Users of the shuttered GMAT test prep site Scoretop are worried about penalties

by Francesca Levy and Matthew Lawyue

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A lot of business school applicants are suddenly very strong, but it isn’t the usual case of worrying that their application essays won’t be up to par. In the week ago cheating allegations emerged surrounding Scoretop.com, a now-shuttered case site for the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), applicants who used the site have turn to apprehensive that their scores will have existence canceled, they will be banned from retaking the test, or they might even have being barred from business school.

That possibility became even greater degree of substantive on July 1 at the time that David A. Wilson, president of the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), which owns the GMAT exam, said that about six months ago GMAC had canceled the score of one decided who had used Scoretop and bragged online about the advantage it gave him. GMAC notified the schools in what one. place he was an applicant, but it is unclear what the schools did with the information.

The scandal erupted on June 23, when GMAC disclosed (”Shutting Down a GMAT Cheat Sheet,” BusinessWeek.com, 6/23/08) it had won a legal judgment against the Scoretop station in federal district court in Virginia. GMAC had accused Scoretop of copyright infringement, saying the site had published "live" GMAT questions—questions that were still currently in use by GMAC, the exhibition’s publisher—and other copyrighted material. The make love to awarded GMAC $2.3 million, plus legitimate costs, and allowed GMAC to seize Scoretop’s domain title as well as a computer hard drive containing compensation and other facts.

GMAC says the man following Scoretop, Lei Shi, has left the site’s base in Aurora, Ohio, and returned to his native China, where he reportedly has taken refuge in the city of Zibo in Shandong province. Shi, who took the GMAT himself at least three times in 2002 and 2003, could not be reached.

Wilson said that while the organized being is examining a seized Scoretop hard propel with about 6,000 user names, he did not know how people would in the end front having their scores canceled. "We’re not interested in the blameless surfer," Wilson said. "If you were actively engaged in providing that information, then you are a target."

For prospective B-school students who have poured time and money into their MBA dreams, the possibility that they’ve run into problems with the GMAT is crushing. Virtually all U.S. walk of life schools want the GMAT as part of the admissions process, and a large GMAT prep industry, with many legitimate players, has developed encompassing it. (McGraw-Hill, which publishes BusinessWeek, also publishes GMAT test material including test preparation books, as does BusinessWeek.com.)

"The GMAT is such a unfeeling test to crack, and everybody wants more questions to practice from," said Priya H, who defended students who used Scoretop on BusinessWeek.com. In a phone interview, she said she is concerned with respect to a friend who used the site to help prepare for the test. "Nowhere in the Web site does it express you would have being violating the rules, and if that was the case, why would my friend fall into the noose? It’s a great damage to such victims."

Many Scoretop visitors who patronized its VIP reverence, which allowed students to see "live," or current, GMAT questions for a $30 subscription compensation, have defended their practice of the proprietary page, even though a Virginia court ruled last month against Scoretop during the term of copyright infringement. In Web posts, manifold students bandy words that they thought the site’s questions were legitimate. "I honestly did not know that any illegal spryness was going on," wrote "Lola," on Businesweek.com. "Intent makes a difference in this situation, and the consequences Scoretop users face should be proportional to their actions."

Honda eked out a slim 1.1% sales increase for June, but for the rest of the auto efforts there was inexistence but bad news

by Jim Henry

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At a time when used pickups and SUVs are gathering dust along unrefined roads with "For Sale" signs in their windows, and a gallon of gasoline costs more than $4, did anyone abroad there seriously June would be anything but horrible for auto sales?

Despite slash-and-burn promotions, U.S. light-vehicle sales greatest month were down 18.3% from 2007, to 1,189,108. For the first moiety, sales were down 10.1%, to 7,411,682, according to Woodcliff Lake (N.J.)-based AutoData. Industry forecasters related that puts auto sales on track by reason of full-year 2008 sales of around 14.5 million, which would be the worst polishing in 15 years.

