MBAs: Ethics versus enterprise
It is an irony of MBAs that those who have one fear these qualifications are being made worthless because these once-rare degrees are now being handed out by confetti, while those without one will do anything to obtain what they still think is a holy grail.
Would-be MBAs are even prepared to pay to see the questions set by the Graduate Management Admission Council, the body that sets the test for the top business schools. Wannabes sit 250,000 GMAC papers a year but the council fears up to 6,000 students may have cheated by seeing questions that have previously been asked.
GMAC has brought in the FBI and is upping its security to include scans that read the veins on the palms of candidates.
Yet surely these students are showing the very entrepreneurship that makes a good businessman? Rather than rail against people who buy the questions from websites (set up by the enterprising Chinese, apparently) GMAC could make a useful case study of its own exams.
It might like to note that since taking action against these sites the price of past questions has slumped from £15 to £5 each as new websites start up. And buying questions is far cheaper than the £1,500 being charged by the ring of impersonators that sat the exams for students who had learned the art of outsourcing. Cheaper too than the fake degree certificates available online.
There is academic research to add to the case study too. Donald McCabe, a professor of management at Rutgers, the US Ivy League university, has studied 200,000 students over 19 years and concludes that business-school applicants are significantly more likely to cheat that those from other disciplines.
Shouldn’t we be pleased at that? Wouldn’t it be more worrying if it transpired that the social-science students or the theologians were more aggressive in wanting to win than the people wanting to be tomorrow’s entrepreneurs?
Note that Sir Alan Sugar – an entrepreneur whose views of university value are probably unprintable in a blog – chose as his real-life apprentice in 2008 a man who had lied on his CV. However, as the lie, exposed on his television programme, was to claim the short-listed applicant had done a course at university, this was regarded as an insignificant fib.
GMAC’s sanction is to ban for life any candidate trying to blag their way into business school. Perhaps that is a good idea: restricting the supply might restore value to MBAs.
