Posted by chris on October 21st, 2011 | No Comments »

This week in the Globe and Mail, Rita Trichur shared details from an in-class exercise conducted by Prof. Ariff Kachra at Ivey Business School (University of Western Ontario). In short, as I understand it, the students were given an opportunity to pay “tips” in order to access additional value from the professor in the form of extra class work and recommendations for jobs. The not-so-shocking denouement is that he was using this as an exercise to prove a point in class.

The more shocking fact,to me, was that apparently several students actually paid money. I love the exercise in that it forces students to make a decision, which should be the activity that MBA education helps. What the description of the article misses (although this may have been part of the class debrief) is the ethics involved in that decision. Value distribution could be one point of this exercise, but what does it say about the students who were prepared to pay money for additional help with the course material or for a positive job recommendation.

Additional support for course work can take many forms from hiring a tutor to buying last year’s tests. I am not sure where the ethical line is exactly, but I will suggest that paying a professor cash in order to attend an extra tutorial is on the wrong side of that line. I will say the same for cash for recommendations (but the recommending function of linkedin could be a real accelerant for that line of business!).

I would hope that in addition to Prof. Kachra’s intended lessons, the students who paid him the money carried around a sinking feeling in their respective stomachs. I would hope that feeling came before the “reveal,” but reading this story makes me wonder two things (1) can you actually teach ethics? and (2) did the students realize that, in real life, the “reveal” could be whole lot messier?

 

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