This module modifies the decision making format published earlier in Connexions under the title, "Ethical Decision Making in Engineering." Students are presented with four cases involving challenges to academic integrity, Treasures from Troy, The Free Rider?, A Different Kind of Recycling, and Teachers Fight Back. Each of these decision scenarios provides a narrative that is terminated at a point of decision. Students are required to make a decision to bring the narrative to completion. To help focus matters, each decision scenario is followed by solution alternatives. Students are invited to evaluate and rank these alternatives in terms of three ethics tests (reversibility, harm/beneficence, and publicity). Another test, a feasibility test, invites students to think carefully about whether their ethical solution can be implemented and what kind of obstacles are likely to arise in its implementation. Each decision scenario/solution alternatives/test description set is followed by a solution evaluation matrix, a table where students discuss and evaluate the alternatives in terms of their ethics and feasibility. The final page of this activity provides a short history of each scenario.
This module is designed to help you become aware of ethical issues that arise on a day-to-day basis in the context of practical and professional activities such as business, science, engineering, and computing. You will look at brief scenarios and then discuss how realistic they are, whether they portray ethical or unethical activities, and whether there is agreement or discord within your practical or professional community on these issues. This module was developed during a retreat funded by the National Science Foundation and held in Puerto Rico (NSF SBR-9810253). Its appearance in Connexions is part of the NSF-funded EAC (ethics across the curriculum) Toolkit, NSF SES 0551779.
In the summer of 2006, the University of Notre Dame initiated a program under which all new undergraduates had to pass an online honor code orientation prior to finalizing their class registration. Students were presented with eight fictional cases and asked to choose among four responses indicating whether a violation of our honor code had occurred and why (or why not). Only one of the four responses was correct. To pass the orientation, students needed to get at least six of the eight correct responses. The impetus for this program came from our recognition that too many of our students were arriving on campus having given little or no thought either to the standards of honesty they should be upholding or to the way those standards are manifested in our honor code. A new pamphlet, The Student Guide to the Academic Code of Honor, which presents the information students most need to know concerning our honor code, is now distributed to all students. Students are instructed to attempt this orientation only after they have read the Student Guide. This orientation was designed so that students who had not looked at the Student Guide were unlikely to succeed. Hence, our hope is that the online orientation will ensure that our new students have both thought about issues related to academic integrity and familiarized themselves with the most significant particulars of our honor code.
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