There was one, albeit slim, ray of hope. Honda Motor (HMC), which includes Honda and Acura, scratched out a meager 1.1% sales amelioration, to a June attestation 142,539. Sales of its tiny Fit model more than doubled, to 10,003 for the month, the company said. Sales of its popular Accord were likewise strong, posting a 9% gain over June 2007. Like every other maker, its pickups tanked, with sales of the Ridgeline plummeting 41.5% for the month. Nevertheless, for the first half, Honda was up 4.1%, to 798,358.

Following the direction this year, sales of traditional full-size pickups and SUVs are off the mostly, in favor of more fuel-efficient unimportant cars. But most troubling of all for the industry are the customers who simply aren’t buying anything, despite resurrection discounts.

"If the overall market is 14 million, that’s 3 million less than it was just a couple of years ago. That’s going to put character impressed on each segment of the market, not just trucks," says Mark LaNeve, vice-president, General Motors North America vehicle sales, service, and marketing.

U.S. light-truck sales dropped 28.4% in June, to 528,060, AutoData before-mentioned. Car sales were along the course of 7.9% from the year-ago month, to 661,048.

General Motors’ (GM) sales fell 18.2% in June from the year-ago month, to 262,329. GM results would have been even worse had it not been for the company’s "72-hour sale" in the last few days of the month, offering 0% financing by reason of up to 72 months, to get an in season start on clearing out 2008 models.

The company has extended the sale through the long July 4 weekend. "The older models are not going to beget any prettier or less of great price during the time that the summer moves put in succession," LaNeve says. "Right now is the best time to move them. Every day that goes by, theoretically, it gets added expensive to move them," with discounts, he says. LaNeve says the 72-month financing wasn’t for example wasteful as it looked—because GM was already offering up to 60 months of 0% financing on many of the same models.

Business schools should create three kinds of value: academic, exterior, and social. All are important

by Michael Hay

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Michael Hay

Over the last century, business schools have emerged to cover the world, apparently from nowhere. The Association against the Advancement of Collegiate Schools of Business has now accredited 500 institutions in 30 countries.

India is rightful one example of this phenomenon. In 2006 the Association of MBAs accredited its first MBA program in India at the Management Development Institute in Gurgaon—one of more than 1,000 homegrown MBA catamenia in the land. China has also embraced business schools. China Europe International Business School, in the Pudong district of Shanghai, dates back to 1994 and is now ranked among the top 20 schools worldwide. Russia is in like manner a pursuit school convert, with the Russian government now investing heavily in business education. Indeed, the number of countries exclusively of business schools or business school affiliations and links is into disrepute to a handful of politically extreme or militarily volatile nations.

As business schools expand in India, Asia, and beyond, we need to wish a better shared notion of their purpose allowing that we are to maximize their impact. Until we identify the purpose of vocation schools we are, metaphorically, building them upon the body sand.

Put at its simplest: I believe the plan of a business school is to create value. I distinguish between three types of value.

First, business schools create academic value through research and its dissemination.

Certain kinds of research will be value-creating primarily through the way in that the scrutiny moves the boundaries of literary perception and understanding. Other kinds of scrutiny will have a more immediate impact without ceasing transaction, its conduct, and performance. Ted Levitt’s early be in action on the then-emerging phenomenon of globalization is one example, and a great deal of of the business school research into domination fits this description. An extra kind of research self-reliance create value for both other academics operating in the kitchen-yard and practitioners. Most famously, the Black-Scholes option pricing model originated in the academic work of Fischer Black and Myron Scholes.

The challenge is to cozen inquiry that is both rigorous and relevant—research that is anchored in theory but oriented toward practice.

For this to be realized, there has to be a unmistakable commitment to fostering a research environment and culture that values quite types of research so long as it is of the highest quality.

Second, business schools create personal value through their teaching. For our students, personal value derives from the discernment and skills they develop while studying. Knowledge and skills, contemporaneously with the development of more individual personal attributes, provide the springboard for building satisfying and rewarding careers. Good teaching is founded on a clear apprehension of the sort of knowledge and skills that will be needed for individuals to come on in the contemporary appointment. Good teaching is informed by the insights of examination.

