Focus on business ethics has increased however, incidents of academic dishonesty among business school students has also increased at the same time. Simply adding ethics courses to business programs appears to offer little guidance for student action, action that is transferred from the university to the business world. More is needed if we wish to reduce academic dishonesty while increasing the character of our students. Two hundred and four participants from a private, mid-western university were asked to classify 22 acts as influencing or deterring their decision to engage in academic dishonesty. These acts were coded according to Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development and were organized along structural/contextual dimensions. Findings indicated that students operate at lower levels of moral development than Kohlberg has previously found and they respond to structural dimensions such as rules, policies and punishments when considering academic dishonesty while the lack of these dimensions facilitates academic dishonesty. The role of virtue ethics education as a moderator to this relationship was proposed.