagerize your post to save time from having to do my own research/thinking.
/h
LOL.
Profs may not want to take the time to "catch" cheaters.
My kid had one prof who required that all papers submitted to him were also submitted online through "turnitin.com."
Wonderful site...useful tool...it detects exactly how much of the paper is web based and reports a percentage. So "buying" a paper online, or cutting and pasting is automatically detected.
I've also noticed there are "tutors" online that will do your homework for you. Submit your higher math or science homework, and they'll do it and send it back in a file, for a fee. What I don't understand is how a person who has someone else do his homework for him, actually passes a test.
The Peter Principle is still in effect, thankfully.
They should do a study on lawyers and politicians.
If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying.
I read an interesting article a few weeks ago about the use of Ritalin on college campuses.
The kids use it to stay awake so they can "cram" and evidently there is a black market of sorts for Ritalin.
The students who don't use it are upset because they say it's actually a form of "cheating"...just as steroids is cheating in professional athletics.
http://www.azcentral.com/families/education/articles/0801back-ritalin-ON.html
Thanks for posting that. I will read it. With all the caffiene, energy drinks, etc. why ritalin?
I used to teach at a Big-10 university. I took a hard line against cheaters; unfortunately, some of my colleagues did not. I have heard professors offer all kinds of excuses for students who cheat: they're young; they're under a lot of pressure; this one has a learning disability; that one is a member of an underrepresented minority group; and so on.
It was not just the faculty. I would refer cheaters to the Dean of Students, recommending that they be expelled. But when enrollments were down, the DoS was under pressure not to expel anyone. Often, nothing much would be done.
As a Broadcasting major back when I was in college, I cannot imagine why anyone would WANT a Master's in journalism.
My kid drinks that Red Bull stuff...yuck, I can't stand the smell.
The article seems to indicate that the Ritalin not only keeps them alert, but "focuses" them which helps on a test.
The whole "focus" thing is because they were raised with the TV as their electronic baby sitter and X-box as their nanny. I doubt that most kids could sit still for more than 10 minutes without the need for audio/video stimulation. It is tragic and why people are adverse to a job that requires them to sit behind a desk.
I state for the record that none of my (MBA program) Managerial Economics students cheated. I know that because all of my tests and quizzes were open book, open notes and homework, and open computer (or calculator). One student even brought a printer to class on the last day, so he could print his final test.
I did graduate work in computer science over the last two years. Only had one experience with cheating... I was doing a group assignment with a good friend who was another American student (as two of the three American females in our program we automatically were best friends), an acquaintance who was from Mongolia and a nice guy, and this other guy who got shoved on our team. He was from the Middle East. Our first assignment.... a no brainer, a three day 'research and present this topic' thing, he gave the two of us American girls his share of the work. Every word in his five pages was verbatim copied from the internet.
We went to the professor, whose response was to take him off our team. There were excuses thrown around like 'in his culture it's not considered cheating' but the facts were that my friends and I could have lost our funding if we hadn't caught his cheating, but because he paid tuition the school policy was to give him another chance.
***What I don't understand is how a person who has someone else do his homework for him, actually passes a test.***
I understand how a student passes a test without doing his homework. It's routine for some professors to NEVER bother to compose new tests each year. Fraternity and sorority houses have file cabinets full of tests and ANSWERS to them.
It should be a requirement for all professors to turn in their new tests to their department heads who should have them filed (and locked) and reviewed each semester. If the prof. IS the dept. head, then the dean's office should review his tests.
I've done that. My professors prefer typed exams, and will let us take them home for 8 to 24 hours at times. It gives you a little more time to think, to compose yourself, and to give the professor a product he doesn't need the entrails of a newt to comprehend. (A lot of people including myself - especially under stress - have horrible handwriting.)
As a fringe benefit, I type faster than I write.
Laptops have really changed the way college classes work now.
I forgot to mention that I required several graphical solutions to problems, so my students needed some ability to use EXCEL to produce the graphs. I required all homework assignments to be Emailed to me as spreadsheets - I refused to accept paper - and I did teach and demonstrate how to build tables of formulae and construct graphs from them.
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