In what officials say is the biggest cheating scandal in the school’s history, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business found that 34 first-year M.B.A. students cheated on a take-home test, according to The News & Observer, a newspaper in Raleigh, N.C.

Though the test was open book, the professor (whom business-school officials would not identify) noticed an uncanny level of similarity in many of the answers. The school’s judicial board conducted hearings and found the 34 students guilty of inappropriate collaboration on the test. The hearings exonerated four other students.

Nine of the convicted students are facing expulsion, a school official said, and 15 students are to be suspended from the school for one year. In other punishments, nine students will receive a failing grade in the course, and one will receive a failing grade on the exam. The students are likely to appeal. —Jeffrey R. Young