ANOTHER SCANDAL AT DUKE

, Deborah Lambert, Leave a comment

Fresh from the agony of the rape scandal, Duke University’s respected Fuqua School of Business appears to mired in a cheating scandal that won’t go away, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Thought at first to involve just a take-home exam, school officials now say that after a judicial board investigation of other assignments, 34 students were punished — and nine face expulsion from the program altogether.

More announcements about suspensions and failing grades are pending, although students have until May 17 to appeal their honor code violations.

The professor who gave the exam has not been identified, according to Mike Hemmerich, an associate dean at the business school, who said that “federal privacy laws prevented the school from identifying students. The average age of students in the first-year class is 29, and more than a thousand people applied for only 411 available spots in the program.”

Interestingly enough, a Rutgers University survey released last year found that “56 percent of MBA students acknowledged cheating in 2005.”

Deborah Lambert writes the Squeaky Chalk column for Accuracy in Academia’s monthly Campus Report newsletter from which this column is excerpted.