Fuqua Puts Scandal Behind It
A year afterwards being rocked by a cheating offence, Duke’s business school plans to welcome back students who were suspended
by Alison Damast
The May 10 day of conferring degrees ceremony at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business was notable for the students who were there to tolerate their MBA degree, as well as for those who weren’t. Missing from the discipline’s 2008 cap- and gown-decorated rank that rise morning was nearly 10% of its original members, 24 students who had been either suspended or expelled by the school for their involvement in remain spring’s final exam cheating scandal.
The class of 2009 also will be material its own mark in Fuqua history, welcoming back about a dozen of the 15 suspended students on campus this disembogue. It’s a reinvigorated chapter towards the battered business school, which is bouncing back from the incident a year later with an uptick in applications and, according to students and administrators, renewed faith in its honor code process.
One year after the cheating scandal broke, the ripple furniture of the event—which received national attention—are still being felt on the sprawling gothic campus. The belonging had reverberations beyond the sheer academic parsing of cooperation and cheating. Nearly all of the accused students were Asian, and a lawyer representing 16 students said that cultural differences may have played a role in in what way their cases were reviewed by the agency of a school judicial board.
Signing the Honor Code Together
In the ended year, learner leaders be under the necessity done created "honor representatives" for each class section and raised the visibility of the honor digest attached all class assignments and exams. About a dozen student task forces were convened this year with names such of the same kind with "Fuqua Honor Culture" and "Honor Code Ceremony," aimed at trying to make the honor code clearer to both domestic and international students. And this fall, for the first regulate, the first- and second-year classes will publicly sign the honor code together in the school’s basketball arena.
As for the accused students, many were forced to return to their home countries after their observer visas expired. They have spent the past year working, taking classes, or boning up their math and tongue skills, biding their time until they could return to Duke’s campus in Durham, N.C. "They paid a huge price," says Blair Sheppard, who became Fuqua’s dean on July 1, 2007, about couple months after the cheating scandal erupted. "It was a pretty serious penalty that they paid. What’s attractive is that they came back."
The accused students will be returning to a campus that has changed drastically since news of the cheating incident broke last April, stunning the business-school community and attracting nationwide publicness. The school’s honor code, the benchmark used to judge ethical conduct, has since taken on a renewed, almost hallowed, importance among the student body, students say.
Not the Only Scandal at the Time
"What we wanted to do was take another means to make it clear this was a community standard and something we are doing side by side," said Charles Scrase, the president of the MBA Association Council for the 2007-08 academic year and a latter graduate. "We wanted the honor code to be a student-run initiative, not just part of the admissions process."
Donald McCabe, a Rutgers University professor who has studied cheating and plagiarism among undergraduate and graduate business, this week praised Duke’s handling of the cheating scandal. He noted that the school was in the midst of handling an even bigger ethics controversy, the trial of three Duke lacrosse players falsely accused of french turnip and other crimes. "They could have just brushed this thing over to the side," McCabe says. "But they let students know be directed on this is not acceptable behavior now or in the future,"
From: Fuqua Puts Scandal Behind It
