Academic Integrity Summary

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This essay is based on the video clip “Academic Integrity: The Bridge to Professional Ethics” specifically the first scenario in the video. In this video a group of students are given a take home examination, the students are told not to work together on this assignment. One of the students finds while studying find an old text book in the library which contains working solutions to the exam problems. He then shares this information with another student and this information eventually gets back to the professor. There are several ethical issues which arise in this scenario and I will attempt to address them here.
In the first scene we have the students meeting and discussing the take home exam noting that their professor has specifically said …show more content…

Mark thinks that these perfect scores will reflect badly on him, he asks the question to Professor Miller “shouldn’t these be your own questions?” I think this is a very important question. As a professional the teacher has a set of internal ethics that combined with his skill set make him competent in his role. He will also have a code of ethics which are appointed by his particular university although in this example we are unable to determine what these are. In terms of general morality the professor has not made an ethical wrong in using these old problems in his exam. His issue here is more of a role specific or internal ethical problem. In this case by using old exam papers the professor has brought into question the academic integrity of his course. The professor has inadvertently given some students an unfair advantage over others by having the exam questions available in the public space. Specifically for the students the got hold of this information it has completely undermined the principal of this exam (and to some extent the entire paper), which is to encourage students to review and learn the course material and then measure how well they have learned the material. Allowing these exam questions to be discovered by student’s means some students have only been tested on how well they can directly copy down …show more content…

While this is very true that the morally correct action for the students is to turn over this knowledge to the professor and let him deal with the situation, the fact is the professor could have taken simple steps to assure that he never put the students into this moral dilemma. By using these old questions he has created a situation where his students must act against their own self-interest in order to do the morally correct

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