Cheating in the Boardroom Starts in College?

May 7, 2007 — -- Insider trading. Stock backdating. Tax fraud.

Where do American business executives pick up their bad habits?

Possibly in college.

It turns out that business school students tend to cheat more often than their counterparts in other fields, according to at least one study.

Just last week, Duke University reported that 34 business school students had been caught cheating on a take-home exam. But the problem is more widespread than just Duke.

A survey for the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke found 56 percent of MBA students acknowledged cheating, compared with 54 percent in engineering, 48 percent in education and 45 percent in law school.

The report, conducted from 2002 to 2004, asked 5,300 students at 54 institutions, including 623 students at 32 graduate business schools, if they ever cheated.

Why is cheating more rampant in business programs than elsewhere?The study's lead author, Donald L. McCabe, a professor at Rutgers Business School, said it is the nature of testing and of the personality of the students.

First, he said, in many business school classes, such as finance and accounting, there is often only one right answer on an exam. "If I can glance over at your paper and see what that right answer is, for a very small risk, I've got a big return," McCabe said.

Students in a history or English class, on the other hand, do not really gain much by seeing a few words of their neighbor's essay.

Then there is the students' personalities."I think it's the nature of the people that attracted to the business," McCabe said. "They seem to arrive already with this bottom line mentality … that getting the job done is more important sometimes than how you get the job done."

So does college cheating translate into cheating in the corporate boardroom?"If you take somebody who has never cheated in college and they go into an environment in business where there is a lot inappropriate behavior going on eventually, I'm afraid, many of them may conclude they have no choice but to engage in it as well," McCabe said.