Captains of Industry, Masters of Cheating (B SCHOOL)--Wa Po

[Demeter]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/26/AR2006092601742.html?referrer=email


By Richard Morin
Wednesday, September 27, 2006; A02



This may explain a lot: Not only do cheaters apparently prosper, they get graduate degrees in business. That's what business professor Donald L. McCabe of Rutgers University and his colleagues found when they surveyed more than 5,000 graduate students and asked if they had cheated in the past year -- and if so, how often.

A majority of MBA candidates -- 56 percent -- acknowledged that they had cheated at least once, compared with 47 percent of graduate students in other disciplines, the researchers reported in the latest issue of Academy of Management Learning & Education....McCabe and colleagues Kenneth D. Butterfield of Washington State University and Linda Klebe Trevino of Penn State University collected data from 5,331 business and non-business graduate students at 32 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada during the 2002-03 and 2003-04 academic years.

The researchers asked participants how often, if at all, they had engaged in 13 specific behaviors, including cheating on tests and exams, plagiarism, faking a bibliography or submitting work done by someone else...They found that about a third of business graduate students acknowledged committing three or more violations in the previous year. Ten percent said they committed two, and 13 percent said they committed one. Among non-business students, one in four said they cheated at least three times -- numbers that McCabe acknowledged probably understate the prevalence of cheating in both groups.

McCabe has studied cheating among undergraduates for more than 16 years. "On every study except one, business students come out on top," he said. "Their attitude seems to be 'Hey, you have to -- everybody else does it.' And business students already have developed a bottom-line mentality -- anything to get the job done, however you have to do it."



Richard Morin is a senior editor at the Pew Research Center. Versions of this column appear athttp://www.washingtonpost.comandhttp://www.pewresearch.org.

[pooja]

1. Pretty sick...

and then they are pissed if an employee cheats them 10 extra mins on a break...

[Double T]

2. Cheating MBAs................

No one should ever wonder why corporate america acts like a bunch of criminals without a conscience. And I even wonder if the business departments at universities don't intentionally support and breed this type of behavior; this behavior is ingrained in american business culture.

[indepat]

3. Winning isn't the best thing: it's the only thing