As fast as regulators and prosecutors clean up corporate America, are business schools preparing the next class of criminals?

The disturbing thought is raised by recent research showing 56 percent of graduate business students admit to cheating at least once an academic year, higher than the 47 percent rate for graduate students studying something other than business.

The report supports earlier studies that revealed undergraduate business students cheat more often than other undergraduates, says Linda Trevino, a professor at Penn State's Smeal College of Business and co-author of the study. A question the research doesn't address is whether students interested in business are inherently more prone to cheating because of their bottom-line, free-market approach or whether the results-oriented emphasis of business schools fosters such behavior.

"From our data, we can't say," says Ms. Trevino, who worked with Donald L. McCabe of Rutgers and Kenneth D. Butterfield of Washington State.

Nor does the research show whether business students are just more honest about cheating than other students, she adds.

Their findings are based on survey responses from 5,331 graduate students at 32 U.S. and Canadian colleges. "Cheating" covered 13 behaviors, from using notes to take an exam to submitting someone else's work as their own.

Some believe the survey exaggerates the level of cheating.

"I think we have a lot less than that 56 percent," says James Kraft, the academic integrity officer at the University of Pittsburgh's Katz Graduate School of Business.

Nor should the violations of nonbusiness students be overlooked. Ohio University is investigating its engineering school after the originality of some graduate theses and dissertations was questioned. In an Aug. 23 statement, the school said there were problems with 38 of the 55 papers reviewed to date. Two faculty members who approved the problem theses are no longer graduate advisers.

Coming at a time when former Enron chief financial officer Andrew Fastow was handed a six-year prison sentence and WorldCom's Bernard Ebbers began serving a 25-year sentence, the findings reinforce efforts of some business schools to make ethics a more integral part of a business education experience.

"I'm not surprised with those numbers," says Duquesne University business ethics professor James Weber, who is also director of the school's Beard Center for Leadership in Ethics.

"I'm not sure business schools are doing a good job of addressing the issue," he says.

Brad Agle, director of the David Berg Center for Ethics and Leadership at the Katz School, says business schools need to pay more attention to the moral development of their students.

"We tend not to use the language of ethics in business school. We tend to use almost exclusively the language of economics," he says.

Ms. Trevino's report cites the findings of the Aspen Institute, which concluded that over the course of a two-year MBA program, the focus on values shifts from customer service and product quality to shareholder value.

Duquesne is trying to prevent that from happening by requiring ethics classes for all business students. Moreover, professors are asked to emphasize ethics at the beginning of each semester and students are required to sign papers and tests indicating they have not cheated on the work.

"It's part of the culture of the university," Mr. Weber says. "You can't just say at orientation: 'By the way, we don't think cheating's a good thing to do.' You have to reinforce it."

Katz requires beginning MBA students to take an ethics seminar and integrates ethics into each course offering, Mr. Agle says. There also is a 16-hour undergraduate program on ethical leadership in business, he adds.

Smeal instituted an honor code this fall that emphasizes promoting ethical behavior rather than focussing on the consequences of unethical behavior. Students share responsibility for developing rules, investigating allegations of cheating and determining the punishment.

"I suspect that the sanctions are going to get harsher because we know students are harder on their peers than faculty are," Ms. Trevino says.

Some of the impetus for more honest business students is coming from business schools' end market.

"There's a lot more interaction now between students and recruiters on this issue of ethical behavior," Mr. Weber says. "It's a huge issue because there's millions of dollars at stake here."

Cheating is a broad term, used to describe a wide range of activity, from incorporating a few lines from a blog and not attributing the material to copying answers from the genius seated at the adjacent desk. Each offense has its own level of what Mr. Agle and others term "moral intensity."

Whatever the intensity of the offense, reducing cheating at business schools is important. But business shouldn't be the whipping boy for the larger societal problem David Callahan examined a few years ago in his book, "The Cheating Culture." Whether its academics, sports (the father who posed as a college recruiter in order to scout his quarterback son's opponent), government or business, "we've become a big culture of cheaters," Mr. Agle laments.