Students in an administrative-law course at the University of Oregon Law School got a shock last week when the school accidentally posted the entire text of a forthcoming exam on an electronic bulletin board, reports the legal blog Above the Law.
The professor, John Bonine, who was in Copenhagen for the U.N. climate conference at the time, declared the incident “a moment in academic ethics” that would define the students’ legal careers. Citing the school’s honor code, he instructed them to delete the test immediately. Those who had read it were to confess how much of the exam they had read.
“I explained that they can be denied admission to the Bar for engaging in dishonest activity, including failing to delete the exam or failing to tell me whether they read all or part of it,” Mr. Bonine told Above the Law. And even though the professor ended up giving them a different exam, he said, “each member of the class deleted the exam and emptied the computer trash, and disclosed whether they had looked at any part of it or not inadvertently.”
Above the Law’s correspondent, Elie Mystal, was skeptical: “Really, all the students deleted or honestly disclosed how they used the exam? Really? The students in that class — competitors, mind you, in a difficult job market — are supposed to just trust that everybody else was honest about this?”
Mr. Mystal says that had the same thing happened to him, he would have considered the exam to be public information. “I would have printed it out (lest the mistake be quickly corrected), and I would have used the exam as the basis for any further study for that course,” Mr. Mystal writes. “I believe in ethics. I believe in honor. But I do not believe in putting myself at a competitive disadvantage because somebody else screwed up.”
Anyone else have a real-life example of ethics in action (or ethics inaction) that they’d care to share with us? Drop us a line at tweed@chronicle.com, with “Tweed ethics” in the subject line. We’ll respect your anonymity if we end up publishing your story. —Don Troop
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8 Responses to A Real-Life Ethics Test
a1broom - December 15, 2009 at 6:57 pm
Mr. Mystal tell us, “I believe in ethics. I believe in honor. But…” I’ll cheat my butt off to gain an edge on everybody else. What kinds of ethics and honor does this guy believe in? Certainly nothing I ever heard of. Well, I guess I have heard of it – Madoff, Sanford, Woods, most of Congress…Art Broom
raymond_j_ritchie - December 15, 2009 at 10:33 pm
My experience with biology and biochemistry students has been that it makes no significant difference in marks whether you give the students the questions or not. But giving them the questions has advantages. Give out the questions at the last lecture and everyone will go home happy. The good students read them and think about how they would answer them and the poor students do not. A colleague of mine has even done simple statistics on exams where he divided his exams into “seen” and “unseen” halves and found no significant difference. That is really telling you something about the typical weak student. Furthermore, you get no students trying to claim that they failed because they studied up on the wrong things.
shuhousing - December 16, 2009 at 11:59 am
Art, I believe your comment is based on a misreading of the text. Mr. Mystal’s point was not that he would cheat, but that he doesn’t believe that *no one* would cheat by lying about whether they’d looked over the exam. In recognizing that there *are* Madoffs and Sanfords among his classmates, he proposed a much more pragmatic solution than the pollyanna-ish one used by Professor Bonine. Mr. Mystal’s honor is very much intact… and so is his competitive edge.
a1broom - December 16, 2009 at 1:28 pm
shuhousing, I believe one of us is indeed misreading the text. How can the second sentence of the penultimate paragraph be construed as anything other than a willingness to cheat by printing out the paper lest the mistake be corrected?Art
johntoradze - December 16, 2009 at 1:31 pm
“I explained that they can be denied admission to the Bar for engaging in dishonest activity, including failing to delete the exam or failing to tell me whether they read all or part of it,” Mr. Bonine told Above the Law. – I have an ethical problem with Mr. Bonine’s statement there. People have passed the bar’s moral qualification after committing a heinous crime in law school as long as they plea bargain it down to a misdemeanor, fulfill the sentence, go to therapy and lie about everything while schmoozing with the dregs of the attorney world in AA, SLAA, Narcotics Anonymous, CODA, etcetera. To suggest to law students that a minor lie on a test is going to gate them out is ridiculous. I am not saying this state of affairs is the way it should be. But the fact is that the state bar’s moral character standard is abysmally low both prior to being accepted and after becoming a member of the bar.
jcn8139 - December 16, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Ethics? Yes, this is a real test of ethics, and Professor Bonie gets an “F.” Not being a lawyer, but former professor, I can’t judge whether his profession should sanction him, but consider what he has actually perpetrated.Mr. Bonine has tried to turn his own failure to monitor and control his own course by shifting responsibility for his short-comings into something for which his innocent students “are” responsible–making them pay the price of trying to judge the ethics of his bogus shell game.Mr. Bonine should have simply fessed up to the error, told his students to use the erroneously published exam as a course handout, said there would be another exam prepared, and apologize.It is Bonine that has the questionable ethics. Perhaps, he became dizzy and disoriented flying off to Copenhagen. Maybe some bone would have helped him see this issue more clearly.John
jcn8139 - December 16, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Sorry, he should have taken some bonine.
hsimm313 - January 20, 2011 at 1:21 am
In this situation i totally agree with Mr. Mystal; I do not believe that any student would have been 100% honest with how much of the test that actually saw. There is no true way for anyone to find out if they are lying so I believe in this situation they will lie and try to use this situation to their advantage. When you are in a competitive environment you do whatever you can to get ahead of the competition. Most people do not like to cheat but if something falls in their lap, such as this test accidentally being forwarded to the students, they will take it. There are many ways to bend the truth so that you do not have to lie. You can say that you looked at the entire test but not mention at all that you printed it out before you deleted it. Although it may seem unethical, I don’t believe it is. The students shouldn’t even be put in this situation; because it was the fault of the professor or university then they should receive the test as practice/study material and be presented with a totally separate exam.