DURHAM - Most of the Duke University business school students who were severely punished last month for cheating are Asian, and their attorney says that's no coincidence.

The biggest cheating scandal at the Fuqua School of Business primarily involved students who had been in the United States less than a year and who did not understand the honor code or judicial proceedings well, said Durham lawyer Robert Ekstrand, who filed appeals last week on behalf of 16 students.

Violations were minor, Ekstrand said. But when a faculty investigator pressured them to admit wrongdoing, they quickly wrote contrite letters of confession, sometimes without knowing the specifics of the accusation, he said. Swift hearings and convictions followed.

The case began when professors noticed striking similarities in students' take-home exams for a class called "Decision Models," according to information filed with the appeals.

Thirty-eight students among the more than 400 in the class were accused and investigated for cheating on the exam and other assignments, resulting in 34 convictions of graduate students in the master of business administration program. Nine were expelled, and 15 received one-year suspensions and a failing grade in the class. The rest of the guilty received failing grades.

If the appeals fail, the international students would lose student visas and have to leave the country in the next couple of weeks, Ekstrand said.

"There is something else going on here, something that needs to be explained before we go forward with this, because it doesn't look right," he said. "This is a class that involves 410, and selected for the investigation and prosecution and permanent separation from the university are all students who are from Asian countries. Somebody has got to look at this. You just wonder how this could have gotten so far."

Five convicted students declined to be quoted in the newspaper.

'Take great care'

Fuqua Dean Doug Breeden emphasized in early May that the students involved in the case are both domestic and international students, representing four continents. In e-mail to the school, he wrote, "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." The appeals board will do the same, he said.

Duke officials won't comment on the cases until the conclusion of the appeals process next week. "We must respect the confidentiality that the appeals process requires and our students deserve," said Mike Hemmerich, associate dean for marketing and communications at Fuqua.

Ekstrand said honor code violations were, for the most part, minor and unintentional. One example, he said, was students who shared a template in which data that everyone had from the exam questions were typed into an empty spreadsheet and disseminated. No one shared analysis or answers, he said. The computer files show documents were created at the same time, which might have looked suspicious, Ekstrand said.

"These are technical violations that had almost no impact on the exam," Ekstrand said, "done by people who have a lifetime of an impeccable record of good conduct."

The lawyer points out in information filed with the appeals what he said are problems with the case:

* The professors identified possible violations within four days of the exam, which was taken by more than 400 students who produced several thousand pages of work.

* A dozen other students whose files had the same creation date were not implicated in the cheating cases.

Next page >