From Bloomberg:
Thirty-four first-year candidates for a master’s of business administration degree at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business were disciplined in the program’s largest cheating scandal. Nine students face expulsion for collaborating on a take-home test, in violation of the professor’s rules.
What gets me is Bloomberg’s lead into the paragraph above:
The cheating episode at Duke University may cause academics to conclude the post-Enron emphasis on teaching ethics in graduate business schools is a failure.
I think the failure to instill ethics in these young men and women occurred long before they stepped into a Duke classroom.
Who is accountable? These aren’t twelve year-olds- it’s too late to blame mommy and daddy. These students are adults, they should know better. Teaching ethics to graduate students is going to fail, its too late. If they don’t know the difference between right and wrong by this point in their lives a semester worth of lectures isn’t going to make a difference.
The pressure to achieve at business schools pushes some students to cheat, said W. Michael Hoffman, executive director of the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Welcome to the real world. A person’s true character is revealed under pressure- these students failed.
A Free Spirit said
You’ll love this: http://deligentia.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/politicizing-academics-business-ethics-compromised-in-the-classroom/