But it is not suitable current students for whom a school creates personal value. In the changing world of work, a world characterized by more liquid and gaseous, plural careers, in that place is an absolute premium without interruption maintaining some’s personal employability. And the guide to this is the connected acquisition of new knowledge and the development of new skills relevant to today’s world. It is for this reason that one of the greatest challenges facing business schools is the progressive growth of truly valuable lifelong learning opportunities.

The final element in the value-creating purpose of business schools is social value. Business schools create social value by means of producing graduates who are well trained and who can make a significant individual contribution: people with the capacity to enhance the value-creating capacity of any organization in which they drudge; who start their acknowledge businesses and create jobs, wealth, and renovated opportunities; or who engage in the select of work that has some immediate impact on the people policy. And of course successful calling schools create social value through academic research that advances the boundaries of understanding and enlightens direction practice.

But there is one more greater amount of specific dimension of social value creation. This has to do with a more active battle of business schools in the communities in what one. they are based, end supporting community programs and those who labor in the nonprofit sector. The notion of social value is also allied to the growing interest now paid to incorporated social responsibility in the business universe. Organizations must offer something back to the communities they operate in and, more often than ever before, come under pressure from their shareholders to do so. Increasingly, employment schools are finding themselves under the spotlight from both current students and alumni to demonstrate their commitment to creating social value, together with the academic and personal value that has for so spun out been their raison d’être.

The challenge for each and each business exercise is to clearly articulate how it creates value along these three dimensions: academic esteem, personal value, and social value. Each educate must know and communicate how it positions itself in conditions of appreciate creation. What does it do to originate cost? How does it do so and how is that distinctive? What is its position in each of the three dimensions of value creation?

The answers to these questions faculty of volition be—must be—different for each business school. There may have existence differences of emphasis: One may outstrip at scrutiny, another in creating individual esteem, another may differentiate itself through a focus on festive value. To take the place of, a successful school must operate successfully in all three dimensions. The potential contribution of business schools to future economic and social development is too large for these questions to be ignored or unresolved.

As the weather heats up, cocktail extinction rises—as does the level of mixological creativity

by means of Nick Passmore

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If anyone is in any doubt touching the continued rise, and rise, of the cocktail phenomenon in American improvement, or at least in those parts of it in what place the consumption of liquor is taken seriously, he need only consider the recent announcement that the Museum of the American Cocktail will open the doors of its "spectacular" new home in New Orleans this July. Can a Cocktail Hall of Fame be almost behind?

As Frank Coleman of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS) points out: "It’s just amazing what has happened over the hold out five years in the cocktail world. You have high-end mixologists [the term itself is the result of the cocktail marvel] gaining the same kind of status that chefs received 10 years ago; they’ve become celebrities."

And it’s not limited to upscale bars in New York and San Francisco—it’s happening in major metropolitan areas across the country. For Mike Bernstein, director of media and communications for Bahama Breeze, a chain of 23 race restaurants run by Darden Restaurants (DRI), it’s about moving cocktails upscale, and continually looking in quest of ways to provide variety. "Without a indecision we are seeing an increasing interest in new and innovative cocktails amongst our customers."

Hard numbers to patronage these observations are not available because it’s not possible to count the calculate of cocktails shaken, stirred, and poured, or to separate out a true cocktail from a mundane Scotch and soda, but there is a mighty amount of anecdotal evidence, and divisible by two some pretty good surrogate numbers.

As Steve Walkerwicz, vice-president for on-premise customer marketing at Pernod Ricard USA, enthuses: "The resurgence of the classic cocktail is extremely refreshing for the industry. It’s happening and it’s happening in a full way."

This is most clearly shown in the song for flavored vodkas, which are primarily used as cocktail ingredients. For Walkerwicz, "The growth of flavored vodkas has reshaped the predicable, and, for the most part, flavors have driven the growth of the overall brand." He is referring to Pernod Ricard’s Stolichnaya, flavored versions of that account for other than one-third of the reproach.’s sales—even greater degree in the on-premise gutter.

This trend applies across the whole industry, with DISCUS numbers showing sales of flavored vodkas rising from 8% of the rank in 2000, to 14% in 2007.

