MBA students swap integrity for plagiarism

A professor at a well-known business school was recently grading papers for a required ethics course. In two of the papers he saw obvious signs of plagiarism. Students were not required to put their names on their papers, just a number identifiable by the administration. Before escalating the problem, the professor e-mailed his entire class saying that the guilty parties could avoid sanction by coming forward now. He received eight e-mails, in addition to the two he had already spotted, admitting to cheating.

Such stories bolster the academic research that suggests business students, both at graduate and undergraduate level, are more inclined to cheat than students in other disciplines. Critics of business and business education leap on such findings to say that this explains Enron, dodgy hedge funds and crooked sub-prime mortgage lenders. They say the whole system is built on fraud. This impression was reinforced further in March when the dean of Durham University