Every Stone

The glory of higher education:

While a number of colleges have instilled honor codes in recent years, overall there is little instruction about cheating or systematic attempt to combat it. It is very difficult to measure, but clearly widespread, with one study reporting as many as 70 percent of undergraduates admit at least one instance of cheating.

“I think the … more frightening figure is the fact that 20 (percent) to 25 percent admit to five or more (instances of cheating),” said Tim Dodd, executive director of the Center for Academic Integrity, which is based at Duke. “The fact that we have a quarter of more of our students admitting they’ve engaged in serial cheating does not inspire a lot of confidence about the credibility of their degrees.”

After the Enron scandals, business schools in particular rushed into the curriculum and heavily publicized a wave of courses designed to prepare students for the ethical dilemmas of the business world. But students don’t seem to be getting the message about ethics while they’re still in the classroom.

A study published last fall by Donald McCabe, a Rutgers professor who has studied cheating for decades, and two co-authors found 56 percent of MBA students admitted cheating, along with 54 percent of graduate students in engineering, 48 percent in education, and 45 percent in law.

McCabe emphasizes the difficulties of measuring trends in cheating, but the undergraduate numbers at the same 32 universities he studied appear even worse: 74 percent of business students, and 68 percent in nonbusiness fields admitted to some form of cheating.

“I’m past the ‘epidemic’ language,” McCabe said in a telephone interview. “I’ve been looking at this so long I’m used to it.”

The concern is that some schools are used to it, too. Aggressive action against cheating stirs up lawsuits, bad publicity, and – if a student is expelled – costs money in lost revenue. Tuition for the nine students facing expulsion at Duke amounts to about $370,000 per year.