http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aEL5ZnKhQuXY&refer=us what a shame these students had to sully the great Fuqua name, not to mention their own (while their names are not being released, it will be quite easy for recruiters to figure out who these students are). i'd be interested to see/hear the reasoning for the varying degrees of punishment.
This does not surprise me one bit. It always makes me laugh when I see the words ETHICS and BUSINESS SCHOOL GRADUATE in the same sentence. It is, as they say, Business, the American Way.
everybody, at the very least, was given a failing grade. some were suspended a year, others were simply expelled.
To tie this in to the "let's all throw the lawyers down the well" thread over there, interesting that law students were the least likely out of the four types of graduate students listed in this article (business, engineering, education, law) to cheat. One would think that those immoral scumbag lawyers would be cheating at like a 95% rate.
What do you expect when they have faculty role models like Coach K? I'm surprised this scandal was only about cheating and not elbowing people in the face.
The numbers in the study were the percentage that acknowledged violating the rules. Maybe the law students lie about not cheating at a higher rate.
I would guess that among law students there is an obsession with the rules that means they actually report cheating at a higher rate. At least at my school, the punishments for cheating, combined with software that makes it very difficult to cheat, meant that it was virtually unheard of.
Reporting to the administration or reporting on a survey? Reporting their own cheating or reporting cheating done by other students? The study appears to be a survey done of the students about their own behavior (presumably anonymous and confidential).
Self reporting on a survey. As to reporting others, it was not uncommon during law school for students to report others who continued writing for less than a minute after time was called.
That's because they want to get ahead of their classmates. It could be as much competition as honesty. If the student is so obsessed with the rules, why break them in the first place? If they are dishonest enough not to follow the rules, why are they going to be so honest about self-reporting on a survey?
Oh, much of it is driven by competition. I think the obesession with the rules means that law students aer more likely to know when they are marginally outside what is allowed or are breaking a rule that is almost always broken--for instance, some profs do not allow working together on or trading of notes. Virtually nobody would follow that rule. Anyway, you answered your final question with your first statement--they will report on a survey because they aren't likely to have any competitive consequences.
I don't know what kind of Ivory tower you live in, wingtips, but in my world, screwing the client/customer/each other is the normal way of doing business. Cheating? Bending or stretching rules? Totally screwing all the employees of your company while you get off scott free? Normal working environment. Look, I understand and dream of the days where rich folks just happened to make something a lot of people wanted to buy, like Coca-cola, or Model Ts, or lightbulbs. Maybe they respected their employees, I don't know. I do know that when a CEO is making 400 times the amount his employees used to make before he was caught sleeping with Chinese prostitutes provided by the Chinese communist agency that has now replaced the workforce, while pressuring the accountant to meet the numbers so he can eek up to 450 times the employee rate, the system is broken. Look, there is no business ethics. Its a myth. The goal in America is to be rich and famous, without doing anything to deserve either. If you can get away without doing hard work, and you have to screw a few people, who cares?
As a current MBA candidate, I think it's unfair to decide that ALL business students are cheaters (which many seem to have done in this thread). I have (so far) maintained a perfect grade point average in my program without once resorting (or even considering) to cheating, and I have many friends and colleagues in my program who would never consider cheating, even if it meant not maintaining a certain grade. Competition is fierce. That's one of the reasons I joined the program - I wanted to push myself. Do all business students have that philosophy? Undoubtedly not. But there are plenty of us with high moral and ethical standards that drive us to succeed based on merit.
It's possible to be ethical in business; the first thing you have to do, though, is accept that business can be ethical. That is in fact a contested notion. No doubt it's difficult. Very often, investors/shareholders/stakeholders are looking for blood from stones. I'd have to submit that a little over half of business leadership fro whom I worked were varying degrees of unethical. But that also means that a little less than half were actively, openly striving to do waht they saw as the right thing by people. But think about it; isn't, to some extent, the very process of calculating, say, the value of a widget at x, knowing that x+2 will meet your needs, and contrviing ways to offer it at x+3 specifically unethical? Doesn't that truth, to at least some extent, damn the very process of doing "business?" Or, conversely, is it entirely right, moral and just - not just within the ethics of our moment, or of our nation, but more universally - to charge as much as you can? Bottom line, these students were simply looking at the world ahead of them and reflecting whole swaths of that reality; they look at business "leadership" and see gangster activity. Their own VPOTUS is an unabshed war profiteer, for chrissakes. They see all kinds of leaders living by that Eleventh Commandment, "Thou shalt not get caught," and hoped to do the same. The punishment should be some sort of extensive, multi-night equivalent to an Oprah/Nightline town hall meeting where each of them as to come clean on the entirety of their though processes, helping all of us receive the issue far more illuminated than it is now.
Damn right. That's what the Founding Fathers had in mind. It's why my father fought in World War Two, and why one of my cousins died in Viet Nam: To give you the unalienable right to be a cretin.
I agree with this for the most part, well said. I think it comes down to the old risk vs reward. It gets tough when presented a situation/decision that falls into "grey area." Unfortunately, Many seem to think, if this goes downhill, how screwed am I going to be/how bad am I going to look, and how well off will I be if it goes as hoped. If the latter is far more than the the previous, many simply dont care if some get trampled in the process.
Right and wrong does not exist anymore. Ultimately this lying and cheating cant go on forever. People will eventually get tired of all of this. Greed is our creed.
Umm,when has lying and cheating not gone on-ever? Recognizing something exists is not the same as condoning it.
In my MBA program, if you fail a class, you're out. That's at a large state school. You mean to tell me that Duke is more lax than George Mason?