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Cheating by MBA Students Should Serve as Wake-Up Call
Raising awareness of ethical values is not enough to root out unsavory behavior, experts say. Schools and companies alike must have procedures for detecting unethical behavior -- and policies that institute firm penalties.
The recent cheating scandal involving students in Duke University's MBA program should serve as a clarion call for colleges and universities to wake up, smell the coffee and start emulating the ethics policies of the private sector, according to at least one expert who closely follows ethics-related issues. Yet, another ethics expert says the university's response should serve as an example to colleges and corporations alike -- in that the institution publicized the infractions and its response to them, thereby reminding everyone that it takes violations of its honor code seriously. Both agree, however, that the episode illustrates the tendency by students and business people to cut ethical corners when they're under pressure -- a factor HR must be aware of as it seeks to build ethical cultures in their own organizations. The controversy began when the university disclosed that 34 first-year MBA students at Duke's Fuqua School of Business were involved in the program's largest-ever cheating scandal, with nine of the students facing expulsion for violating a professor's specific instructions to not collaborate on a take-home test. The Duke students are hardly alone: A study released last year by the Center for Academic Integrity, a consortium of 360 high schools and universities that's based at Duke in Durham, N.C., found that students pursuing MBA degrees cheat slightly more than other U.S. graduate students. Fifty-six percent of the business-school students acknowledged cheating, compared to 54 percent in engineering schools and 48 percent in education schools. Cheating and other dishonest activities continue to be prevalent throughout higher education despite the proliferation of ethics courses that were introduced at business schools in the wake of the Enron and Worldcom scandals, says W. Michael Hoffman, who serves as executive director of the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass., and the college's Heiken Professor of Business and Professional Ethics. It's simply not enough to offer ethics courses -- institutions (in both the academic and private sectors) must create ethics strategies, complete with prevention, detection and punishment, he says. "In terms of prevention, you need to raise the level of ethics awareness so people will know that it will be a fundamental criterion for judging their performance," he says. "They need to be made aware that if they violate the institution's values, they'll be judged -- and punished -- accordingly." Next comes detection, which Hoffman says can be done by giving students the means to report (anonymously or not) violations of the ethics policy and encouraging them to do so via frequent reminders that violations can tarnish the reputation of the entire program. Policies can also be established that hold those who know of such violations but fail to report them just as accountable as the actual perpetrators, he adds. Finally, strong and consistent enforcement of penalties alerts everyone that the institution takes these matters seriously, he says. "I think Duke acted appropriately in this case by expelling the nine students," he says. "And it publicized the punishments, which is also very important." However, Hoffman says the academic community in general lags the private sector in creating ethics strategies. "Most of these practices are already in place at many companies," he says. "But colleges haven't gotten the message yet. They tend to think of themselves as ethical because of who they are -- they haven't faced up to the fact that they, too, can have ethical problems with serious consequences. They need to be less complacent about their own ethical cultures, and I hope the Duke episode serves as a clarion call." Timothy Dodd, executive director of the Center for Academic Integrity, says Duke's handling of the case was admirable. "They take ethics violations seriously enough to root out this kind of behavior," he says. "All of the deans, faculty and students interviewed at Duke said the school's honor code is part of their lives and they see their role as helping root out this kind of behavior. "I don't think it's an accident that major cheating scandals have occurred at schools with an abiding respect for honor codes -- these incidents were discovered and acted upon because the institutions had the will and moral force to confront them." Both Dodd and Hoffman agree that colleges and businesses will need to decide whether the values of the bottom line will continue to outweigh questions of right vs. wrong. "I often think there's a failure to teach that moral means are just as important as moral ends," says Hoffman. "Although there may be a superficial attention to ethics at many places, if the values that are deemed truly worthy are the bottom line and getting ahead, these may override a perfectly well-intentioned notion of behaving ethically."
May 15, 2007 Copyright 2007© LRP Publications |
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