According to Donald McCabe, a professor of management and global business at Rutgers University, “95 percent of high school students say they’ve cheated during the course of their education, ranging from letting somebody copy their homework to test-cheating. There’s a fair amount of cheating going on, and students aren’t all that concerned about it.”
“The professor has been surveying cheating practices among college kids for 18 years and high school students for six years. He says he’s surveyed 24,000 high school students in 70,000 high schools, grades 9 to 12. His findings? Sixty-four percent of students report one or more instances of serious testing-cheating, which include copying from someone else, helping someone else cheat on a test, or using crib notes or cheat notes.
In 2002 17-year-old Alice Newhall was quoted in a CNN article on cheating, “What’s important is getting ahead. The better grades you have, the better school you get into, the better you’re going to do in life. And if you learn to cut corners to do that, you’re going to be saving yourself time and energy. In the real world, that’s what’s going to be going on. The better you do, that’s what shows. It’s not how moral you were in getting there.“”
Colleges are no different, with MBA students leading the pack. “56 percent of MBA students admitted to cheating… In 1997, McCabe did a survey in which 84 percent of undergraduate business students admitted cheating versus 72 percent of engineering students and 66 percent of all students. In a 1964 survey by Columbia University, 66 percent of business students surveyed at 99 campuses said they cheated at least once.”
MBAs lead another pack; see if these names sound familiar: Jeff Skilling (MBA, Harvard). Joe Nacchio, (MBA, NYU), Richard Fuld, (MBA, Stern), John Thain, (MBA, Harvard), the list goes on and on.
Do you see a pattern here?
It’s OK to cheat in high school to get good grades to gain entrance to a good college;
it’s OK to cheat in college to gain entrance to a top grad school; and
it’s OK to cheat in grad school to insure access to a good job, especially on Wall Street; so
it must be OK once you’re working to cheat to improve your company’s bottom line.
Cheating is good business in its own right directly or in the sub-strata of plagiarism.
Google offers 1,620,000 results for “how to cheat in school,” 605,000 for “how to cheat on a test” and another 562,000 for “how to cheat on tests,” not to mention the more than 3,000 “how to cheat” videos on YouTube.
Meanwhile, on the plagiarism front, “school papers” returns a whopping 22,600,000 results.
Take a good look at the numbers and you’ll see that religion, spirituality and cheating seem to happily co-exist.
“The University of California at Los Angeles’s Higher Education Research Institute reported that 80 percent of students show high degrees of religious commitment and spirituality. The new data comes from a survey conducted this past year involving 112,232 first year students attending 236 various colleges and universities.”
All the ethics courses, integrity lectures and moral preaching that go on aren’t likely to change decades of successful cheating—mainly because it works getting people where they want to go.
Cheating isn’t new, but the casual acceptance of it as a viable life strategy has radically changed.
The media and most people are all enraged because many of the bailed-out companies owe taxes, but I don’t see the big deal.
“Nearly two-thirds of U.S. companies and 68% of foreign corporations do not pay federal income taxes…The Government Accountability Office (GAO) examined samples of corporate tax returns filed between 1998 and 2005…an annual average of 1.3 million U.S. companies and 39,000 foreign companies doing business in the United States paid no income taxes – despite having a combined $2.5 trillion in revenue. The study showed that 28% of foreign companies and 25% of U.S. corporations with more than $250 million in assets or $50 million in sales paid no federal income taxes in 2005. Those companies totaled a combined $372 billion in sales for the largest foreign companies and $1.1 trillion in revenue for the biggest U.S. companies.”
This isn’t new; I remember hearing about it decades ago, so why freak out now?
The thing that really gets me is that AIG is suing the US government, which essentially owns it.
“A.I.G. sued the government last month in a bid to force it to return the payments, which stemmed in large part from its use of aggressive tax deals, some involving entities controlled by the company’s financial products unit in the Cayman Islands, Ireland, the Dutch Antilles and other offshore havens.”
And even in this day and age $306 million is (or should be) more than small change.
Does this qualify as irony, stupidity or just good, old-fashioned insanity?
Considering the business news for the last decade the title of this week’s quotes is more of an oxymoron.
And, IMCO (in my cynical opinion), it’s not over yet. I think more schemes, more unethical if not downright illegal actions and a whole lot more stupidity are going to surface globally before we get out of this tunnel.
With that in mind I offer up these insights to the human psyche.
There are two levers to set a man in motion, fear and self-interest. –Napoleon Bonaparte (He should know.)
Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. –John Maynard Keynes (That was then, now the wicked men do wicked things sans greatest good for anyone but them.)
