Required Professional Ethics Program for First Year Graduate Students

1
Required Professional Ethics Program for First
Year Graduate Students

• Kerry Landers
• Assistant Dean
• Graduate Student Affairs
• Dartmouth College
• kerry.landers_at_dartmouth.edu

2
The Need for a Professional Ethics Program

• Complex issues facing graduate students.
• Take proactive approach to address increase in
  student misconduct issues.
• Increase competitiveness with funding agencies.

3
Development of Program

• Collaborated with Ethics Institute at Dartmouth.
• Faculty buy-in to make requirement.
• Orientation program sets tone and community
  building event.
• Trained facilitators in case method approach on
  four areas Professionalism, Mentoring, Data
  Collection, and Authorship.

4
Case Example

• Case of Professor Crabapple
• What are the issues here?
• How could a professor positively engage a
  struggling student?
• What should the student do in this situation?
• Should the student confront the faculty member?

5
Assessment

• Weaknesses
• Existing cases do not address all fields.
• Some students express that the program is a waste
  of their time.
• Strengths
• A majority of graduate students surveyed reported
  a clearer understanding of their ethical
  responsibilities.
• Tracking of honor code violations over time
  suggests a decline after implementation of the
  program.
• Helps build a stronger sense of community among
  graduate students.

6
Feedback

• From a student
• I think the discussions that took place in
  these workshops were really useful in that they
  brought out a lot of issues I had never thought
  of before such as the appropriate use of
  information from a paper that you have been sent
  for peer review. Im happy that I got to discuss
  some of these issues early in my graduate career,
  rather than learning them on the fly and making
  mistakes that could be damaging to my career.
• From a faculty member
• In addition to providing a needed venue to
  discuss varied aspects of professional ethics,
  the sessions have turned out to be an ideal
  format for frank discussions about tradecraft,
  finding appropriate grants, dealing with
  recalcitrant reviewers or editors, and
  identifying the subtle differences among
  journals.