UCLA Anderson School of Management Blog

UCLA Anderson Battles Plagiarism With Turnitin

Andrew Ainslie, a senior associate dean at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, pictured with a Turnitin plagiarism report, says "nobody ought to be able to buy their way into business school." (Bob Chamberlin, Los Angeles Times / September 1, 2011)

Claremont McKenna College made headlines today, but not the type of headlines they wanted to make. It seems that the college is taking heat "for exaggerating the collective SAT exam scores of incoming freshman classes for the last six years, boosting statistics used for national school rankings."

In the CMC case, it's the school that is accused of wrongdoing. Oftentimes, though, it's students and potential students who break the rules. The Los Angeles Times' Larry Gordon had an interesting piece yesterday about plagiarism. He spoke to UCLA Anderson's Andrew Ainslie, who serves not only as an associate director of marketing but also as senior associate dean for Anderson's full-time MBA program. 

Gordon's piece discusses plagiarism in applications to graduate schools. He writes, "The detection of such wholesale cheating in college applications is on the rise due to the use of Turnitin for Admissions, an anti-plagiarism database service that compares student essays to an immense archive of other writings. Around the country, more than 100 colleges and universities have adopted it, mainly in graduate divisions, although Stanford University is among the dozen schools starting to use it for freshman applicants this year."

"The more we can nip unethical behavior in the bud, the better," said Ainslie. "It seems to us nobody ought to be able to buy their way into a business school."

Gordon notes that In Anderson's first review of essays from potential MBA candidates this year, "Turnitin found significant plagiarism — beyond borrowing a phrase here and there — in a dozen of the 870 applications, Ainslie said. All 12 were rejected."

 

The article concludes like this:

At UCLA Anderson, one recent applicant didn't search far for essay material. He stole verbatim from the school's website in citing "exceptional academic preparation, a cooperative and congenial student culture, and access to a thriving business community."

If plagiarists like that are denied admissions, future business leaders may include fewer unethical careerists, said UCLA Anderson's Ainslie. "If they are going to do that," he said, "they are going to do it in every aspect of their lives."

Read the whole Los Angeles Times article here

Prof Aimee Drolet Rossi's "The Aging Consumer" Recognized as One of 2011's "Ten Most Important Books In Business, Management and Labor"

The January 2012 issue of Choice -- the review journal of the American Library Association and Association of College & Research Libraries -- included "The Aging Consumer - Perspectives from Psychology and Economics" on its list of the "Ten Most Important Academic Books in Business, Management, and Labor" in 2011. "The Aging Consumer" was co-edited by UCLA Anderson Marketing Professor Aimee Drolet Rossi (Anderson's Betsy Wood Knapp Term Chair Professor of Innovation and Creativity) and her colleagues Norbert Schwarz (professor of business and research psychology at the University of Michigan) and Carolyn Yoon (associate professor of marketing at Michigan's Ross School of Business). The recognition was based on the organization's review of 7,000 books.

(Also included on the list was Professor Richard Rumelt's latest "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy which we've blogged about a few times previously.) 

The UCLA Anderson blog recently had the opportunity to interview Professor Drolet Rossi about "The Aging Consumer." She told us the book had a few goals, including a look at the economic implications of an aging world population, as well as how aging consumers, whose psychological functioning and evolving biological limitations, will behave in the marketplace. 

"The book kind of represents a kind of interection of scholars from economics and psychology who are trying to understand aging consumers, how they behave in the marketplace, how they plan for retirment, how they shop, what kinds of brands are they attracted to, what's the best way to advertise to them," Drolet Rossi says. "The book is organized in a way that we think makes sense. What kind with age? How do you market to (aging consumers)? A lot of past research is focused on 18 or 20 year olds. There's a lot of research that was done based on the assumptions that just aren't realistic anymore."

