Sixty new MBA students started their education with a lesson in right and wrong.

The intensive 2 1/2 days of ethics training covered three topics: organizational ethics; leadership training, which is the place where ethics should start in an organization; and becoming comfortable with their new MBA colleagues, said J. Markham Collins, associate dean of the College of Business Administration.

Especially with recent high-profile criminal trials involving Enron, HealthSouth, Tyco, Martha Stewart Living and WorldCom, faculty want to make sure that students start thinking about ethics early in the MBA program and continue the discussion throughout the curriculum.

"For years and years, business schools have been talking about ethics," Collins said. "But the pressure to document exactly what students learn about ethics is growing because of recent scandals. Almost nobody had an ethics course 15 years ago, even though people might have been talking about it. Now, we know it's an important part of business education."

Students wrote an ethical code, which covered general issues such as fairness and honesty in the MBA program.

More specific codes of conduct, which cover conflicts of interest, plagiarism and other particulars of ethics, are handled by smaller teams later in the semester.

Three speakers worked with the students: Jina Daigle, a facilitator and development consultant; Walt Pavlo, who was convicted of fraud at MCI, served two years in federal prison, and lectures about white-collar crime across the country; and Chris MacDonald, an ethics professor at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Canada.