As the trial of Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling begins this week in Houston, the fallout from the demise of Enron is more than financial. Lay and Skilling are heavily to blame for the inept management that led Enron, once America's seventh-largest company with 31,000 employees and a stock market value of $35 billion, into bankruptcy. But the greatest legacy of these inept executives may be their social and ethical impact on future business leaders.
Research by the Center for Academic Integrity ("CAI"), a think tank affiliated with the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, shows that undergraduate business students do more cheating than just about anyone else.
The survey of nearly 50,000 students at 69 schools found that 26% of business majors admitted to serious cheating on exams, and 54% admitted to cheating on written assignments, which includes plagiarism and poaching a friend's homework. The results come from surveys conducted over the past three years by Donald McCabe, a management professor at Rutgers Business School and founder of CAI.
McCabe says cheating has increased since he began doing surveys 15 years ago. Technology makes it easier to cheat but he adds that a "disturbing" number of students use recent corporate and political scandals to justify their behavior.
Source: Helena Oh, BusinessWeek, February 6, 2006