Business grad students most likely to cheat

There is no additional comment needed; the study speaks for itself:


href="http://today.reuters.com/news/ArticleNews.aspx?type=domesticnews&storyID=2006-09-20T191504Z_01_N20379527_RTRUKOC_0_US-LIFE-CHEATING.xml">Business
grad students most likely to cheat: study


Wed Sep 20, 2006

Reuters



BOSTON (Reuters) - Graduate business students in the United States and
Canada are more likely to cheat on their work than their counterparts
in other academic fields, the author of a research paper said on
Wednesday.



The study of 5,300 graduate students in the United States and Canada
found that 56 percent of graduate business students admitted to
cheating in the past year, with many saying they cheated because they
believed it was an accepted practice in business...



...The study, published in the September issue of the Academy of
Management Learning and Education, defined cheating as including
copying the work of other students, plagiarizing and bringing
prohibited notes into exams.



McCabe said that in their survey comments, business school students
described cheating as a necessary measure and the sort of practice
they'd likely need to succeed in the professional world.



"The typical comment is that what's important is getting the job done.
How you get it done is less important," McCabe said. "You'll have
business students saying all I'm doing is emulating the behavior I'll
need when I get out in the real world."



HT: Uranius Pelican


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Reminds me of the old economics majors in the Prisoner's Dillema study:

"...the defection rate for economics majors was 60.4 percent, as compared to only 38.8 percent for nonmajors.

Needless to say, this pattern of differences is strongly supportive of the hypothesis that economics majors are more likely than nonmajors to behave self-interestedly (p<.005)."

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/economics_frank/frank.html

1. This is not just a study of willingness to cheat, it's also a study of willingness to admit it afterward. Perhaps the business students are more honest, not less.

2. I'd like to see this broken down a bit more. Do the accountants cheat as much as the marketers? I suppose with a sample size of only 5300 they might have trouble getting statisticly significant results if they subdivide it more.

3. Since this study included both Canadian and American students, the obvious question is whether there was any difference between the two countries.

RyanG,

You are correct. That is a good example of how studies do not always get at the thing that they are purported to study. The conclusions have to be scrutinized closely.

That's precisely why we business school faculty take cheating far more seriously than our liberal arts counterparts, and punish cheaters severely.