MBA students are the biggest cheats of all graduate students, with 56 per cent admitting to misdemeanours such as using crib notes in exams, plagiarism and downloading essays from the web.
The statistic comes from a survey of graduate students to be published in the Academy of Management Learning and Education journal. The report is based on data from about 5,300 survey respondents at 54 colleges and universities in the US and Canada, including 623 students in 32 graduate business programmes.
The report will be unpleasant reading to US business schools, many of which are still smarting from the involvement of their alumni in the corporate scandals of recent years: Jeffrey Skilling, former chief executive of Enron, received his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1979, for example.
As a result, over the past few years many of the top US business schools have scrambled to introduce compulsory courses on ethical behaviour at the core of their MBA programmes.
It is not just the prevalence of cheating that interests the author of the report, Donald McCabe, professor of management and international business at Rutgers University, in New Jersey. "What surprises me is how willing these students are to admit to it."
Even though the survey is anonymous, he believes some students may not report incidents of cheating for fear of being caught out, which would mean the true figures are even higher than 56 per cent.
The most significant reason for cheating, he believes, is that students see their peers being dishonest, in a highly charged competitive environment where the prize is the best company internship or Wall Street job.
"The moment they see somebody cheating they are placed at a disadvantage." They act by cheating themselves, he says.
Prof McCabe, who has been conducting studies on cheating in US colleges for the past 16 years, believes the strongest deterrent is for the business school to have a strong honour code in place, something that is missing at most schools today.
Dubious though the accolade of being the biggest cheats might be, MBAs can take comfort from the fact that graduate students in general - arguably the cream of the academic crop - are often prolific cheats.
Half the engineering students (54 per cent) and science students (50 per cent) questioned also admitted to cheating.
And even among the most honest group, the social scientists and those studying humanities, 39 per cent admitted cheating.
Moreover, bad as it is in graduate programmes, even more cheating is reported in undergraduate degree programmes, says Mr McCabe. And high school students, it would seem are even worse.
