those cheatin’ business students
Brayden
Yes, it’s true. Business school students like to cheat. Researchers at Penn State, Rutgers, and Washington State claim to have evidence to support this claim. From the Philadelphia Inquirer (via Wall Street Folly):
A survey of 5,331 students at 32 graduate schools in the United States and Canada found an “alarming” amount of cheating across disciplines, but more among the nation’s future business leaders. Fifty-six percent of graduate business students admitted they had cheated at least once in the last year, compared with 47 percent of non-business students.
The students, who were surveyed between 2002 and 2004, told researchers from Pennsylvania State, Rutgers and Washington State Universities that the most important reason for cheating was that they thought that other students were doing it.
And what explains the discrepancy between business and non-business grad students? Linda Trevino, one of the study’s lead investigators, offered this explanation:
Trevino said it might be that students who were drawn to business school were more self-interested or bottom-line-oriented. Some studies also suggest that business school, with its emphasis on the free market and maximization of shareholder value, changes student attitudes.
Trevino covers her bases, mixing a self-selection explanation with a little Ferraro, Pfeffer, and Sutton socialization/norm internalization. Excellent.
Hmm, business students and executives are getting a bad rap these days. And by association – so are organizations (behavior and theory) professors. But, it seems that most mgt articles however pass the buck onto colleagues in finance/econ (agency theory is the culprit) though Organizational Behavior has been taught in b-schools for years. Anyway, in short, it could just be a rotten apples (and self-selection) thing, I simply have not seen convincing mechanisms yet in the literature (very much conjecture, as was the press article, but a start I suppose…)
Teppo
September 20, 2006 at 5:31 am
[...] There’s an interesting post up at the orgtheory.net blog on a study showing that amongst graduate students, 56% of graduate business students cheat, in constrast to 47% of non-business students. [...]
With apologies to my two friends who’ve studied business… « Don’t look now, but…
September 20, 2006 at 6:39 am