Business grad students most likely to cheat

[n2doc]

Business grad students most likely to cheat: study
Wed Sep 20, 2006 2:12pm ET


BOSTON (Reuters) - Graduate business students in the United States and Canada are more likely to cheat on their work than their counterparts in other academic fields, the author of a research paper said on Wednesday. The study of 5,300 graduate students in the United States and Canada found that 56 percent of graduate business students admitted to cheating in the past year, with many saying they cheated because they believed it was an accepted practice in business.

Following business students, 54 percent of graduate engineering students admitted to cheating, as did 50 percent of physical science students, 49 percent of medical and health-care students, 45 percent of law students, 43 percent of liberal arts students and 39 percent of social science and humanities students. "Students have reached the point where they're making their own rules," said lead author Donald McCabe, professor of management and global business at New Jersey's Rutgers University. "They'll challenge rules that professors have made, because they think they're stupid, basically, or inappropriate."


McCabe said it's likely that more students cheat than admit to it.

The study, published in the September issue of the Academy of Management Learning and Education, defined cheating as including copying the work of other students, plagiarizing and bringing prohibited notes into exams. McCabe said that in their survey comments, business school students described cheating as a necessary measure and the sort of practice they'd likely need to succeed in the professional world.

"The typical comment is that what's important is getting the job done. How you get it done is less important," McCabe said. "You'll have business students saying all I'm doing is emulating the behavior I'll need when I get out in the real world."

http://today.reuters.com/news/ArticleNews.aspx?type=domesticnews&storyID=2006-09-20T191504Z_01_N20379527_RTRUKOC_0_US-LIFE-CHEATING.xml

[htuttle]

1. Does the 'philosophy' (using the term loosely) of the Chicago School...

...state that cheating is okay, and even required, if you can get away with it (or if the penalty is outweighed by the gain)?

Not surprised by this at all.

[swag]

2. Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal!

"All I'm doing is emulating the behavior I'll need when I get out in the real world."

Assholes.

[no_hypocrisy]

3. 45% of law students

When I was in law school, I was a base C student. However, that's relative due to the facts that I wasn't in a study group, and a segment of my class did cheat on exams. Two compatriots tried to cheat during the NY Bar Exam in the summer of 1992. They looked for cameras and microphones in the bathroom and proceeded to continue their collaboration of cheating. At the end of the second day of testing, two burly guys escorted my classmates to a windowless room where they were shown a videotape of them putting their brainless heads together. The gentlemen in suits told them that they just pissed away seven years of college and would not practice law -- ever -- even in the Aleutian Islands.

Every now and then, there is justice . . .

[DireStrike]

4. No surprise - and cheating in general is because school is BS

Do these things that nobody cares about, to get a degree, which entitles you to work in a field where you can actually make enough money to survive. Not like the degree actually means anything, or will be relevant to your work in most cases.

Oh, and see if you can rack up some debt while you're at it. And incriminate yourself with "youthful indiscretions" if possible, so you can be dismissed from the pool of potential political dissenters who may be given any credibility.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

10. You come very close to stating one of the prevalent American

attitudes that makes me crazy: namely, that the sole purpose of education is to get a job and that anything that is not relevant to job training is not worth learning.

This is the attitude that is behind the ruination of our public school system, the attitude that removes art, music, literature, foreign languages, theater, and other subjects that enrich the human spirit, and reduces school to "just the basics."

[VTMechEngr]

11. Absolutely agree!

Even though I'm an engineer, I still took art, history, and music classes, not to increase my engineering ability, but to make me a better person.

Classical education is sadly, almost dead.

[DireStrike]

12. I learn far more outside of school in almost every subject

than I ever learned in it.

If school is suppsoed to broaden our horizons and such, it fails.

Art - From school, I remember the color wheel. And cray-pas, they felt quite good. At college, I dropped painting because I would have had to spend nearly $200 on supplies.

In half an hour at an anime convention I learned two drawing techniques that, if I practiced them, would bring about continual improvement in my drawing ability and effectiveness.


Music - I have some procedural memory of how to play (poorly) a watered-down version of Pachelbel's Canon on violin. I will never use this knowledge. Music appreciation has taught me how to play the triangle.

I've learned a lot more listening to music on my own and discussing it on forums for the band. Also from playing video games, and discussing the soundtrack on gamefaqs.com.


Drama - School plays were fun. Mainly, the things that I did with friends while waiting offstage for my one or two lines.

I've seen a handful of "adult" plays, and was thoroughly unimpressed. Only A Christmas Carol seemed at all good to me, which might have had something to do with the seasonal atmosphere. I'd never pay to see a play. Movies are superior in every way.


Foreign Language - I now have a rudimentary understanding of Spanish, the only language offered at my junior high! Well done... sort of. Language learning programs outside of school are far more effective.


