Duke's Fuqua School of Business has disciplined 34 first-year MBA students (including expulsion for nine) who were caught when a professor spotted similarities in their answers on a take-home test. That's almost 10% of the class of 2008.

This story comes on the heels of the scandals in 2005 when Harvard Business School and MIT's Sloan School rejected 150 applicants who had hacked their way into admissions office databases to find out whether they had been accepted.

Can ethics be taught in the classroom? Business schools seem to think so -- they all trumpet the ethics components of their curricula. I tend to think ethics is one of those things you have to learn at home long before you get to grad school.

It's also an interesting time for higher ed to be wagging its finger at applicants and students, given recent revelations about graft among financial aid officers and con artist Marilee Jones, former dean of admissions at MIT.

See more Ivey Files postings on cheating here and here.