Business Ethics & Business Schools

And we wonder why Wall Street’s in trouble…

The Chronicle yesterday (subscription required):

Business students cheat more than students from any other academic discipline, and their professors too often look the other way, a Rutgers University professor told an international gathering of business deans here. Such dishonesty, he said, might help explain how the country got into its current financial mess. [...]

His conclusions are based on 19 years of studying both undergraduate and graduate students, including doing surveys of 170,000 students at 165 colleges and universities and 18,500 faculty members at 115 institutions. He has also visited nearly 100 campuses, speaking about academic integrity to students, faculty members, and administrators.

Or maybe the business students are just more honest about their cheating:

[Donald L. McCabe, who teaches organization management at Rutgers Business School and authored the report,] conceded his methodology has its limitations because most of his studies rely on students’ self-reporting. “I’m asking students to be honest about their dishonesty,” he said. In his surveys, he asks about specific behaviors, like copying work off the Internet, sneaking a peak at a classmate’s answers during an exam, and helping someone else cheat.