Guy Kawasaki ('79) Is UCLA Anderson's 2012 Commencement Speaker

UCLA Anderson Dean Judy Olian made the announcement in a message to the Anderson commumity:

I am very pleased to announce that Guy Kawasaki ('79), celebrated Apple evangelist, author, technology guru and entrepreneur, will deliver the commencement address to this year's MBA, FEMBA, and PhD graduates. The ceremony will take place on June 15, 2012 at 4:00 pm on Wilson Plaza at the UCLA campus.

After completing an undergraduate degree in psychology at Stanford University, Kawasaki received an MBA from UCLA Anderson in 1979. His first job at fine-jewelry manufacturer Nova Stylings taught him how to sell and take care of customers while a stint at educational software company EduWare Services provided the segue to Apple. Kawasaki served as software evangelist of Apple for four years, gaining widespread recognition for his novel use of secular evangelism to promote Mac and (in his words) lead "the charge against world-wide domination by IBM."

In 1987 Kawasaki left Apple to found the Macintosh database company, ACIUS, where he published the groundbreaking (and still popular) Apple database software system 4th Dimension. In 1995 he returned to Apple as chief evangelist and Apple fellow. He later became founding partner of the venture capital firm Garage, which provides early stage investments to tech companies. He is also co-founder of Fog City Software and Alltop, a personal, online magazine rack. Kawasaki is a prolific and popular author of ten books including his latest: Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. He was also a regular contributor to Forbes, MacUser, and Entrepreneur.

Paper by Subbu Ramanarayanan Featured in the Economist

It seems logical that a doctor sued for malpractice might see a drop in demand for their services. If one views medical services as a product sold by doctors, it stands to reason that a defective (read: negligent) product will drop in popularity.

A recent paper co-authored by UCLA Anderson Assistant Professor of Policy Subramaniam (Subbu) Ramanarayanan (along with David Dranove and Yasutora Watanabe of the Kellogg School of Management) took a look at the issue in a paper called "Just What the Market Ordered - How malpractice lawsuits punish negligent doctors," a paper that received attention in The Economist.

So a sued doctor should prove less popular. But demand for doctors isn’t quite as simple as that. There are, essentially, two demand curves: one for patients with private health insurance and one for patients on Medicaid, which reimburses at fixed rates (and slowly at that). The authors’ model assumes that demand from Medicaid patients remains elastic, so a doctor who sees fewer private patients can take more Medicaid patients.

Subbu and his co-authors did indeed find that sued doctors saw demand for their services drop. But there were some differences, depending on how much of their practice was privately insured and how much of it was Medicaid patients. Those whose primary patient source used Medicaid to pay for services became less popular with both these Medicaid patients and those with private insurance. Doctors whose practice was mostly privately insured began picking up more, lower-paying Medicaid patients.

Subbu and company attempted to demonstrate that doctors who have been sued see a drop in demand for their services. They did. As The Economist states:

Their analysis suggests that the negative effects of a lawsuit on the doctor’s income can last for five years or more. It also gives evidence towards another truism: those with less money can find it harder to pay for higher-quality goods. In this case, poorer mothers get worse doctors.

Artice about Subbu's paper in The Economist

Read the paper here

Shlomo Benartzi Talks Retirement Savings; Ed Leamer Discusses January Ceridian-UCLA Pulse of Commerce Index

We've got a couple of new faculty videos to present today.

In the first, Professor Shlomo Benartzi joins Morninstar.com do discuss why folks don't save enough for retirement and some of the ways they can start doing so.

 

In the second video, Professor Ed Leamer, director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast and chief economist for the Ceridian-UCLA Anderson Pulse of Commerce IndexTM talks about the latest PCITM release. The Pulse of Commerce Index is up for the third month in a row -- just barely.

 

Mary Petersen Gives $100,000 to Support Staff Development

Mary Petersen started her career at UCLA's management school as a switchboard operator and for the next 40 years she dedicated herself to the community, ultimately supervising the move from the old GSM building to the current UCLA Anderson campus in 1995. Though she retired in 1997 -- after making an indelible mark on countless lives -- she remains active in the community, often seen around the school at conferences and other activities.

