The Fight Against Cheating

Santiago Iniguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa Business School.

During a discussion with colleagues regarding the results of the study conducted by Donald McCabe, i.e. that management education students were the group who most admitted to cheating, some pointed out that MBA programmes are very demanding, sometimes beyond realistic expectations: how could you ask an MBA participant to work more than what is actually possible? In order to cope with these unrealistic demands, some students just cheat. Other colleagues referred to the prevalent culture at many business schools, which emphasizes performance at any cost, thus exacerbating the competition and prompting disloyalty among fellow students –in line with what Professor Sumantra Ghoshal stated in a posthumous article.

In their combat against cheating, business schools officials should not transfer the entire responsibility to students, but rather involve other school stakeholders, docents in particular. A whole set of measures should be displayed in order to make cheating really difficult or very risky, including the adoption of preventive measures along the publication of a list of condemned practices as well as the existence of effective bodies that decide and implement the sanctions.

Enactment of Honour Codes. The surveys released by the Center for Academic Integrity show that "cheating on campuses with honor codes is typically 1/3 to 1/2 lower than the level on campuses that do not have honor codes".

Involve students in the ethical governance bodies. Half of our ethics committee is made up of students making the agreed-on sanctions more legitimate in the eyes of students. At IE we see as key that the student knows the technical means we have at our disposal to prevent cheating (see "Technical Solutions" below). Nobody likes to have to tell a student that they have to leave the course, with the extreme financial discomfort that this would entail etc. We hope to dissuade rather then having to catch and punish students after the act. All this creates an environment where honesty and endeavour are the key elements that resonate; all resulting in a critical mass of fair play.

Empowering and improving the conscientiousness of faculty. According to CAI, faculty members are normally reluctant to take action against suspected cheaters. "In Assessment Project surveys involving almost 10,000 faculty in the last three years, 44% of those who were aware of student cheating in their course in the last three years, have never reported a student for cheating to the appropriate campus authority. Students suggest that cheating is higher in courses where it is well known that faculty members are likely to ignore cheating".

Balance the load of assignment to students.This may seem obvious but at times it might seem outrageous the workload that students are asked to do in some schools. In some cases this creates the sense of desperation necessary for some students to cross the line.

Technical Solutions. My school uses a Web based application called Turnitin to verify that our students are not plagiarising when handing in written assignments etc. Use of this tool sends a strong message that we take seriously the protection of the honest competively-minded student and this has a spill-over effect in the approach to other tasks, such as exams and presentations etc.

Indeed it is in the interest of all the top schools to use this tool to prevent inter-school plagiarism as the tool is constantly becoming more efficient with the many updates to the databases that it references, which include the students’ own assignments. On uploading a given assignment, the most popular academic databases are cross-checked, along with news and information sources, as to the level of originality of the work. The results can be surprising and reveal the most sophisticated cheats, who use, for example, paraphrasing. The disuassion effect can be enhanced by providing students with example reports on the originality of sample works.

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