Developing ethics codes and statements of values  (Page 10/11)

Exercise 8: assessing the uprm college of business administration statement of values

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 achnowledgment? 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.?