Duke University's Fuqua School of Business is gearing for several weeks of appeals expected from students found guilty of violating the honor code, while other business schools carefully watch Duke's cheating scandal.

On Wednesday, Fuqua Dean Douglas Breeden gave faculty, staff and students an e-mail update on the case, in which 34 students were convicted of cheating last week. He said the students involved are from the United States and countries on four continents. The buzz around the school had been that many of the convicted were international students, who make up about 40 percent of the Fuqua student body.

The students have 15 days from last Thursday to appeal convictions by the Fuqua judicial board, he wrote. Then a three-member appeals committee, which includes the dean, a tenured faculty member and a student, will respond within 10 business days. The committee will publish a summary of its conclusions for faculty and students, Breeden wrote.

The students, from a single course in the master's of business administration program, were found guilty of violating the honor code in an investigation that started when a professor noticed similarities among answers on a take-home exam. Breeden would offer few additional details about the case. But he wrote that "students' conduct on both the final exam and other assignments in the course were investigated."

Breeden promised that the appeals committee would judge each case on its own merits.

"Each case is unique and complex, and the charge to the Judicial Board is to take great care in considering the individual circumstances surrounding each," he wrote. "I am confident the appeals process will show the same meticulous consideration for each and every appeal."

All told, 38 students in Fuqua's first-year daytime MBA class were accused of violating the honor code. Four were cleared, but the rest were found guilty of offenses that ranged from "extremely severe" to "severe" to "minor," according to a description from honor committee Chairman Gavan Fitzsimons, professor of marketing and psychology. Nine students face expulsion, while others face penalties such as one-year suspensions, failing grades and notations of the offense on their transcripts.

The mass cheating case is a topic of discussion at other business schools. "You've got to take the Fuqua situation and say, 'How do we learn from this,' " said Larry Clark, dean of the Cameron School of Business at UNC-WIlmington. "What do we do to help students realize that just because you can do it, should you?"

On Wednesday, Steve Jones, dean of the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC-Chapel Hill, sent an e-mail message to students warning them about cheating.

Jones applauded Fuqua for taking decisive action and said the case is a reminder of the importance of teaching ethics to future business leaders.

"Some say you can't teach leadership, or integrity, and that students already have those qualities -- or not -- by the time they reach business school," he wrote. "We don't see it that way. We believe this school is a place for learning professionally and growing personally and that each of us can leave at the end of every day a little stronger on both counts."

Integrity can't be separated from leadership, Jones told the students. "It is vital to a successful career and a life worth living, and so we focus on it," he wrote.

Students at Fuqua said they don't see academic dishonesty as a widespread problem at Duke, though a national survey released last year showed cheating is more prevalent among MBA students than graduate students in other fields.

"We all share the view that this is an isolated case," Hamidur Rashid, a second-year student from Bangladesh, wrote in an e-mail. "The rest of the student body remains united in continuing to uphold our values as those values are at the core of the community we have invested so much in."