MBA students 'cheat the most'

in Financial Times on-line
(MBA = Master in Business and Administration)

"MBA students are the biggest cheats of all graduate students, with 56 per cent admitting to misdemeanours such as using crib notesin exams, plagiarism and downloading essays from the internet.

The statistic comes from a survey of graduate students to be published in the Academy of Management Learning and Education journal. The report is based on data from about 5,300 survey respondents at 54 colleges and universities in the US and Canada, including 623 students in 32 graduate business programmes.

The report will be unpleasant reading to US business schools, many of which are still smarting from the involvement of their alumni in recent corporate scandals: Jeffrey Skilling, former chief executive of Enron, received his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1979, for example. As a result, many of the top US business schools have scrambled to introduce compulsory courses on ethical behaviour at the core of their MBA programmes.

The most significant reason for cheating, he believes, is that students see their peers being dishonest, in a highly charged competitive environment where the prize is the best company internship or job on Wall Street. "They act by cheating themselves," he says."