Welcome, Future Corporate Leaders!

If business school case studies are meant to inspire the future leaders of corporate America, perhaps it's best if we kept Enron and WorldCom off of the syllabus.

Thirty-four students at Duke University's prestigious Fuqua School of Business were caught cheating on a take-home final exam. University officials called it the program's worst cheating scandal ever.

What's most surprising isn't that they cheated, but that they got caught. According to a survey of graduate students from a Rutgers Business School professor, M.B.A. students are practically famous for their dishonesty. The survey found that 56 percent of business school students admitted to cheating, compared with 47 percent of graduate students in non-business programs. Making matters worse is the fact that the organization that published the study was the Center for Academic Integrity at none other than Duke University.

So if the students are mimicking the fallen executives from some of the worst corporate corruptions in history, how well does the Fuqua administration mirror the prosecutors and regulators who mopped up after the scandals? About as unpredictably, it turns out. Nine students face expulsion, fifteen were suspended for a year, nine were given a failing grade for the course and one lucky student escaped with merely an F on the exam. Four others who were suspected of cheating were exonerated.

by Megan Barnett