Duke's Mbas Cheating Scandal
Duke's MBAs Cheating Scandal
While students are overwhelmed with handbooks on plagiarism, school honor codes when they entering a university, cheatings are rampantly detected in university environment. Admittedly, plagiarism and cheating should be seriously punished. However, there do exist controversial cases where some assert that the cases are not considered cheatings, the others argue that they should be considered cheatings.
An article named "Duke MBAs Fail Ethics Test" by Alison Damast appearing in the Business Week Magazine has brought nation-wide attention to a scandal happened at Duke University. The scandal is about thirty-four Fuqua School of Business students who violated the school's honor code by cheating on a take-home exam (collaborating instead of doing the exam alone). The article reports that, on April 27, 2007, the Duke University seriously took disciplinary action against 34 of the first-year MBA students, which accounted for nearly 10% of the school's 2008 class, for cheating on an open-book and take-home exam. Out of these students, nine would be expelled, fifteen would be suspended for one year and would receive an F in the class, and the remaining would receive F in the course. These stiff penalties were taken to prevent the possibility of re-occurrence of cheating in MBA program. According to a study published in September in the journal of the Academy of Management Learning & Education, there were 56% of business graduate students who admitted to cheating one or more times in the past academic year, compared to 47% of non-business students. This indicates that business students tend to be involved in cheating more than other-discipline students. Some argue that business students face with high competition than the others, so that they are tempted to cheat to get ahead. I think this is not a defense for the behavior of violating the ethics rules. Business field is not out of Honor system. Everyone should be...
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