Literature - This is the one thing I appreciate from school. After being exposed to dozens of "classics", I ran into a handful that were actually worth reading. However, my mother, and R.L. Stine, did far more to increase my appreciation of books than school ever did. Maybe school can take some of the credit for being the building in which the Scholastic book fair took place.


None of the above, with the possible exception of the literature, has enriched my human spirit noticeably. School focuses on a handful of old activities, excluding the rest. School is to life what MSN's home page is to surfing the internet.



Now, according to you, school is not "supposed to be" about getting a job. Yet, nearly all good jobs require college degrees. At the same time, maybe 5% of what you learn in the process of getting that degree is actually applicable to your job. I suppose employers value degree holders because they are usually not poor, and have proven their ability to submit to ridiculous and useless commands.


It may be that school's problems are due to the sort of thinking that you decry, instead of vice versa. There is no way for me to tell. All I know is that school is an enormous waste of time and money in most cases. Mostly higher education. Elementary school taught me to read and do math, Junior high even showed me applications for algebra. High school provided a deeper look through many fields of study. What is college supposed to do? You can't be dicking around when you're directly paying such huge sums of money. You get your degree and get out, and god help you if you can't decide what job you want to get that degree for.

I guess that's why, except for in a select few fields, college classes don't really teach you anything. If you were to commit all that time and money to learning something and then decided to do something else, you'd simply be screwed.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

15. You never know when some bit of knowledge will come in handy

For the first 15 years of my professional life, it seemed as if college was pretty irrelevant to what I did.

But then I became a translator, joining a profession in which one can be asked to translate anything in any subject. I found that the knowledge in those long-forgotten college courses came in very handy. Suddenly I was asked to translate the catalogue of an art gallery (art history classes!), an article on landslides (geology!), a raft of articles on foreign aid from Japan to other Asian countries (geography and economics!), more articles on caring for the elderly (biology and psychology!), and the programs for a music festival (classical music, French, and German!). Oh, and I own my own business (accounting!)

The point is that I never could have predicted that I would ever change careers. I saw myself as teaching Japanese on the college level until retirement, so at that time, the only "relevant" courses were Japanese language and literature.

But these days, careers don't last forever, and it's the adaptable person with a broad background who can change orientations and mindsets quickly.

If your school experience with the arts was unsatisfactory, then it's the fault of your school, not with the concept of a broad education. You evidently went to a school which, whatever it claimed for itself, had low standards, so you were bored with what was offered.

[Jackpine Radical]

13. This sounds like one of my rants.

Did you copy it?
:silly:

[ComerPerro]

5. I'm not suprised. And I don't think cheating is anything new

the only reason it seems more widespread is because with increased technology its becoming easier to cheat

[Generic Other]

6. This is in Chapter 1 of their textbooks: Business Ethics

:rofl:

[Marr]

7. Who cheats the least?

[earth mom]

8. I'm not surprised.

Isn't cheating rule #1 in business? Just ask the corporate whores who cheat us all every day! :puke:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

9. I am not the least bit surprised at these figures

When I was teaching Japanese, I had the misfortune of having my subject become popular among business majors.

Only unlike most of my previous students, who took Japanese because they were really interested in the language or culture (and who were a joy to teach), this new crop of students just wanted to have high grades in Japanese on their transcripts, presumably so that employers would fall down and worship them, but preferably without doing the kind of work that would earn those high grades.

They cheated in ways that were so stupid and transparent, such as copying one another's homework or test papers character for character, including misformed characters, accidentally repeated words, and bad translations.

Whenever I called them on this, they'd get all defensive and blather on about "collaborative learning," to which I'd respond that "collaborative learning" didn't mean that one clueless person copied his equally clueless friend's work without passing it through his brain.

They never understood--or at least pretended not to understand--the difference between copying someone else's homework without thinking about it--and figuring out the work independently, comparing results after completing their own versions, and then discussing and figuring out which one of them was right on which points. (That's the kind of collaborative learning I allowed and encouraged.)

As the number of business majors increased, my joy in teaching diminished, because with a few exceptions, these were the students who probably didn't belong in college but were going just because that's what middle-class youth do. Instead of learning the material, they constantly looked for angles. It was sometimes almost funny, as when first-year students with Japanese vocabularies of maybe 300 words turned in essays written by Japanese exchange students as their own work and were surprised that I could tell the difference between their usual writing style and that of an educated native speaker.

Business majors cheating? It's old news to me.

[Hippo_Tron]

14. They're just training to be future Republican Congressmen

[Evoman]

16. I'm a graduate student...and I don't know HOW TO cheat.

Honestly...I'm a physical science (biology) grad student and I wouldn't even begin to know how to cheat. The reading papers I have written have been to specialized and reading intensive for me too have cheated (with the exception of plagiarism I guess, but my profs check the sources). The exams and lectures are unique every year (do these people break into the profs computer?). All the rest is research..obviously you can't cheat on original, scientific research (unless you falsiify data, which is sure to backfire).

I don't get how they cheat.