I think its indicative of the values (or lack of) inherent in business

Quote :

" Thomas Kostigen reports on a study by the Academy of Management Learning and Education, which surveyed 5,300 graduate students in the US and Canada and found that "graduate students in general are cheating at an alarming rate and business-school students are cheating even more than others." Cheating was defined as "plagiarizing, copying other students' work and brining prohibited materials into exams." (I assume they mean "or" rather than "and" -- any one of those would strike me as cheating.) The findings: "More than half (56%) of MBA candidates say they cheated in the past year." The percentage of cheaters among other graduate disciplines: 54% - Engineering 50% - Physical Sciences 49% - Medical and Health Care 45% - Law 43% - Arts 39% - Social Sciences and Humanities "

1/31/2007 10:33:34 PM

when i did my MBA, i can barely think of anything that was worth cheating on, but even more so, what I could have cheated on.
Business school (at least grad school) is 95% project and essay based. Barely any "normal assignments" that you would get as an undergrad. You can't really cheat on big project or essays.
.... unless you plagiarize, i guess. which is the worst form of cheating, i guess.

1/31/2007 10:36:41 PM

Quote :

"45% - Law"

the other 55% decided to wait until they get out of school to do their cheating, because then they'll get paid a lot of money for it.

1/31/2007 11:00:23 PM

I was also surprised with the 45%, but then I realized that most of them are probably lying anyways.

1/31/2007 11:04:43 PM

lest we forget: http://thewolfweb.com/message_topic.aspx?topic=457081

1/31/2007 11:11:51 PM

how the fuck do you cheat in an MBA program? - - don't answer that, its rhetorical.

i'm just saying, virtually every goddammned thing was groupwork, and what wasn't group work was NPV and IRR.

1/31/2007 11:31:28 PM

i think what you meant to say was:

I think its indicative of the values (or lack of) inherent in business all graduate disciplines.


it's not like there is some huge discrepancy of business students cheating compared to engineering, physical science, medical, etc.

1/31/2007 11:31:34 PM

think this study is flawed. at least theres no way to tell from the information given that it isnt flawed.

i could do a study where i ask a group of people if theyve ever stolen anything, even a piece of gum, in their life, and then conclude, "OH NOES, 85% OF ALL ______ ARE THIEVES!!!!1".

I mean, really, in your entire college career, did you *EVER* cheat?? Did you ever collaborate on homework when the prof said "please do your own work?" did you ever program a formula into your Texas Instrument programmable calculator during Calculus 141, and did you ever "peek" at that formula during an exam?

I'm calling shenanigans.

you need to put a source link.

1/31/2007 11:51:29 PM

http://biz.yahoo.com/weekend/mbacheat_1.html

I'm sure that a peer reviewed academic journal has more than enough street cred to determine adequate methodology





[Edited on February 1, 2007 at 12:24 AM. Reason : .]

2/1/2007 12:22:57 AM

two distinct points here.

(1) why are MBA's so inherently evil, when engineering is practically a statistical dead heat as far as percentage reporting some amount of cheating (56% vs 54%). thats essentially the same amount. the study (or at least the Yahoo! article) wants to imply some sweeping generalizations about how MBA students are inherently unethical because of some correlation to a rise in ethical business scandals involving corporate executives and accountants.

yeah, yeah, thats all fine and well. we all know about the greedy capitalists and unethical business executives.

but what does that say about engineering?? graduate level engineers are (in my experience) some of the least business-savvy people... all many of them want to focus on is technology and design issues.

so how does the sweeping generalization about unethical businessmen translate to the unethical engineers??

(2) there is still no word on methodology as to what determines a cheater. I, personally, filled my TI-89 calculator with every freaking formula i ever had to learn in advanced math classes. does that make me a cheater? that i used mathematical formulas without committing them all verbatim to memory?

in some freshman and sophomore classes i collaborated on homework with others. I may have even on a few occasions copied some answers on these homeworks without fully understanding them. and i paid for it come exam time.

in my later engineering courses, i didnt cheat on any homeworks and i made damn sure to do as much of my own work as i could because i knew if i didnt, i wouldnt understand the concepts, and my progression would come to a halt.

i can say i never cheated on exams, and i never plagiarized anyone elses work as my own. but if i had to strictly answer a carefully-worded question asking if i ever cheated to any degree at any time during my college studies, i'd have to answer yes.

did i cheat my way to a degree? of course not. I passed the FE/EIT exam on the first try. 8 grueling hours where theres essentially no possible way anyone can cheat. and when it comes time to take it, ill pass the PE exam too. My conscience is clear.


