Ethics in Educational Groups, Essay Example

Most colleges or universities a standard honor and ethical statement in the student handbook: All students that become students of our university will be expected to maintain the highest standards of academic integrity. Each student must complete assignments without plagiarism or any other unethical actions. Anytime, students are faced with the possibility of breaking any of ethical polices, the student can consult his or her instructor for appropriate answer. However, the student’s ignorance is not a legitimate defense for academic dishonesty or unethical actions. At our university academic dishonesty includes lying, cheating, stealing, and passing others work on as your own will be grounds for dismissal. The college is making sure the students learn the importance of morals and ethics.

The basics of moral values and ethics are often taught at college and universities. However, some of the ethical lessons should be taught at home as well. According to Smith and Pidi (2009),”The analysis strongly indicates that having an academic ethic facilitates a smoother transition to college life” (pg.3). These ethical lessons will assist students in the future with making ethical decisions in their personal and business lives. Kyle, Mia, Raymond, and Jasmine are at a critical point in their lives and ethics is very important. The students will be faced with conflict dilemmas during the collegiate and business careers. There are several issues that must be addressed. The students agreed to work together on a project. The project was shared by all the students to complete the project on time. The suggestion Mia presented to write the final report is a normal strategies for group assignments. Each participant will provide research and references for the project or written assignment. One person will gather all the information from the other team members to complete the final report. My personal opinion is the students have not broken any ethical laws but they lack the experience collaborating with group or teams. The group should have learned or been taught how to resolve this type of conflict within a group. The group should already be thinking about how to disseminate the code, how to keep it in mind in making decisions, how to guide its application, and how to correct those who violated it (Davis, 2008).

The group has not learned about teamwork required to complete these types of projects. The team members should all work on editing the paper including Mia to improve the quality of the paper. It must be noted that the university and colleges have the some responsibility to teach the students how to be ethical in group settings as well. Considering these alarming examples of professional misconduct and unethical research behavior, it has become clear that institutions of higher education have a critical responsibility for providing their students and faculty with advanced training in ethical obligations and professional standards (Artino & Brown, 2006).

In the college and business world teams often have obstacles with rewrites, team members doing less than required, more information needed, missing documents and critical deadlines. During my team assignments in college, we learned that students must be resilient and resourceful while facing the obstacles that include students not contributing very much to the paper. However, we learned that it’s the journey towards the end result is the true lesson. The students should have learned it’s more important to get the grade versus worrying about who did not contribute. The order of business for a team working on a paper together is identifying what each person does the best. The assignment should been broken into references, quotes, theme, writing, and surveys. Many times you will find one person is good at presentations, another at writing, editing or research. The goal is to ensure each person is doing something they enjoy about the project which ensures the deadlines will be met. What I have learned from my college group experiences are the team should set their own ethical polices for the team such as:

• Each team member will strive to understand and respect everyone’s communication and their messages, suggestions or ideas.
• Each team member will communicate a mutual understanding of respect understanding that some group members may contribute more or less but the goal is for everyone to contribute something
• Each team member must agree that any unethical actions will not be tolerated in the group.
• Each team member will understand that each team member has different academic loads that may allow fewer contributions but nonetheless they contributed. The will receive full credit because the goal is the complete the paper as a team not individuals.

In the business world often students will practice what they learn in college such as ethics and morals. They will rely on ethical and moral education they learn in college. The students will bring to those learned habits to their first jobs? It is important that these students learn that future jobs are always based on groups or teams succeeding together. Kyle, Mia, Raymond, and Jasmine should work burn the midnight oil together with or without Mia because she might not be able to attend. However, there is no need to approach the instructor concerning Mia inability to write a quality paper. The students will end up getting a worse grade because the instructors will clearly see that the team is working as individuals instead of a team. There are many education tools that will help the students to quickly edit the paper such as grammerly.com and APA wizards that assist students with checking the quality of their paper in minutes. Kyle, Mia, Raymond, and Jasmine did a great job in facing the adversity to get the paper completed but they need to learn the basics of working together to accomplish any task as a cohesive team. However, they should have allowed enough time for re-editing the assignment. The students have learned that it is necessary to edit a college paper more than one time. Kyle, Raymond and Jasmine had unreasonable expectations that the paper would be perfect after the first draft by Mia. Mia did hold up her part of the bargain to gather all team members’ information into one paper. Regardless, of how many mistakes Mia made on the paper, the students should have each proofed the paper before turning in to the instructor. This way you have a quality paper because four different students brought their observations about the paper to the table. Normally, it can take up to 5 or 6 times editing the paper to ensure the quality of the paper meets the course standards. What I learned as a freshman in college that using APA format requires at least three rewrites because many students write the way they speak. The students could have used editing software like paper check that provides grammar editing, which includes punctuation use, the correct use of verb tense, the correct spelling, and the quality of the student’s sentence structure.

From my observations and experience, it appears that the students panicked because they have not learned to use all the colleges writing resources for editing the paper. Many schools have a writing department that will review your paper with 24 to 48 hours’ notice. The academic writing team will review the paper making all the necessary suggestions on what areas of the paper need to be rewritten or changed. The academic writing team specializes in the APA for MLA format that the college is using for all academic papers. Another resource when students have a short deadline is the writing lab at the University. Many times there are writing tutoring students in the writing lab that will review your paper in a few hours. The writing tutors have the experience to quickly review the paper for jargon, structure, grammar and proper formatting. Kyle, Raymond, Mia and Jasmine could have spent more time on the researching, if they had used different resources for editing the paper. From my experience here are some final suggestions for the team: Always start with a well-defined abstract. The students should always revise, revise, revise and revise some more! The paper will never be perfect. The students should be very consistent with APA or MLA formatting, verb tense and sentence structure. Finally, the students should learn that there is no “I” in team.

References

Artino Jr., A. R., & Brown, S. W. (2009). Ethics in educational research: a comparative analysis of graduate student and faculty beliefs. College Student Journal, 43(2), 599-615.

Davis, M. (2008). Thinking through the issues in a code of ethics. New directions for higher education, (142), 55-73.

Smith, W. L., & Pidi, Z. (2009). The academic ethic and the transition to college. College Student Journal, 43(1), 86-98.