With apologies to my two friends who’ve studied business…

There’s an interesting post up at the orgtheory.net blog on a study showing that amongst graduate students, 56% of graduate business students cheat, in constrast to 47% of non-business students.

I have two comments about this – first of all, isn’t it sad that 47% of non-business grad students cheat? If you have to cheat, you’re in grad school for all the wrong reasons. And you make life suck for those who don’t cheat, since many classes are graded on a curve. It’s also incredibly demoralizing for honest students. (And don’t give me a lecture about grad students from cultures where communal learning is the norm not knowing better than to “write group solutions”, either – when I was in CS at Purdue a few years back, it was common knowledge among the grad students that there were groups of students cheating, and those students had heard the same lecture about the rules we had.)

Secondly, and more importantly… is this gap really a surprise to anyone? Business students are choosing a profession which is about the bottom line and personal financial profit. Other grad students, particularly doctoral students, are (in the general case) on crack if they are doing graduate study in their fields with the goal of getting rich. It’s all a matter of intent.

Given that people who study business are specifically learning to assess risk versus potential profit, since the risk of getting caught cheating – and paying an appreciable price for it – is usually much lower than the potential profit (particularly in this day and age, where universities appear to do whatever they can to avoid litigation), the only thing to stop them from cheating is their own ethics. That, or making the risk much greater. Remember, folks, that this is a field which is about capitalism in a society where capitalism is the unofficial state religion. Everyone is supposed to be out for #1, and so on. None of this is surprising, though it is sad.

I’ll add a disclaimer or two here, though. First of all, I have two good friends who’ve studied business, and they’re fine, ethical people. (I’ve also had a few bosses who claim to have studied business and who are neither fine nor ethical.) I should also mention that there are MBA programs in the U.S. where ethical business practices are an important part of the curriculum, and I commend these programs for doing the right thing. Not everyone in business is bad, nor do I mean to imply that – my point is more that given the nature of what’s being studied (and the study’s authors address this point), it shouldn’t really be surprising that a higher number of graduate students whose field suggests very different interests and values than the fields of other graduate students might also behave differently from graduate students in those other fields.

Whether it’s MBAs, other grad students, or undergrads, it’s really time to start attacking the problem from both ends – ethics and risk. It’s time to start emphasizing academic ethics again (can you spell plagiarism, boys and girls?) and making the consequences of cheating much more dire. I think it’s time for universities to start kicking out those students who cheat instead of giving them second, third and fourth chances. I know this is a lot more work for professors, and that’s the real shame – preparations for academic hearings are a pain in the ass as far as I’ve seen, and collecting evidence is no fun – but this has really gotten out of hand.

47% of graduate students??? Ugh. Shame on you, people. Shame on you.