Law, Business and Society 11th Edition by Tony McAdams

Exercise 37

In perhaps the largest cheating scandal in school history, about 125 Harvard University undergraduates were investigated for collaborating on a 2012 take-home examination in a course on government. More than half of those students were forced to withdraw from school and others were placed on probation. Certainly we should not be surprised about the Harvard episode because cheating appears to be epidemic. Business students seem to be particularly suspect. A large 2006 survey found 56 percent of graduate students in business admitted to cheating at least once in the previous year, the largest percentage of any discipline surveyed. Among nonbusiness graduate students, 47 percent admitted cheating.
Ninety-five percent of 3,000 undergraduate business students polled in 31 universities admit they cheated in high school or college, although only 1 to 2 percent admit having done so "frequently." Academic ethics expert Donald McCabe's surveys find about 75 percent of college students cheating on either a test or a paper at some point, with business majors, fraternity and sorority members, and male students being among those most likely to cheat. The cheating evidence is discouraging, but some evidence of change should also be noted. High school students who said they had cheated on an examination in the past year declined from 59 percent in 2010 to 51 percent in 2012. Harvard MBA students have received a great deal of attention for their voluntary campaign to sign "The MBA Oath," a pledge that Harvard MBAs will act ethically, "serve the greater good," and avoid advancing their own "narrow ambitions" at the expense of others. Now an international oath project pledges higher standards of integrity and service by business leaders. [See www.theoathproject.org]
[For a video of The Daily Show's treatment of the MBA Oath, see http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-august-12-2009/mba-ethics-oath] This clip contains profanity and violent rhetoric. [For the "Top 10 Cheating Scandals in College History," see http://collegetimes.us/top-10-cheating-scandals-in-history/]
Do you think ethics instruction, religious commitment, or higher natural intelligence would reduce academic cheating Explain. See James M. Bloodgood, William H. Tumley, and Peter Mudrack, "The Influence of Ethics Instruction, Religiosity, and Intelligence on Cheating Behavior," The Journal of Business Ethics 82, no. 3 (2008), p. 557.