And from what I've read so far, I dont buy the conclusion of the study because its too easy to make these sort of claims.



[Edited on February 1, 2007 at 12:54 AM. Reason : ]

2/1/2007 12:51:58 AM

I interact with both med and grad schools in my program, and there is definitely more of this going on with med students. It seems to be due to the competitive nature of the program (although no one ever gets kicked out, there's still competition for honors) whereas grad students have no real motivation to cheat: there aren't even any exams or homework in most cases (except for those classes with med students).

2/1/2007 12:51:58 AM

To be fair, most of those engineering cheaters are chinese and indian. MBA cheaters are home grown.

2/1/2007 12:54:51 AM

^ How do you figure that about the chinese and indians?

2/1/2007 12:56:55 AM

I get it now.

Quote :

"a study by the Academy of Management Learning and Education ... reports that business-school students are cheating even more than others."

well, its clear that the "Academy of Management Learning and Education" is filled with graduate business students, who obviously cheated to get in there, and then made up a bunch of bogus data to put in their plagiarized and intellectually-bankrupt "study".

if anything, we should believe the opposite, and realize that it's the Humanities grads who are the cheaters.

further proof, recall the old saying "Cheaters never prosper" ... and then look at the average salary of Humanities grads.

Q.E.D., bitches.






[Edited on February 1, 2007 at 1:09 AM. Reason : ]

2/1/2007 1:05:36 AM

I threw the values statement in there as "red meat" to get people talking, but it still stands that business people value generally value money over people, the environment and just about anything else not invented by man. People who say, teach in public schools or become social workers have a different values structure. All of these different actors act in their own self interest, business majors work to maximize profit in their own material self interest. People who forgo the "business" game in their careers focus their attention on fulfilling a rational need to maximize their utility, in this case, to "make a difference". Its a key tenant of rational choice theory that every rational person will work to maximize utility in their own self interest, although that may not translate to material wealth/greed.

I'm sure that the study is more substantive than you think and I doubt the fact that you had some formulas in your TI-89 will throw a wrench into the entire research methodology. I think the metric they used is people using "prohibited" materials in an exam, as in implicitly stated prohibited. If you think you can improve on it, email the researchers and ask them about their methodology.

2/1/2007 1:20:54 AM

Quote :

"Q.E.D., bitches."

OMG pwn on so many levels

2/1/2007 7:49:26 AM

Quote :

"^ How do you figure that about the chinese and indians?"

he was implying that since most engineering (grad) students tend to be chinese and indian anyway, then by default, they are the ones doing the cheating

2/1/2007 8:12:54 AM

i've heard that cheating on the gre by international students is rampant. apparently my advisor doesn't even really look at the scores most of the time anymore. he says he's gotten plenty of people from different countries who scored 5's on their written part and couldn't string together a decent sentence let alone a paragraph when they got here to ncsu. apparently in some areas there's a lot of people get people to take the tests in their place.

2/1/2007 8:57:30 AM

Quote :

"he was implying that since most engineering (grad) students tend to be chinese and indian anyway, then by default, they are the ones doing the cheating"

No. I was implying that chinese and indian students cheat more because they don't think plagiarism is a big deal. Almost every college has to have orientation presentations explaining to them how its different here.

For example:

Quote :

"• International students are 4.99 times more likely to be accused of an honor offense than domestic students. “It would seem logical to me that students from highly collectivist cultures would approach the challenges of college in a more collectivist way” — for instance, working together on individual assignments, he said. Donald McCabe, a Rutgers University professor who has long studied cheating, agreed. “A lot of international students are coming from backgrounds where cheating is viewed differently,” he said. Students from Asian cultures, who already feel they have a linguistic disadvantage, may particularly feel pressured to help one another out, he said."

http://www.virginia.edu/topnews/11_15_2004/honor.html

[Edited on February 1, 2007 at 9:22 AM. Reason : sdf]

2/1/2007 9:15:06 AM

ities

[Edited on February 1, 2007 at 9:26 AM. Reason : w]

2/1/2007 9:25:40 AM