Honesty on your resume

It’s a Saturday afternoon in January, and I’m reviewing the eighth undergraduate resume this weekend; the 30th so far this month. Students interested in jobs and internships with finance firms send me resumes by e-mail, bring resumes to my office hours and occasionally slide resumes under my office door. By Spring break (at which point the recruiting season for banking internships will be largely over), I will have provided feedback on more than 100 junior and sophomore resumes. I suspect that I am one of a relatively small number of Duke faculty members who see both undergraduate resumes and those same students’ transcripts on a regular basis.  

Unfortunately, this means that I am also one of a very few individuals to be in a position to spot discrepancies between students’ actual GPAs and those they report when they apply for jobs. This type of behavior is—thankfully—extremely rare, but it is not unheard of.   

Which brings me back to that eighth resume of the day. I’ve seen this student’s resume in earlier semesters, and I’m blessed (or, perhaps, cursed) with an elephantine memory for numbers. Something about this student’s GPA number doesn’t feel right—even allowing for the fact that GPAs change on a semester-by-semester basis. I look him up in the system. Unfortunately the reported and actual GPAs differ by more than 0.5; a significant revision. This student may be hoping to improve his chances of obtaining interviews by “revising” that single, allegedly all-important measure of overall academic prowess.  

Academic honesty is frequently alluded to during undergraduate life. Many faculty remind students of its importance by requiring them to sign honor code statements on their coursework or exams. Resume accuracy also falls under the Duke Community Standard, but students are reminded of this fact less frequently. Resume creation is often a solitary exercise; not one that is evaluated and graded by a member of the faculty. So the rare student who misrepresents her GPA (or other information) may not realize that falsification of data from an official Duke document (such as a transcript) is also a violation of the DCS. Furthermore, a student who lies on her resume and gets away with it might then assume that she can continue to be “economic with the truth” in her professional life.  

There lies the start of a perilous path. We all see stories of those apparently brilliant investors who, it later transpires, fiddled the numbers in some colossal scam. Madoff is not the only recent example; think of Brian Hunter, the commodities trader who brought down Amaranth in 2006, and Jerome Kerviel, the “rogue trader” at Societe Generale two year later. And these are just a few of the famous ones. There are also dozens of such cases every year that do not make the front page, but do result in jail time for the hapless cheat. I myself have seen someone marched off a trading floor, escorted by burly individuals in security uniforms.   

So I hope that this article will remind all students of the importance of a code of honor throughout their lives, and in all aspects of their experience: personal, academic, professional. This should be a part of what you take away from your time at Duke—a lesson that will stay with you even when the last remnants of organic chemistry and principles of economics have been forgotten.

Emma Rasiel is the associate director of undergraduate studies and an assistant professor of economics.