Last spring, the University of Wisconsin was hit with a cheating scandal, forcing university officials to come up with a way to deal with not only the students who collaborated on the exam, but also those who were merely a part of the accounting program and not even enrolled in the class that the issue surrounded.

UW officials decided on an approach that they hoped would educate the students rather than punish them.

Students enrolled in the professional program were assigned an extensive amount of work to be completed over the summer. Students were instructed to read one of two assigned books as well as newspaper and business journal articles dealing with recent accounting and audit failures.

The next part of the summer assignment was to incorporate the reading done into a seven to 10 page paper, which was due Aug. 29 via e-mail. The main points of the paper were to revolve around ethics and recent ethical failures dealing with accounting, as well as much more direct and specific ways to foster responsibility and leadership roles used to develop good ethical behavior.

“It wasn’t as much punishment as an opportunity to understand it in a broader context,” said Larry Rittenberg, UW professor of accounting and director of the Five-Year Professional Accounting Program. “We wanted them to think about ethics and to think about ethics in a positive fashion, particularly as it affects the growth of companies.”

Students were also instructed to review UW’s code of conduct and were reminded to work on the assignments alone.

The cheating incident of last semester dealt with a number of students collaborating on a take-home test that they were specifically told to not talk to any of their classroom peers about.

Although Rittenberg acknowledges that certain students did inexcusably cheat on the exam, he also said the situation got blown out of proportion by the media.

A UW senior in the program, who wishes to remain anonymous, said upwards of 50 students were reported to have been cheating on the exam, when realistically an approximate five probably did. Rittenberg said that it was exaggerated just about to the extent as the student reported.

According to Rittenberg, around 70 students are enrolled in the program, and 25 of these students were not in the class that had the take-home exam.

“We went through and re-interviewed every single student that was in the program that had been in that class to find out the extent of collaboration that had taken place,” Rittenberg said. “There were some instances where collaboration took place that shouldn’t have.”

Rittenberg also said that at least one student was dropped from the program after the incident.

Regardless of the number of students who cheated and the number of students dropped from the program, all of them were required to do the summer work as well as attend a meeting Sept. 5 at UW to openly discuss the work done over the summer and speak about the new code of ethics that the students are in the process of developing for the program.

“I couldn’t be more positive on how they are taking this and dealing with this because they see it as something that is really important to them, and they see it as empowering,” Rittenberg said in response to the developing of the new code of ethics, noting that many students gather on Friday mornings to discuss their ideas.

Students, however, have mixed feelings regarding the assignments as a whole, but generally recognize them as necessary to a certain degree and beneficial.

“I think it was educational, because it gave us insight into some things we needed to be aware of,” the UW senior said in response to the summer work, noting that hopefully these efforts will prove to the firms and the rest of the community that something is being done to better the situation. “It was a lot of work and stressful … but I definitely understand the reason why we had to do it.”

However, some students are not as positive about the hours of work they were forced to do during the summer months as well as the work carrying over to this fall semester.

Brian Lambrecht, a UW senior in the accounting program, was studying abroad in Hong Kong last spring at the time of the cheating incident. Therefore, he clearly had no part in the wrongdoing, and yet was still forced to complete the work like the rest of the students.

“Obviously it kind of sucked to have to partake in all this work, since I was 15,000 miles away in Hong Kong and really had no control or knowledge of what was happening,” Lambrecht said. “And no one was really enthusiastic about having to spend summer analyzing a book and writing a 10 page paper, but in the end I think everyone learned something interesting that will probably be relevant in the future.”

Lambrecht questions whether all the work was fair and, as far as it being successful goes, he said it is yet to be determined.

“I guess we’ll have to see what happens when the five-year students go on to their internships this winter, and see if everyone actually represents a higher standard of ethical conduct,” Lambrecht said.