Dukes Mbas Cheating Scandal - 997 Words

Duke s MBAs Cheating Scandal While students are overwhelmed with handbooks on plagiarism, school honor codes when they entering a university, cheatings are rampantly detected in university environment. Admittedly, plagiarism and cheating should be seriously punished. However, there do exist controversial cases where some assert that the cases are not considered cheatings, the others argue that they should be considered cheatings. An article named Duke MBAs Fail Ethics Test by Alison Damast appearing in the Business Week Magazine has brought nation-wide attention to a scandal happened at Duke University. The scandal is about thirty-four Fuqua School of Business students who violated the school s honor code by cheating on a†¦show more content†¦These rules have encouraged people to conduct researches on new things. As a result, many inventions are initiated. Contrary to the United States, in my country, which is Vietnam, the rules on plagiarism are very loose. Students will cheat whenever they have a chance. It is so popular to copy theses/dissertations of each other. I feel shamed for my country on this aspect. It restrains creativeness. Besides these two articles, I have read several other comments on the topic. Some people said that if this is a big deal because giving a take-home exam means giving a license to cheat. It is not surprised that students work on group. They may still download data from Internet, pay others to do the exam for them. Therefore, it is a responsibility of faculty to formulate an exam that makes students difficult to collaborate or to search sources from Internet. The Duke s faculty has failed in this assignment because the exam has facilitated an environment to cheat. For me, I agree that it is ideal to have an exam that nobody can cheat. However, in the open-source society, with the aid of modern technology tools, it is hard to avoid cheating if students are dishonest. Even if the exam is held in classroom, students may still cheat by storing materials in Ipods. In addition, for some courses, to test a comprehensive knowledge and in-deep thought, it requires a long hours exam that makes a take-home exam more appropriate. Thus, I think, being a