For Michael O’Donohue, a corporate director at Starwood Hotels’ (HOT) Luxury Brands Group, what one. includes the St. Regis and W hotels, it’s every part of encircling coat. This may sound bland, but confabulation to any dangerous bartender and he’ll soon begin to wax lyrical about the good ice, especially immense, devoid of warmth cubes of the stuff. "Ice plays such each prominent role in the cocktail," explains O’Donohue. "If you have very cold, inch-and-a-quarter cubes, they keep the tipple colder and it doesn’t get watered down as fast." Ice plays such some important role, in fact, that he has plans to introduce new coat machines at all his properties.

Then there’s the revenue aspect of the cocktail phenomenon. Spirits have always commanded a higher markup than food, wine, or beer but, as O’Donohue points out, "When you’re making a startling, handcrafted cocktail, you’re going to be able to get more riches for it than you were five years ago for a be a toper that had maybe just two ingredients."

When I asked Philip Ward, head bartender at Death & Company, a trendy bar in New York’s East Village, what’s hot in cocktails at the moment, I expected a list of ingredients or a advise on a particular method of backhanded shaking, but the sort of I got was considerably more philosophical. For Ward, the hottest incline is: "People are making more good drinks. Every year we get more bars making good drinks, and even bars that aren’t making real good drinks are making a little better drinks. More places are pushing the envelope."

This summer his envelope-pushing involves playing around by swizzles—copious, tall summer coolers over crushed ice. These are work of the first class Caribbean drinks made in lofty glasses, but instead of jolting or stirring the ingredients he mixes them with a swizzle stick. Whether his wooden swizzle sticks, specially imported for him from the Caribbean, devise make it to the Museum of the American Cocktail remains to be seen, but his two concoctions included in the accompanying slip show would have existence worthy Hall of Fame contenders.

See our slide show for 10 of the summer’s best cocktails.

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Police told couple Queen Anne women to get their blinds fixed after the women reported seeing one of their neighbors looking at them through the window with binoculars.

The neighbor, whose wife told officers she should have called police on the girls for “putting on a show” by walking around naked or in sexy lingerie, was told through officers responding to the call to put the binoculars not present.

Seattle police responded to the call on Queen Anne Avenue North on June 22 when one of the girls reported seeing the neighbor looking at her through binoculars.

She also told police she had seen the liege looking into her window with the aid of a flashlight.

Responding officers at the women’s apartment said they saying the neighbor coop up the blinds of his window when they looked outside.

The man, and his consort, acknowledged they had seen the women through their windows.

The wife said it was hard not to intimation because one of the women was always “putting put attached a show.”

The women said the blinds were broken excepting that they would ask their landlord to make repairs.

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Seattle police shot and wounded a suspect following a bank depredation and track that wound from West Seattle to downtown shortly after 10 a.m.

The wounded man is in critical condition at Harborview Medical Center after being shot in the neck, authorities said. Police say he robbed the bank then hopped at the back the wheel when his getaway driver fled.

The FBI this afternoon identified the wounded man as Douglas Michael Cox, 50.

A second man arrested in connection with the bank spoliation was identified as Kevin V. Palmer, 43. According to the state Department of Corrections, his criminal memory includes convictions for theft, possession of surreptitious property and cocaine ownership.

Cox was wounded by gunfire from officers who surrounded the Jeep Cherokee at First Avenue and Spring Street. Cox reportedly ignored several holy orders to surrender and raised his hands, displaying a handgun. Officers, two Seattle police officers and unit King County sheriff’s deputy, then opened fire at the car, police declared.

Witness Jim Rulf was in an office building at First and Spring at what time he looked outside and saw at least 10 police cars and several motorcycle officers surround the gold Jeep Cherokee. He said officers shot numerous gunshots into the Jeep.

“You could see the policemen in firing positions and you could hear the shots,” Rulf said.

Fearing wandering gunshots, Rulf told everyone in his office to hit the floor.

A man seated in a nearby car was negligently injured with stray shrapnel, police said.

Palmer was arrested earlier near Yesler Terrace hinder he jumped out of the Jeep, police said.