Corporation, n., An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility. –Ambrose Bierce (But it doesn’t have to be that way.)
Earnings can be pliable as putty when a charlatan heads the company reporting them.–Warren Buffett (Can you say derivatives, Madoff and hedge funds?)
If ethics are poor at the top, that behavior is copied down through the organization. –Robert Noyce (We really didn’t need anyone to prove Noyce’s wisdom.)
Are kids learning anything from the economic meltdown?
Parents seem to be doing everything possible to avoid exposing their little darlings to a dose of reality.
Quotes in a December post highlighted parental efforts to fill Christmas wish lists and shelter their kids from the tanking economy.
A letter to Malcolm Berko asking for financial advice is another example of the lengths to which parents are willing to go, here is the key part.
“…Our son will graduate high school this May and we don’t have the savings to send him to the University of Florida, his chosen school where his two best buddies attend. Our combined 401(k) savings plans are worth $67,000 and they too took a big hit in the market. So we are thinking either of taking a mortgage on our home (we built it without borrowing money), cosigning a note at the credit union or cashing in our 401(k) plans for his college money. Or I could take a part-time consulting job…”
Berko doesn’t suffer fools gladly and has no compunction about saying what he thinks (I highly recommend his column). I’ve shortened his response, but it’s worth reading the whole thing.
“I’d be more concerned about adding money to your retirement savings plan than helping your son pay for frat parties, beer, sex and drugs at the University of Florida…I suspect he really wants to party with his buddies, and UF is a great party school.
Here’s my advice: Tell your son to join the armed services where he’ll mature in a hurry…Or your kid can live at home, attend a community college…and take a part-time job at McDonald’s. If he does well in community college, he can easily find the financial support to earn a bachelor’s or a master’s degree.”
One reason the Great Depression made a great impression was that kids weren’t sheltered from its effects. And although this isn’t a depression the principle is the same.
Saddest of all, preventing kids from experiencing and dealing with reality now cripples them in the future. They have a
harder time in college;
more difficulties when they start working and
more problems in relationships and marriage.
Succeeding in life requires knowing what to do and how to deal with things when they don’t go your way and are outside of your control.
But as long as parents keep shielding kids from the ups and downs of reality and are available to intervene and make [whatever] better then there’s no reason for kids to learn how to do it themselves, which will be a big disadvantage for them in the future.
Here lies Wall Street’s short-term thinking
That trashed our lives without blinking
Ethics and honesty it disrespected
Let’s hope it’s never resurrected!
I am revolted by the lack of respect shown by so many of our Congressional (so-called) leaders.
Warning: If you don’t like rants feel free to navigate to a different (brilliant) post on this blog, because what follows is definitely a rant—in spite of the lack of excessive profanity and personal attacks.
I prefer to read the full text reprints of items such as Obama’s State of the Union speech because of my hearing, so, thankfully, I didn’t witness the disgusting performance of our sworn ‘leaders’ who chose to text and tweet throughout Obama’s speech.
And my anger has nothing to do with Obama. I really don’t give a damn who holds that office, the office itself deserves respect, whether I voted for the holder or not (and I did). I would feel the same way if it had been Bush, Clinton or any of the other 40 warm bodies who have sat in the Oval Office.
What the hell is going on here and around the globe? The world has gone meme and it’s not just the kids.
Granted, I don’t tweet, but I’m sure there is actually useful information being passed around beyond ‘I’m going upstairs to the bathroom now’.
There doesn’t even seem to be responsibility for tweets—blame it on a staffer or pull everything.
Texas Rep. Joe Barton’s page read “Aggie basketball game is about to start on espn2 for those of you that aren’t going to bother watching pelosi smirk for the next hour,”…Minutes later, that message disappeared, replaced with the disclaimer: “Disregard that last tweet from a staffer.” That note was also deleted after several minutes.”
Silly me, I’m such an innocent I thought people actually did their own tweeting, instead of paying someone. (Note to self, talk to marketing guy about tweeting for me.)
We grouse about Gen Y being disrespectful and rude, unlike their elders. Well, it looks as if their elders are catching down.
Maybe I can hitch a ride to a galaxy far, far away.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
According to Donald McCabe, a professor of management and global business at Rutgers University, “95 percent of high school students say they’ve cheated during the course of their education, ranging from letting somebody copy their homework to test-cheating. There’s a fair amount of cheating going on, and students aren’t all that concerned about it.”
The media and most people are all enraged because many of the 
Considering the business news for the last decade the title of this week’s quotes is more of an oxymoron.
Are kids learning anything from the economic meltdown?
