A professor at a well-known business school was recently grading papers for a required ethics course. In two of the papers he saw obvious signs of plagiarism. Students were not required to put their names on their papers, just a number identifiable by the administration. Before escalating the problem, the professor e-mailed his entire class saying that the guilty parties could avoid sanction by coming forward now. He received eight e-mails, in addition to the two he had already spotted, admitting to cheating.

Such stories bolster the academic research that suggests business students, both at graduate and undergraduate level, are more inclined to cheat than students in other disciplines. Critics of business and business education leap on such findings to say that this explains Enron, dodgy hedge funds and crooked sub-prime mortgage lenders. They say the whole system is built on fraud. This impression was reinforced further in March when the dean of Durham University's business school in the UK, Tony Antoniou, was fired for having plagiarised academic work 20 years earlier.

However, in their enthusiasm to eviscerate, the critics may be overlooking some vital differences between a business education and one in, for example, philosophy or electricalengineering.

In spite of their long history - Harvard Business School celebrates its centenary this year - business schools still strain for academic respectability, especially in the minds of their students. For many, the purpose of attending business school is not to receive an academic education, but to get a job.

"The academic values of integrity and honesty in your work can seem to be less relevant than the instrumental goal of getting a good job," says Craig Smith, a professor of business ethics and corporate responsibility at Insead, France.

Dispiriting research, he says, indicates that MBA students actually become less ethical over the course of their education. "The focus on maximising shareholder value causes some students to minimise other important codes of behaviour," he says. He adds that the number of graduates of prominent business schools being caught in corrupt practices has forced a "period of useful introspection" at the schools.

The accessibility of information online has affected the definition of plagiarism. Don McCabe, a professor at Rutgers Business School in the US, has conducted extensive research into plagiarism among business school students. He says that by far the most commonplace form these days is cutting and pasting from the internet. This generally involves using a few sentences from multiple sources, either verbatim or paraphrased.

"Many students are very equivocal as to whether this is actually cheating or not," says Prof McCabe. "Especially if they paraphrase from a source." 40 per cent of students in Prof McCabe's research admitted to cutting and pasting, although he assumes the figure is probably higher.

He adds that students today, both in business schools and beyond, feel much freer than their forebears to define what constitutes cheating for themselves, regardless of their teacher's instructions. One example is that when a teacher requires individual work, many students see no problem in collaborating with each other.

"They argue that they can produce much better work and that they learn more when working together. Business students seem to be more ready to justify such behaviour by noting the emphasis corporations are putting on hiring people who can work together in teams. They argue that their collaboration, even when not permitted, is simply gaining practice at a skill they need to acquire to get a good job and advance," he says. "And faculty who do not encourage or allow such collaborative work are simply out of touch."

Prof McCabe says that from the faculty's perspective, aside from purely ethical issues, it is hard to give academic credit to students who copy other people's work. Whether the students cheat to inflate their grade or simply as a "time-management" solution to an academicrequirement, they become difficult for professors to grade. Different schools adopt different strategies to deal with plagiarism. Some delegate policing to faculty, while others put it in the hands of students and a strict honour code. The latter is generally more effective.

At Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business in the US, students are taught the honour code from the first day they arrive on campus, when they must also participate in some form of community service. "It's a way of telling them that they are not here just to learn about the bottom line, but how to become responsible citizens of society," says Aine Donovan, executive director of Dartmouth's Ethics Institute. Tuck's pedagogical approach also minimises the opportunities to cheat, with lots of teamwork and few written papers. Ethics is not a required course at the school, but it is an oversubscribed elective.

"It allows students the chance to think about things which have been bothering them in the rest of their course," says Ms Donovan.

Most ethics teaching at business schools tends to focus on cases where poor ethical judgments have been made, rather than issues of basic honesty. These cases, such as Enron and Exxon-Valdez, look at the situations in which individuals and companies made appalling decisions. They examine the twilight zone in which business decisions, subsequently seen as "ethical", were made and the stresses on the people who made them. This tends to provide students with a sliding scale of right and wrong rather than a set of absolutes.

Addressing the more hum-drum issue of plagiarism, Ms Donovan says, can make ethics more personal. Students tend to be much harsher on each other than faculty. They know stepping outside the lines might yield enormous personal rewards, but comes with equal risk and can be lethal for a community.

Business school students are more likely to self-report cheating, she believes, because they are "more forthright, willing to say 'sure I shave corners to get ahead', but then have a reason for it. A philosophy or comparative literature student will never admit to cheating."

Ms Donovan used to teach at the US Naval Academy, where cheating on an engineering test might mean being unprepared when a problem arose on a battle ship. The consequences of plagiarism were dire.

While cheating on a business school paper might not be quite so grave, "these graduates from top business schools are expected to come in to businesses and dazzle. If they've short-changed themselves, they will be found out very quickly", she adds.

