Cheating MBA student faces course expulsion Thankfully we don't have to worry about such things in the U.S.
"The quality, suitability and performance of our MBA students is monitored both through our internal quality assurance procedures and by AMBA ,who have accredited the Leicester business school for the last 20 years." Oxpecker, I love the irony. Just today a few people seemed to be very concerned with Edinburgh Business School's lack of professional accreditation. http://forums.degreeinfo.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=81486#post81486 This cheater may have been able to "earn" an AMBA accredited MBA, if only she were able to pay her accomplice, Elizabeth Hall Associates. Oh well, another one for Professor Kennedy's files.
Not gloating Thanks Charles for understanding the issues at stake for DL and oxpecker for drawing our attention to this problem. The problem lies in creating opportunities for cheating by either people who cannot cope with the work for an MBA or for those indolent students crushed for time. All continuous assessment programmes, though brought in to relieve one problem (some people cannot cope with final exam stress, or less seriously need feedback, which can be given in other ways), creates another more serious problem of compromising the integrity of the assessment process. In DL, continuous assessment is an invitation to cheat. That it happens on campus too - as in the current case - suggests it is not an unreal problem. It is a scandal waiting to happen. If the culprit had paid her fees, she would not have been caught but then she would have gone out into the world with an MBA of which she was the unworthy recipient. Hence, final exam regimes, closed book, no choice of questions, independently invigilated, subject to external examiners, and with non-zero failure rates, are required. Those DL Schools that do not have such a regime are, in my view and experience, suspect attestors of the fintness of their 'graduates', and all the unofficial "accreditation" badges they accumulate (AMBA, AACSB and EQUIS, etc.,) are hostages to fortune and the unanimous integrity of their students. It should be noted that cheating begins with the problems of an individual person, for which, of course, humane people are naturally sympathetic. The phenomenon spreads like a cancer and jeopardises the fortunes of all other students, for which the human person is naturally concerned too. Excusing the guilty cheat, is cruelty to the honest student who is punished by the public airing of these incidents. Better to reduce the opportunities for cheating. Final exam regimes do that job better than the alternatives. My twa' merks.
Worry is a choice you make. I'd say that cheating is widespread if not rampant in the U.S. and elsewhere. And the "team assignments" I'm reading of in this forum reminds of the collaborative efforts I've observed to be common in college students born foreign to the U.S. Sadly, the safety of the communal herd is displacing individual initiative in the university and through the university, in the corporation. Why wouldn't one cheat when neither responsibility nor reward is to the individual?
"The quality, suitability and performance of our MBA students is monitored both through our internal quality assurance procedures and by AMBA ,who have accredited the Leicester business school for the last 20 years." http://education.guardian.co.uk/mba/story/0,12010,1005333,00.html how different is EBS program from one from Leicester business school ? Who is rated better?
Heh heh. Rather a mischievous post from manjuap. The EBS program is as different from the Leicester program in question as day is from night. The Leicester MBA is largely assessed by "continuous assessment" -- i.e. assignments rather than examinations: 9 assignments and only 2 exams for the whole program. I am sure that the better students learn a lot and emerge with useful knowledge. But I believe that the worst students learn very little and graduate with very little knowledge. This is also true (even more so) of the program in which I teach (at a state university in U.S.).
Manjuap The question should be written: "Which is rated better by whom?" It would, of course, be invidious of me to offer an answer! However, oxpecker has kindly provided the element of an answer, namely that "continuous assessment" is used in one of the institutions and not in the other. The thread is discussing the behaviour of someone caught cheating in some of her continuously assessed essays (because she would not pay her debts to the people providing the essays she used to commit her acts of cheating). Continuous assessment is wide open to cheating by this easy, not always detectable, method. Assessment by final exams only is not vulnerable to this form of cheating. An institution that uses only continuous assessment is suspect, in my view, in its quality standards which are compromised (because it does not know with a high degree of certainty that the name on the essay submitted for assessment is the name of the person who wrote the essay). In the DL context is this is a major problem. That an unofficial "accrediting" agency (AMBA) accepts such uncertain assessment methods says it all about the value of its "accreditation". You may draw your own conclusions. Of course, I absolve all faculty at such institutions from any tolerance of cheating - when they catch instances of it. But why invite it in the first place? Accreditation, official or unofficial, is not a guarantee of quality. The exam regime tells us more about quality than a marketing agency posing as "accreditors".
Just so there is no misunderstanding: the student was enrolled at De Montfort University (the former Leicester Polytechnic), not the University of Leicester.
