Schools' Responses on Cheating Stats

BusinessWeek asked the top 25 B-schools for statistics on MBA cheating. Here's what they said

by Alison Damast

In the wake of a cheating scandal at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business that involved 34 students, BusinessWeek conducted an e-mail survey of our top 25 ranked graduate business schools in an effort to quantify the level of B-school cheating. (See BusinessWeek.com, 6/21/07, "Are B-Schools Hiding the Cheaters?)

We were able to obtain data on incidents of cheating among business school students only from the University of Chicago, the University of Virginia, and Duke. Each of these three B-schools has a different system for tracking honor code violations and academic sanctions imposed by the school.

At Chicago, between 1993 and 2006 the school held 25 disciplinary hearings for students accused of violating the honor code. All 25 resulted in sanctions, although only 11 were related to academic issues or misconduct. For the 13-year period, that is an average of less than one sanction per year. (The school has about 1,100 full-time students).

Some Schools Don't Break Out Cheating

The Honor Code Committee at Virginia's Darden School of Business keeps a yearly online log of how many cases were accused, investigated, and dropped by the school. The school gave BusinessWeek records from academic year 1999-2000 to academic year 2003-2004, a period when two business school students were investigated for cheating, only one of whom was accused by the honor committee. From 2003 on, the records kept by the honor committee aggregate graduate school data and are not broken down by separate grad schools. However, a spokeswoman for Darden said that no B-school students were found guilty this year of violating the honor code.

Duke University's B-school provided data on cheating from the past five years, going back to academic year 2002. Prior to the incident this year, where 34 students were found guilty of cheating, there had been only eight convictions, said a spokesman for the school.

Fifteen business schools provided information about their policy for dealing with ethics violations, but did not provide specific figures on cheating among B-school students. They were Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Dartmouth, Emory,

Indiana University, New York University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, University of California at Berkeley, University of Michigan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, UCLA, University of Pennsylvania, University of Texas at Austin, and Yale.

Seven business schools did not provide any information. They were Harvard, Northwestern, Columbia, Georgetown, Purdue, University of Southern California, and University of Maryland.

Damast is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.