PSU Ethics - Decision Processes

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MP3s on Campus
This case describes actions taken by Carnegie Mellon University in an effort to curb sharing of illegally copied music files. It also suggests methods that are being proposed to be followed by universities in an attempt to curb the copyright infringement that is occurring. The hopes of these methods are to teach students that they will be in the same place as the recording industry some day, in that they will be creating work that they will want protected. Being that this topic has affected Penn State directly, and that MP3s are extremely popular among college students, this case study would produce a great amount of student participation.

This case study was submitted by Robert F. Ladenson (ladenson@iit.edu). He is from the Department of Philosophy Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), and Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), and Faculty Associate, Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions (IIT).

The SAT and Gender
This case points out that females consistently score lower than males in the SATs. It also states that the SATs supposedly foreshadow how students will perform during their first year of college but not necessarily throughout the remainder of their college careers. However, studies have shown that generally females receive better grades than males during their first year of college. Leslie R. Wolfe, President of the Center for Women Policy Studies, is calling for the College Board, which prepares the SAT, to eliminate the gap in female and male students' scores by replacing questions on which male students regularly score better than female students. This is obviously a request that is open to much discussion, especially among students that have recently taken the SATs to get into college.

Financial Aid
This study describes the admissions policy of Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. The admissions policy is based on the financial ability the student has to attend the school. It admits as many students without looking at need as its financial aid budget allows, offering these students enough money to attend. Once the budget is exhausted, however, the college only admits students who need a grant of $2,000 or less to pay the amount a student needs to cover tuition and living expense costs at Carleton. The question at hand is whether or not this policy is fair. This issue is relevant to students that require financial aid, in addition to the remainder of the students who can sympathetically imagine being in that scenario.

Equal Opportunity
This case discusses Title IX of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964, which deals with sex discrimination in education. This states that colleges receiving federal funds must provide equal opportunity in intercollegiate athletics for members of both sexes. In other words, the male/female participation in athletics must be proportional to the amount of male/female students. The fairness of this proportionality requirement on intercollegiate athletics is the issue at hand. Since Penn State is a university that is greatly involved in sports, this case would be interesting to the students.

Testing by a CO-OP Student
This case concerns the falsifying of data by a co-op which lead to a failure in an engineering prototype for a field test of a new appliance model for the XYZ company. Because of a lack of time, a co-op was given the opportunity to run stress tests on a component. The prototype was being constructed concurrently and would not be released until all tests on the new component came back positive. The tests all ran successfully and the component was placed into the prototype. The prototype would not operate as the new component tested by the co-op caused failure in several of the other components. Upon looking at the data notebook of the co-op, all results showed the tests of the component as successful, so the engineers deduced that the co-op had "faked" the results. There are several questions that can be raised from this case: What ethical issues, if any, does this scenario raise? What comments would you make about the supervision given co-op students at XYZ? Should the university be made aware of the performance of its co-op?

Dr. Gale Cutler, a management consultant in St. Joseph, Michigan, originally prepared this case. It was published in Research Technology Management, May/June, 1988, p. 50.

Request from a former Student
A prominent professor headed a research project that involved an undergraduate student assistant. It was an honor to be the student selected for this position. The student selected was very enthusiastic about the project at first, but as time went by, he became bored and tired of the work. The student abandoned the project leaving it incomplete. A year the later, that same student was now a graduate student at another university. He wrote to the professor and requested a copy of the final project that they had worked on together. He admitted his immaturity level in the past and apologized for abandoning the project. Because of this admittance, the professor decided to give the student the benefit of the doubt and sent him a copy of the final report. Several years later the professor found out that the student had used the report as his Master's Thesis -- adding only a couple of introductory paragraphs, a concluding section, and an updated bibliography. No credit was given to the professor at all. What should the professor do? Since plagiarism is a constant temptation for students, this would be a relevant topic to cover.

Prepared with James Jaksa.

TA Grading Party
This case concerns a group of teaching assistants getting drunk while they graded exams. There was a group of about fifteen teaching assistants that decided to bring in alcohol to their grading session. As a result, several exams were left completely un-graded while others were only partially graded. On a whole, all of the exams were sloppily marked and the integrity of the exams was jeopardized. One TA came forward to the Professor about the situation because she was left to deal with the remainder of the exams. This study raises several ethical questions: Was it right for the TA to come forward? What should the professor do in this situation? Should all of the exams be graded again? What should be done to the teaching assistants that participated in this so-called party? Since students rely on the teaching assistants to carefully grade their work, students would be very interested in this case. Students would have a lot to say about careless activities that affect them directly.

Clyde Freeman Herreid of the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, originally prepared this case.

Penn State is committed to affirmative action, equal opportunity, and the diversity of its workforce.

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