Are B-Schools Hiding the Cheaters?

Want to know where business students are cheating? Many schools have honor codes, but it's not easy to find out when they're broken

by Alison Damast

With the controversy surrounding the cheating scandal at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, a prospective business school student might be inclined to take a closer look at just how often cheating occurs at some top B-schools. But if you're of that mind, be prepared to encounter some roadblocks along the way.

This was what happened when BusinessWeek conducted an e-mail survey of our top 25 ranked graduate business schools in an effort to quantify how widespread cheating is among B-school students. It turned out to be a tougher task than we expected. We learned that business schools are reluctant to release data about cheating and, in some cases, refuse even to discuss it.

Back in May—shortly after Duke announced it was disciplining 34 students for ethical violations involving a test and classwork—we asked each of the top 25 how many students had been sanctioned for cheating or other ethical violations over the past 10 years. We requested a breakdown by school year, type of violation committed, and punishment handed down, if any. We also asked the school if they had an honor code and, if so, what their process was for dealing with students who violated it.

Handful of Cases Only

Out of the 25 business schools, only three—the University of Virginia, Duke, and the University of Chicago—were able to provide us with specific data about ethical violations among their B-school students. Fifteen schools provided us with information about their policy for dealing with ethics violations, but did not provide specific figures on cheating. And seven schools declined to provide any information (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/21/07, "Schools' Responses on Cheating Stats").

From the limited amount of information provided by the schools, there was no indication that cheating cases resulting in school disciplinary action were numerous at top B-schools. Chicago, for instance, said that it only had 25 disciplinary hearings over the past 13 years. All 25 resulted in sanctions, although only 11 were related to academic issues or misconduct. That's an average of less than one academic sanction per year during that period.

Schools such as New York University and Indiana University's Kelly School of Business said they just have a "handful" of cases each year, but declined to get more specific on the figures. And Virginia has had just a small number of cases in the past seven years that resulted in expulsions, according to online records kept by the school's honor committee.

Playing With Cheaters

Still, the unwillingness of a large number of top schools to provide data on cheating is bad news for a business school student who wants to get an accurate picture of how his classmates might conduct themselves while in school, said David Callahan, author of The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead.

"It seems to me like it is a piece of information you would want to know about the business school you are going to," Callahan said. "If you are an honest student, it puts you at a disadvantage to be in an environment with cheating because you're going to be working harder and losing out to people who are not playing by the rules."

Administrators at business schools offered a wide variety of reasons they were unable to disclose data on cheating; some said they simply didn't keep track of it, while others said they could not disclose it because of federal privacy laws. A handful said simply that cheating rarely, if ever, happens at their school.