近期，某家知名商学院的一位教授在批改一门必修的伦理课论文时，在两篇文章中发现了明显的剽窃痕迹。在写作这篇论文时，学生不需要签署自己的姓名，而只需标上学校行政部门能确认的学号。为避免整个事态的升级，这位教授给全班发了封电子邮件，并声称只要犯错误的人马上承认，就可以免予惩罚。除了已发现的那两人之外，他一共收到了8封承认作弊的邮件。

诸如此类的故事，证明了某项学术调查结果的正确性：硕士或本科阶段的商学院学生，比其他专业的学生更倾向于作弊。商界与商学院教育的批评人士们认为，这些发现足以解释安然(Enron)、狡猾的对冲基金和欺骗性的次贷银行等现象。他们认为，整个商业体系都建立在欺诈的基础上。这种印象在3月份得到了进一步的加深：当时，杜伦大学(Durham University)商学院院长托尼•安东尼奥(Tony Antoniou)由于20年前的一宗学术剽窃案而被开除。

然而，在他们去伪存真的热情之中，这些批评者也许忽略了商业教育与哲学或电子工程这类学科之间存在的关键差别。

尽管这些商学院历史悠久--今年是哈佛商学院(Harvard Business School)的百年校庆--但它们仍在竭力维系着学术尊严，尤其是在学生心目中的尊严。对于许多人来说，进入商学院的目的并非接受学术教育，而是要得到一份工作。

法国欧洲工商管理学院(Insead)商业伦理与公司责任教授克雷格•史密斯(Craig Smith)认为："诚信在你工作当中的学术价值，可能看上去并不比找份好工作的工具性目标更有意义。"

他表示，一些令人沮丧的研究成果表明，在他们受教育期间，MBA学生的伦理水平越来越低。"对股东价值最大化的关注，让一些学生将其它重要行为准则最小化。"他补充道，一些著名商学院的很多毕业生因腐败行为而被捕，已经迫使商学院进入了"一个有效反省时期"。

网上信息的便利，影响到了有关剽窃的定义。美国罗格斯大学(Rutgers University)的教授唐•麦凯布(Don McCabe)对商学院学生的剽窃活动展开了广泛的调查。他表示，目前最常见的就是从网上摘抄并粘贴。通常是从众多来源摘用一些句子，有些是照抄不误，有些则是变化了措辞。

麦凯布表示："这样做是否属于欺骗？许多学生对此都模棱两可，尤其是如果他们对一份资料变换措辞的话。"在麦凯布教授调查的学生当中，40%的人承认自己做过摘抄和粘贴。不过麦凯布教授推测，这个数据很可能会更高。

他补充道，现在，不管是商学院还是其他专业的学生，他们都比前辈们更为随意地自行订立构成欺诈的定义，他们并不理会教师们的教诲。举例说来，当老师要求大家独立完成作业时，许多学生认为，互相合作一下也没什么大不了。

"他们会辩称，这样可以产生更好的作品，而且一起合作可以学得更多。商学院的学生似乎更愿意认为这类行为是合理的，他们提出，各个公司都强调要雇佣能够进行团队合作的人。他们辩称，自己的合作虽然未经允许，但这也只是为了进行必要技能的实践，以便将来获得一份好工作和得到晋升。"他表示："不鼓励或不允许这类合作的教员们，确实也管不了多少。"

麦凯布表示，从教师的角度来看，除了纯粹的伦理考虑以外，他们也很难将学术荣誉给予那些抄袭他人作品的学生。不管学生是以欺骗方式提高成绩，或只是为了符合学业规定而进行"时间管理"，对于教授们来说，给这些人评分很困难。不同的商学院会采取不同的策略。一些学校将政策制定的权限交付教学部门，而其他学校则将权限交给学生，并采取一套严格的荣誉守则。最后一种办法通常更为有效。

在位于美国达特茅斯的塔克商学院(Tuck School of Business)，新生在抵达学校的头一天就要学习荣誉守则，同时他们还必须要参与某种形式的社区服务。达特茅斯伦理学院(Dartmouth's Ethics Institute)的执行董事安妮•多诺万表示，"通过这种方式可以让他们知道，到这里来不仅仅是为了学习最低限度的东西，而是要学会如何成为对社会尽责的公民。"通过大量的协同作业与极少的书面作业，塔克商学院在教学实践中将欺诈的机会减少到最低限度。伦理学并不是学校的必修课，但却是一门选修人数极高的课程。

多诺万表示："这使得学生们能够有机会思考一下其它课程中困扰他们的问题。"

在商学院，多数伦理学教学都倾向于集中在伦理决策的反面案例上，而不是围绕基本的诚实问题。这些案例，例如安然案和埃克森-瓦尔德斯(Exxon-Valdez)案，它们考察的是一些个人与公司做出骇人听闻决策的情形。这些案例对一些灰色地带进行了研究--在这些灰色地带中，人们做出了后来被视为"伦理性的"商业决策。这些案例也研究了做出这些决策的人感受到了何等的压力。这种教育方式倾向于让学生们获得一种对与错的游标卡尺，而不只是一套绝对的标准。

多诺万表示，解决更为老生常谈的剽窃议题， 可以让伦理观念变得更加个性化。学生彼此之间可能会比教师的严厉程度更高。他们知道，越界也许会产生巨大的个人收益，但也会带来同等的风险，并会对社群造成致命伤害。

她相信，商学院的学生更有可能会自我揭弊，因为他们"更为直接了当，并更愿意表明'当然我做事情时要抄近道'，不过他们之后会给出理由。一位哲学系或比较文学系的学生永远不会承认自己作弊。"

多诺万曾在美国海军学院(US Naval Academy)执教。若是在这个学校的工程学测验时作弊，或许就会意味着一旦战舰上发生问题，你将猝不及防。剽窃会造成这样的后果，着实令人恐怖。

多诺万补充道，尽管写商学院论文时的作弊并不会如此严重，但"这些从顶级商学院毕业的学生们可能会进入商界，并会为之眩惑。如果他们自我欺骗，很快就会被发现。"
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