This exercise offers four scenarios in academic integrity. Your job is to discuss each scenario in terms of the values listed in the UPRM College of Business Administration Statement of Values (available via the PREREQUISITE LINKS).
Marta Acevedo, a business administration student, has a report due tomorrow. She has been overwhelmed for the last few weeks with assignments from other classes and doesn't really have time to complete this exercise. She discovers that her roommate took this same class the previous semester and has a complete report on disk. She considers using her roommate's report. Should she? What would you do if you were her?
- Is Marta threatening any of the values listed in the ADEM SOV? Which ones?
- What can be done prevent this kind of problem from arising in the first place? Should Marta have planned her course load better when registering? Can teachers coordinate to prevent overloading students with the same deadlines? Whose fault is this? The students? The teachers? The system?
- Can this problem be posed as a conflict between ADEM values and other values held by students and teachers? If so, what are values that are in conflict? How can these conflicts be addressed?
- Do you think the ADEM SOV adequately addresses this problem? If not, how can it be improved?
You are head of your department. A recent study has revealed that plagiarism, which is a university-wide problem, is especially bad in your department. Imagine your relief when a member of your faculty brings you his latest software project, a super-effective and comprehensive anti-plagiarism software program. This program does everything. It detects subtle changes in style in student papers. Its new search engine quickly connects to existing online paper data bases, greatly expanding the ability of a professor to detect the sources from which their students have copied. Furthermore, it allows professors to upload papers and projects from past semesters and provides fast and flexible indexing to help them identify recycled student work. Professors can zero in on students using recycled papers, and the former students who have become their suppliers. Following the recent lead of Ohio State University, you can now revoke the degrees of past students who participate in this version of academic dishonesty. In short, this new and exciting software package allows you to monitor the work of present and past students to a degree thought impossible even in the recent past. "Plagiarism," your colleague tells you, "will now become a thing of the past."
- Does this anti-plagiarism program threaten any of the values in the ADEM SOV? If so, which values?
- Is the department chairperson treating students disrespectfully by adopting and implementing the anti-plagiarism software? Can faculty treat students disrespectfully as "justifiable" retaliation for student cheating and plagiaring? Do two wrongs make a right?
- What is the cause of plagiarism? Do students do it out of ignorance of standards and practices of documentation and acknowledgment? Do they do it because they procrastinate until they do not have time to do the assignment properly? Do students resort to plagiarism because they have too many conflicting obligations such as family, job, large course loads, etc.?
You teach an advanced course in Engineering Economics that has both graduate and undergraduate students. At the end of the semester the students turn in a group project that comprises 40% of their grade. One of the groups complains to you that only 4 out of the 5 members have done any work. The fifth student, the one who allegedly has done no work, is an undergraduate. The others are graduate students. You talk with the undergraduate who claimed that she tried to involve herself in the group activities but was excluded because she was an undergraduate. What should you do?
- ADEM faculty have identified students not working together effectively in groups as a major concern. Do you find this a problem? What do you think are the causes of students not participating effectively in work groups?
- Assume that the teacher in this case is committed to implementing the ADEM SOV. Which values are at play in this case? Design an action for the teacher that realizes these values?
- Assume you are a member of this student work group. What can groups do to ensure that every member is able to participate fully? What do group members do to exclude individuals from participating?
You are studying frantically for your exam in a computer engineering course. It will be very difficult. But your roommate, who is also taking the course and has the exam tomorrow, seems unconcerned. When you ask why, he tells you that he has a copy of the exam. Apparently, a group of students in the class found out how to hack into the professor's computer and download the exam. (They installed a Trojan horse called Sub-Seven into the professor's computer which allows unauthorized access; then they searched through the professor's files, found the exam and downloaded it.) Your roommate has the exam in his hand and asks you if you would like to look at it. What should you do?
- A group of students in a computer ethics class created a survey that asked students if they would avail themselves of exams obtained through means such as that described in the scenario above. Sixty percent of the respondents said that they would. Compare this to the value commitments expressed in the ADEM SOV? Is there a gap between aspiration and behavior? What can be done to reduce this gap?
- Suppose you took the exam. Would this have any long term effects on your character? Would acting dishonestly this time make it easier to do so in the future?
- Suppose you wish to uphold standards of academic integrity in this case and not take the exam. Should you turn your roommate in to the teacher? Would keeping this exam theft a secret undermine any of the UPRM ADEM values? If so, which ones?
You have now discussed some or all of the above cases in terms of the ADEM Statement of Values. What do you think are the strengths of this document? What are its weaknesses? Do you recommend any changes? What are these?
Sources for Cases
- Case 1 has been developed by William Frey, Chuck Huff, and Jose Cruz for their book, Good Computing: A Virtue Approach to Computer Ethics. This book is currently in draft stage and is under contract with Jones and Bartlett Publishing Company.
- Cases 2 and 3 were developed by UPRM faculty teams from the College of Engineering during workshops held for the ABET 2001 Steering Committee and the Department of Industrial Engineering. These workshops took place April 6, 2001 and May 14, 2001.
- Case 4 has been modified from "The Plagiarism Detector" written by Moshe Kam. It can be found at the beginning of the ethics chapter in Practical Engineering Design, edited by Maja Bystrom and Bruce Eisenstein. Moshe Kam. "The Plagiarism Detector", in Practical Engineering Design, edited by Maja Bystrom and Bruce Eisenstein. Boca Raton, FLA: CFC Press, 2005: 27-28.
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