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.

That said, a college cheater that enters a company with a strong ethics program will probably reform his or her ways, McCabe said.Linda K. Trevino, a professor at Penn State University who has worked with McCabe, said that cheating has become more high-tech in recent years. Students can use cell phones to send text messages, instant message each other and cut and paste from the Internet.

Trevino said via e-mail that many students cheat because they feel pressure to get good grades and succeed."But our research tells us that the biggest influence is the social environment," she said. "If students are in an environment where they perceive that others cheat and get away with it, they're more likely to cheat as well."That perception can be changed by having a strong honor code, Tervino said, particularly one that is student-run and strongly implemented into the culture.

The Internet may have made it easier for students to cheat. But schools have turned to their high-tech approaches to fight cheating.Turnitin is one of a handful of programs that have cropped up in recent years to fight plagiarism. Students submit their papers to an online site where Turnitin scours databases to see how much of the text matches existing copy.

John Barrie, CEO of iParadigms, the company that offers Turnitin, said that one third of all papers coming through his system are "less than original." The threshold for "less than original" is that one fourth of the content in a paper matches text already in the database.

Barrie said that his system does not catch plagiarism, but "unoriginal" text. It is then up to individual teachers and professors to determine if a student plagiarized.He said the program cuts cheating to almost zero. "It catches cheaters," he said, "and is a strong deterrent. Just the mere presence of Turnitin is going to produce the desire that you are looking for," Barrie said.

Turnitin has more than 7,000 clients, Barrie said, including high schools, colleges and various other institutions which use the system to vet resumes, personal statements and scholarly articles.

Each paper that is checked by Turnitin is then added to the database so future papers can be checked against it. Barrie said there are more than 40 million papers in the database now with 100,000 new documents added daily.

Teachers have also found other ways to fight back. For instance, some schools allow students to take quizzes on computers.

But those computers don't just track which answers the students get right or wrong. They can tell an instructor which computer was used for the quiz and how long the student spent taking the quiz.

Ultimately, McCabe and Trevino said that cheating will always persist. "That's human nature," Trevino said.

However, McCabe said, Duke responded properly to the cheating which should help cut down future incidents.

"Unfortunately many schools sweep it under the rug. They don't want the bad PR that normally goes along with it," McCabe said. Duke is "sending a very clear message to the students that remain behind."