Case 2: The Ethics of Requiring Students To Subsidize a Plagiarism-Detection Ser
ID: 432638 • Letter: C
Question
Case 2: The Ethics of Requiring Students To Subsidize a Plagiarism-Detection Service
Background
You are the chair of your university’s nine-member Student Council. The purpose of the Student Council is to give students a voice in university governance. The university’s administration often presents to the Student Council its ideas on ways to improve students’ academic and social lives. The Student Council then discusses these ideas and sometimes solicits the views of the entire student body before responding to the administration.
The subject of this month’s meeting is a letter from the Provost, Mary Lingram, to you as the chair of the Student Council. In the letter (Document 2.1), Provost Lingram discusses the university’s plan to reduce plagiarism by purchasing a site license to CopyCatcher.com, a plagiarism-detection service.
You distribute copies of the letter to the other members of the Student Council, and you can see that they don’t look happy. After a minute, you ask, “What do you think?”
Crystal Noack responds first. “Well, speaking as someone who’s over twenty thousand dollars in debt,” she says, pausing for effect, “I’m not wild about paying a for-profit company to check up on whether I’m plagiarizing.”
“Yeah,” agrees Adam Levanger, “I don’t plagiarize. How is it fair that I have to pay?”
“How do we even know how big a problem plagiarism is in the first place?” Laura Kim asks. “The Provost didn’t say anything about how pervasive it is here.”
Sa’id Hamdi says, “What about my rights as a student? I don’t get a say in whether my paper gets uploaded to CopyCatcher? Isn’t there an intellectual-property issue here?”
“Okay, it seems that this is kind of complicated,” you say. “How about we do this: Let’s take a look at the site and see if we can understand how it works. By Monday I’ll write a post to our discussion list, soliciting your arguments. I think the best strategy is to look at the ethics of how this would affect us, not the cost—”
“That’s right,” Adam interrupts. “Six bucks a year is three coffees.”
“Okay,” you continue. “If we don’t like it, it has to be because it violates our rights, or something like that. So let’s come at this from the ethics angle. But we need to think about what the Provost said about how it’s in everyone’s best interest if people realize we’re not all a bunch of cheaters. If you all post to the list by the end of the week, I’ll post a draft of a letter to the Provost by Monday. Then we’ll take it from there.”
Reflecting on Your Work
Were you initially in support of Provost Lingram’s proposal, or did you share the concerns of the students in the case scenario? Did your opinion about the proposal change after you considered it from the perspective of the four ethical standards? Why or why not? Did you find using the standards to be an effective method of ethical evaluation? In the text box below, write a reflection of one or two paragraphs about what you learned from analyzing the ethical implications of the provost’s request.
Document 2.1 Body of Letter to Student Council from Provost Lingram As you know, the chief responsibility of all educators at the university is to ensure that students receive the best education possible. Although a university education consists of many experiences that occur outside the classroom, the core element is to help students learn how to think critically, creatively, and responsibly about the world and their role in it. To this end, the ability to write clearly and originally is fundamentally important I write to you today to solicit the Student Council's views on an idea we are considering to confront an insidious threat to the success of our shared mission: plagiarism. Plagiarism-the use of another's words and ideas without proper attribution-has long been a threat to the integrity of writing by students and professionals alike. In the age of the Internet, however, with easy access to term-paper mills, plagiarism has become an epidemic on campuses all across the countrv At the suggestion of a number of department chairs representing all four of our academic colleges, I am investigating the purchase of a site license to CopyCatcher.com, the leading plagiarism-detection service. With a site license, any instructor in any department on campus carn upload papers to CopyCatcher and quickly receive a report indicating whether the papers are original or contain plagiarized writing In these times of economic austerity, the university cannot afford to purchase this site license out of the existing operating budget. Therefore, we are considering proposing a $3 increase in the student fee paid each semester by full-time students and a $2 increase for part-time students. The administration believes that CopyCatcher can be a highly effective tool in reducing the incidence of plagiarism on campus, thus helping us educate our students in the norms of academic conduct. In addition, reducing plagiarism will have the effect of protecting the students' investment in their education by ensuring that we maintain our well-earned reputation with graduate schools and employers for educating honest, skilled, and thoughtful leaders of tomorrow Would you please let me know the Student Council's views on this idea before the end of the month? Sincerely, Mary Lingram, ProvostExplanation / Answer
Supporting provosts proposal could not be feasible for many of the students as it would add button on the students for those who don't even use Plagiarism checker. As imposing fee on each and everybody in the university would be an ethical as well as it would reduce the impact of availability for a fair decision making for all the students involved in the university.
Plagiarism checker should be purchased by organisation as a mask subscription for improving the overall availability of educational services rather than imposing the free on the students for making education better.
Ethical implications regarding this implementation involve greeting each and every student in the university from the same perspective as creating a better quality of the educational services is responsibility of University hence provision of the Plagiarism program subscription should also be included in the educational structure of the university rather than putting a burden on students to purchase the specific product and increase the level of fee. As many of the students are already in debt paying education loan hence application of such a specific mandatory purchase of a plagiarism checker program would not be feasible or ethical by any means.
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