The robbery occurred at a Wells Fargo Bank branch in the 2300 block of California Avenue Southwest in West Seattle shortly on the model of 10 a.m.

FBI Special Agent Robbie Burroughs said a man dressed in a brown woman’s peruke, sunglasses, a black short coat and pants with black shoe polish smeared across his cheeks and chin burst into the Wells Fargo Bank branch in West Seattle. The man, identified in the same proportion that Cox, was armed and carried a sullen garbage bag.

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As many as 12,000 Starbucks workers will lose their jobs when the society begins closing 600 U.S. supplies this summer.

The Seattle coffee company is cutting 5 percent of its U.S. locations like element of a wide-ranging trial to boost its bottom line and its stock price. The chain is accelerating international growth.

Most customers whose Starbucks stores close will be a short walk from a caffeine fix, the concourse said, because frequent of the unprofitable stores were being cannibalized by nearby Starbucks locations.

The company will try to find jobs for persons within Starbucks, moreover that could be difficult with fewer than 350 unaccustomed U.S. stores expected to open in the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.

About 200 of those will be quickly operated by Starbucks, with the rest managed by other companies like bookstores and airport yielding firms.

As much as 7 percent of Starbucks’ be force could be slashed. The company had 172,000 employees worldwide last September.

Starbucks officials said the closures are happening in “all major U.S. markets” betwixt late July and March. Florida and California are among the largest states affected, spokeswoman Valerie O’Neil told Bloomberg News.

There were 2,496 supplies in California and 625 in Florida in March. Those two states have been especially calamitous hit by the agency of the real-estate downturn and credit crisis.

“By far, this is the principally angst-ridden decision we have made in my more than 25 years with Starbucks,” Chief Executive Howard Schultz wrote to employees in a message posted on the company’s Web site.

“[B]ut we realize that part of transforming a company is our ability to look forward, while pursuing radically new measure and given to reflection, in various cases, through 20/20 hindsight, on the decisions that we made in the past, both good and bad.”

Starbucks originally had planned to clinch 100 underperforming U.S. stores as division of a turnaround strategy begun when Schultz resumed leading the group in January.

Investors cheered the additional 500 closures, what one. were announced after regular trading hours Tuesday. After closing down 12 cents to $15.62, shares shot up 72 cents to $16.34 in after-hours trading.

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Starbucks continues to shrink its empire in an effort to turn around profits and a stagnant stock price.

The Seattle coffee gang announced this afternoon that it will close approximately 600 underperforming company-operated stores in the United States in the next nine months, 500 more than it had already targeted.

It also expects to open fewer than 200 new U.S. company-operated stores during its 2009 fiscal year, that starts Oct. 1.

“In January, we committed to transforming the company through a series of critical and strategic initiatives to improve the current state of our U.S. duty and model the business for the long term,” Howard Schultz, chairman, president and chief executory, said in a prepared statement.

The closures are “significant, but a relatively trifling percentage of the stock base,” said John Owens, an algebraist at the research firm Morningstar in Chicago.

“By most companies’ standards, it looks like a actually big number, but the supplementary 500 stores represent about 7 percent of U.S. company-operated stores, 4 percent of total U.S. supplies and 3 percent of global stores,” Owens said.

Nearly three-quarters of the stores being closed were opened since October 2005, the company said. That means about one in five stores open since then are being shuttered, Owens figured.

“They probably made some poverty-stricken real order decisions, and when they opened stores in fiscal 2006, they probably didn’t anticipate how tough the economy would subsist and how the lightning-flash would be struggling,” he said.

Andy Cross, a senior analyst at The Motley Fool in Alexandria, Va., said the tell off of closures was “a little disgraceful” partly for the cause that new Starbucks supplies in his superficial contents “continue to have existence packed.”

“But given the environment we’re in, nothing really surprises me anymore,” he reported.

Starbucks said it will take pretax charges of about $328 million to $348 million as a be the effect of the closures, including $8 million in separation costs and $120 the public to $140 million in lease termination costs and coming events let obligations.

Starbucks said it will trial to find jobs within the company for those working at the stores that have a mind be closing.

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