MBA students: the biggest cheaters?

Further to academic cheating, a study by the Academy of Management Learning and Education of 5,300 students in the U.S. and Canada placed MBA students at the top of the cheater list:

56% of M.B.A. candidates say they cheated in the past year. For the study, cheating was defined as plagiarizing, copying other students' work and bringing prohibited materials into exams.

However, other disciplines were close behind:

With 54% of graduate engineering students, 50% of students in the physical sciences, 49% of medical and other health-care students, 45% of law students, 43% of graduate students in the arts and 39% of graduate students in the social sciences and humanities readily admitting to cheating, something must be done to correct course.

Also:

Faculty, the authors say, should "engage students in an ongoing dialogue about academic integrity that begins with recruiting, continues in orientation sessions and initiation ceremonies, and continues throughout the program." It may also include initiating an honor code, preferably one that emphasizes the promotion of integrity among students rather than the detection and punishment of dishonesty.

Promote the good not the bad. Yet at the top of those companies most ensnared in ethical scandal sat a chief executive with an M.B.A.

***
Meanwhile, back at Harvard, the Boston Globe reported:

Harvard’s student newspaper has said one of its writers lifted material for her column on linguistics from a similar column posted a year earlier to Slate, an online magazine.

The Harvard Crimson published an editor’s note apologizing for its failure to reference the Slate column as a source for quotes from ‘‘The Great Gatsby’’ and ‘‘Little Women’’ used in the Crimson column. The Crimson editors plan to publish another note Friday (Oct. 27) saying they will discontinue the biweekly column by Victoria Ilyinsky, and will remove the problematic column from the Crimson website.

IPBiz notes that the Globe also said:

The Crimson’s apparent incident of plagiarism highlights the inherent risks of publishing, said the Crimson’s president, William Marra, a senior.

‘‘Any publication that prints has to look out for plagiarism or allegations of plagiarism,’’ Marra said in an interview Thursday.

**
IPBiz notes that in strong contrast to the Crimson position, a certain ezine does not like to discuss plagiarism at all.

IPBiz notes that the Crimson was (initially) all over the Laurence Tribe matter, but interest dropped.