In the light of my post on whether MBA is losing its relevance for businesses and attractiveness to the students I was thinking what were the events relating to the MBA programs that attracted the most media attention lately. Since my personal interest in MBA evoked only in Spring 2008, this was the time when I started to actively look for information pertaining to MBA.
There were many interesting articles touching upon various aspects of business education in general, and MBA in particular, that I came across in the last almost two years. But as far as I could remember there were two specific events that attracted the most of media coverage. Moreover it was not just a short outburst of coverage from various media outlets, but it was a relatively extended period of time when the event stayed in the spotlight. It also seemed that it got coverage in national mainstream news media, not just from the columnists of Businessweek and the likes writing about business education.
Here is just a short recap of those events. You can find tons of material on the internet to learn the details.
The first event was the scandal about cheating on GMAT test that erupted in June 2008. A lot of students, prospective, current and even graduated, were affected by the discovery made by GMAC, the owner of the GMAT test, that thousands of GMAT takers have been perusing the services of infamous website scoretop.com. Once GMAC seized the assets of the website through the court order, they got access to the database of users who paid money to get access to the “live” questions, as well as correlated that information with users who posted “live” questions on the website. Both of the actions are against GMAT Non-Disclosure Agreement and General Terms of Use. This discovey resulted in cancellation of GMAT test scores for those users. The business schools were left with decisions how to deal with the cheaters.
The second event was the Harvard’s MBA Oath. It draw media attention in June 2009. In a nutshell this was an oath taken by the Harvard MBA 2009 graduates who pledged “to act with utmost integrity” and serve the purpose of the greater good. This oath came in the wake of the financial crisis that shook the nation and the world at the end of 2008. The greed of the MBAs who were the integral part of the abuses on the Wall Street had been often cited as one of the main causes of that near collapse situation. The importance of that oath was that it was quickly supported by graduates from many other MBA programs not only in the US, but internationally.
I think that these two events and their timing is a significant indicator of the changes that have been going in the MBA education recently. The first one shows the MBA degree perceived by the applicants as a highly desirable designation, so much so that they would resort to the use of the illegal sources to get an upper hand and get admitted to their choice business school. The second one illustrates the budding change in the attitudes of the MBAers, and business schools who want to demonstrate to the outside world that they are not all about making a big buck at any price, but they “feel the pain” of the society at large and are willing to change.
Whether this second event is a lasting trend and not just a nod to the order of the day is yet to be seen. However, I think it is a remarkable shift of emphasis that is taking place in the MBA programs these days. The MBA programs try to stay relevant, and I believe they will manage to adapt to the “new world order” 
Speaking of cheating on GMAT by looking up the “live” questions. Not only it is a questionable moral choice, it is really plain stupid. The GMAC says that the questions banks have thousands of questions, and the chance of running into particular question on the actual test is really very miniscular given the computer adaptive nature of the test. It’s really much more reasonable to try to learn the concepts than to brute memorize the answers to unlikely questions. And if you want to get the feel for real questions, just use The Official Guide for GMAT Review, 12th Edition
P.S. After I finished this post I found out that GMAT cheating case made a come back again, this time on China soil. Apparently much less coverage this time around as I missed it before.
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