Are B-Schools Hiding the Cheaters?

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Who's Keeping Score?

"We don't have this problem. It just doesn't occur because we have the best practices that prevent it," said Deb Magness, a spokeswoman for Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business, one of the schools that provided information on honor codes, but didn't give statistics on cheating.

At the University of Michigan's Ross Business School, Gene Anderson, associate dean for degree programs, said his school has a formal process for handling ethical violations, but does not keep records on cheating. "There probably was a deliberate decision at one time not to keep the records, but I don't really know the real reason for it," he said.

The reluctance of school officials to quantify cheating has some experts like Donald McCabe, a professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School, concerned. McCabe conducted a survey in 2006 that revealed that B-school students tend to cheat more often than their counterparts in other graduate school programs.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Schools are doing a disservice to students if they don't keep track of how often cheating occurs, McCabe said. For example, it could be occurring frequently, but school officials might not be aware of the scope of the problem if no records are kept. "If they're not keeping track of it, shame on them," McCabe said. "In a larger sense, it says, 'We are not worried about the trend.' If that's the case, then how can you deal with it?"

Gary Pavela, who teaches in the honors program at the University of Maryland and serves on the board of the Kenan Ethics Institute at Duke, said it is a "major blunder" if schools are not keeping records on the number of cases of academic dishonesty. "It is a deliberate 'ostrich head in the sand' policy of not wanting to know."

Pavela said privacy-law arguments don't wash, either. Schools are allowed to release general data about the number of cheating cases among their student body and how they're resolved without releasing names or the general circumstances of the case, he said. "There is no federal privacy-law restriction on the release of that information at all," Pavela said.

No Simple Explanation

Even if school officials don't disclose their cheating data, it does not mean that it's not an issue of concern among students at the school. For example, The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton declined to provide data on cheating at their school, although it did discuss its honor code. But a Mar. 27 article in the Wharton Journal, a student publication at the school, indicates that the three co-chairs of the business school's Ethics Committee were concerned about a "significant" rise in cases brought before them in the last semester.

"There is not one simple explanation for the marked increase in the number of ethics cases compared to other years," wrote Dustin Burke, Elizabeth Kent, and Matthias Weisheit in the article. "It is probably not a safe assumption to attribute this solely to an increase in cheating. This is a question that the next Ethics Committee will need to investigate and address."

Not surprisingly, schools where students are invested and involved in implementing the honor code tend to take cheating more seriously, said Rutgers' McCabe.

On My Honor

Indeed, Eric Schreiber, a second-year MBA student who serves as a representative for the University of Virginia's Honor Committee, said he believes it is important for students to have a grasp of how frequently cheating occurs at the business school. He will often refer to recent honor code violations during briefing sessions for incoming students, he said.

It is helpful to have this data on hand. "This way they know that our honor code is a living, breathing document and it can affect you," he said. "It's not just words on a paper or a quote on the wall."

Damast is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.