This is a few weeks old, but I didn’t have time to mention it at the time – on September 21 the NZ Herald ran a Reuters article on a US study that found that 56% of graduate business students “admitted to cheating in the past year, with many saying they cheated because they believed it was an accepted practice in business.”
The numbers weren’t much better for other disciplines including engineers who came in at 54%. The article goes on to say
…business school students described cheating as a necessary measure and the sort of practice they’d likely need to succeed in the professional world.“The typical comment is that what’s important is getting the job done. How you get it done is less important,”
“You’ll have business students saying all I’m doing is emulating the behaviour I’ll need when I get out in the real world.”
This is very sad and also very worrying, when you consider that these are the people who are going to be leading US businesses, and to a large degree US society in years to come.