If corporate ethics start in business school, the industry landscape of the future could be even more scandal-ridden than it is today.
A recent study found that business students are more likely to cheat than any other graduate students, though some at Wharton doubt that the data apply to Penn's MBA students, saying that the school's emphasis on its Code of Academic Integrity tends to discourage cheaters.
A survey of 5,331 students at 32 graduate schools across North America revealed not only that almost half of all graduate students cheat, but that MBA students do it even more.
Fifty-six percent of MBA students in the study said they had cheated at least once in the last year, according to researchers at Duke University's Center for Academic Integrity, who interviewed students between 2002 and 2004. By comparison, 45 percent of law students admitted to academic dishonesty.
"Students tend to emulate the ethics of the business world, where the emphasis is more on getting the job done than on how to do it," said Don McCabe of Rutgers University, who helped analyze survey data.
Another reason why students cheat so often is because new technology - like cellular phones and online plagiarism - has made it easier to cheat, according to Pennsylvania State University professor Linda Trevino, who also worked on the study.
But Trevino said students are not entirely to blame.
She also said collaborative cheating - where students help each other on assignments that they are supposed to do individually - has increased over the past few years.
"We're sending mixed signals to students," she said."On the one hand, we emphasize the value of teamwork, and on the other hand, we ask students to work alone on some assignments."
Many Wharton professors, however, put a lot of faith in their students.
"Those statistics just sound like speculation to me," Statistics professor Ed George said. "Wharton puts tremendous emphasis on ethics, and our students are some of the highest-character students I know."
Finance professor Robert Holthausen, who teaches both undergraduate and MBA students, agreed.
He said he has "no knowledge" of any such activity in his classes. Like George, he pointed to the strength of Wharton's honor code as one of the reasons why its students wouldn't cheat.
Some Wharton MBA students say their undergraduate counterparts are the ones actually doing the cheating.
"I think undergraduates cheat more than MBAs," second-year MBA student Ayesha Mansukhani said.
She said since employers do not currently see MBA grades - a non-disclosure policy that most major business schools follow - during the recruiting process, students are less likely to take the extra effort to cheat.
But Mansukhani is part of the last Wharton MBA class whose grades will be private from potential employers. MBA students who entered this fall will be graded on a regular A-F scale, just like undergraduates.
Some MBA students think the policy will actually discourage cheating.
"Since students are more competitive now, they will be less likely to help each other out," first-year MBA student Emil Eminov said.
Even if the new grading scale for MBA students does discourage cheating, some think professors just should not trust their students too much.
"If a professor hands out an exam and then leaves the room, everyone will cheat, regardless of whether they are MBAs or not," Engineering and Wharton junior Ashar Khan said.
