Some cheating may seem harmless, but we see this as a black-or-white issue: Either you do cheat or you don't. Sadly, too many business students do, and we urge them to shape up.

Donald McCabe, a business school professor and researcher at Rutgers University, recently revealed some disturbing findings at an annual meeting of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.

After nearly 20 years of surveying 170,000 graduate and undergraduate students, McCabe has determined that business students cheat more often than any other group of students. What's more concerning is that McCabe believes business students are carrying their unethical habits into the real world.

Our country is currently in a recession for a host of reasons, many of which won't become apparent until after economic recovery is in full swing. One thing we do know from new light shed on the collapse of the housing market and the subsequent credit freeze is that a lot of business people cut a lot of corners. Mortgage brokers and bankers handed out subprime loans like candy at a parade. Completely uninhibited, bankers bought and traded mortgages because credit rating agencies had slapped the best ratings on bundles of bad mortgages without understanding what was truly in them. Economists have generally avoided declaring that Wall Street out-and-out cheated, but plenty of people didn't bother to understand the ramifications of their actions or simply looked the other way when they came across questionable practices. Should we even get into all the Enrons and Bernie Madoffs of the business world?

In 2006, McCabe released hard data related to his research. At the time, he found that 56 percent of graduate business students had cheated at least once during the previous academic year. This is significantly higher than the still-high 47 percent of the non-business students surveyed that admitted to the same.

As future leaders of the business world, business students need to be incredibly careful to avoid any action that even remotely looks, smells or sounds like cheating — and that includes ignoring what seems wrong. We recommend all students operate on this principle: If it feels like it might be wrong, just assume it is wrong.

We don't have data on the number of students who cheat at Marquette. We are proud that the College of Business Administration requires students to take one of three business-specific ethics courses, in addition to the university's Philosophy 104: Theory of Ethics requirement. With this strong emphasis on ethics, we hope the vast majority of Marquette students avoid cheating.

The bottom line is that students will take the habits they develop in college into the business world. If those habits are bad ones, we are all in trouble. Copying a classmate's report or sharing answer keys to an upcoming test might not seem quite as bad as setting up an illegal Ponzi scheme, but it's a slippery slope. We encourage all Marquette students to make clean, ethical decisions here in college and out in the professional world.