On April 26, 2007 Marilee Jones, MIT’s Dean of Admissions and advocate of decreasing the pressure on high school students to create five-star resumes in order to be accepted by elite colleges and universities, resigned after admitting that she herself had lied in her own resume. Jones claimed to have degrees from Union College, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Albany Medical College.

In reality, Jones does not hold any undergraduate degree at all, though she was a student at Rensselaer for a year. The first MIT position that Jones applied for was as an administrative assistant, a job that did not require a college degree. But Jones claimed on her resume to have one, and did not correct that misrepresentation when she was later considered for MIT positions that did require a degree.

Is Marilee Jones another example of a smart person who did a dumb thing? “She’s really smart… very creative,” Michael Behnke, the admissions dean at the University of Chicago and Ms. Jones’s predecessor at MIT was quoted as saying (Wall Street Journal April 27, 2007).

Or do Marilee Jones’ actions only seem dumb because she was caught?

In 2002, a survey of over 12,000 high school students found that 41% of college-bound students agreed that “A person has to lie or cheat sometimes in order to succeed,” up from 34% who had agreed with that statement two years earlier (study conducted by the Josephson Institute of Ethics).

When lying on resumes and college applications comes to be viewed as something that “everybody does” then it’s easy to conclude that you’d be foolish not to do the same. Honesty places you at a disadvantage. Perhaps that’s why David Edmondson, former Chief Executive of RadioShack lied about having a college degree and motivational speaker Dennis Waitley claimed a degree he hadn’t received.

Unethical actions appear “dumb” when the individual is found out and pays a big price for their dishonesty. But unethical actions appear “smart” when individuals not only get away with deception, but reap benefits from it.

Being smart is not the same thing as being ethical. To some people, being smart means doing whatever it takes to maximize your personal advantage – without getting caught.

Being ethical means something different. It means having the integrity to do the right thing even when it’s not the “smartest” thing to do in that situation. And when we’ve succumbed to the all-too-human temptation to gain an advantage in a competitive situation, being ethical means having the courage to admit what we’ve done and try to correct it. It was this courage that Marilee Jones lacked at the crucial moment. “I misrepresented my academic degrees when I first applied to MIT 28 years ago and did not have the courage to correct my resume when I applied for my current job or at any time since,” Jones said.

Did a blind spot affect Marilee Jones? Her initial decision to falsify her credentials, made as a much younger, inexperienced woman 28 years earlier, is likely an example of a foolish choice made because she failed to consider all the possible repercussions. Marilee Jones didn’t stop to think. And “not stopping to think” is a blind spot — it reveals, as David Perkins of Harvard University discovered in his research, our tendency to miss seeing a “thinking opportunity.” Marilee Jones ultimately paid a high price for her failure to stop and think.