Even after devoting her professional life to GSM/AGSM/The Anderson School/UCLA Anderson, Petersen continues to make an impact. At the school's 2011 Holiday Party, Dean Judy Olian announced that Mary had made a $100,000 endowment to "help staff members find the same kind of opportunities to grow professionally that she enjoyed in her long and varied career."

Our colleague Humphrey Gyde recently authored a story about Mary, her career and the gift. Here is an excerpt:

When Mary started on the switchboard in 1957, Westwood was still a village and UCLA Anderson was the Graduate School of Business Administration, housed in what is now Dodd Hall. It was her first job after graduating with a bachelor of science in business education from UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. She was happy to be earning the princely sum of $243 a month, out of which "I could pay for my apartment, food, clothing, whatever I needed." There were fewer options to spend a paycheck in the Westwood of that era. This was long before Whole Foods, boutique hotels, designer bars and the global cuisine now on offer. Students and residents had to make do with a Bullocks department store (where the Ralphs now stands), the Fox Theater and a Desmond's clothing store. Of course, Mary adds, there were beer busts. (Some things never change.)

Professor Rakesh Sarin: “(EMBA students) apply their new knowledge to their careers immediately.”

Professor Rakesh Sarin, UCLA Anderson's Paine Chair in Management, has a new book coming out this year. It's called "Engineering Happiness: A New Approach for Building a Joyful Life" and we look forward to interviewing Professor Sarin about the book as the release date draws closer. 

While we wait for his thoughts on happiness, we'd like to take a moment to share his thoughts on executive education. Sarin was recently interviewed by Smart Business. “EMBA students are lot more engaged on conceptual issues, even though they have to balance work and study,” says Sarin, “They also can apply their new knowledge to their careers immediately, as they already hold full-time jobs.”

Smart Business asked Sarin how the work of executive MBA students translates almost immediately to practical workplace applications. He says:

"One example is when we were doing a case in which students had to decide whether they were going to put more money into a marketing campaign of a dealer promotion, or put more money into consumer promotion, meaning they would give coupons directly to consumers. There was a student who had faced a similar situation at his job at a major corporation and he was able to provide a lot of input on what he did. Another example is when I was talking about something that happened a couple decades ago. Because of one student’s work experience, he was able to update us on what had happened since then.

"Our students are very willing to share their experiences, which helps solidify what they learn. As a result there are a lot of things from the classroom that they are able to apply very quickly to their careers, and are then able to come back and talk about their own real-world applications. From an instructor’s perspective, it’s very refreshing to hear, ‘I learned this in the classroom, and here’s how I’m going to now try to apply it to my work situation."

To read all of Professor Sarin's interview with Smart Business, click here.

To preorder Engineering Happiness: A New Approach for Building a Joyful Life, click here. 

 

Stengel/Grow Q&A in Forbes: "Leaders today need to be whole-brain leaders. They need to be artists and operators."

UCLA Anderson Adjunt Professor Jim Stengel continues to make news with his recently released book "Grow - How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World's Greatest Companies." We blogged about it last month when we noted Stengel's premise that "What propels a successful company is not cutthroat business sense but an understanding of the purpose that drives its brand. In other words: If you make your customers' lives better, they'll return the favor." As noted in that post, Stengel is teaching this quarter and has promised the UCLA Anderson blog an interview when he gets to town.

In the meantime, the Financial Times has run a review of "Grow" (note: you might need to log in to read the whole review, it's a free registration). The (positive) review reads in part:

Mr Stengel concludes that the best-performing businesses are driven by brand ideals; that these touch on five human values (“eliciting joy, enabling connection, inspiring exploration, evoking pride or impacting society”); that the most successful brands are run by “business artists” such as Steve Jobs or Howard Schultz; and that these artists are also grounded in solid business practices.

Grow does not offer a guide to running a social media campaign or which ad to air during the Super Bowl, but argues that if you keep focused on the core brand ideal, the rest should fall into place.

And speaking of interviews, Forbes' Dan Schawbel landed one with Stengel already.