Okay, I'll bite! The first post in this thread (I forget by whom)
gave 'doing a quick and dirty titration and not including it in the
final project' as an example of unethical behavior. Why is this
unethical? If a student did a sloppy first try, and then I made
her redo it, I wouldn't think it unethical for her to report on
the redo. I view the sloppy first tries as part of the learning
experience. Am I missing the point?
In a much later post, Cynthia Galloway writes,
" I have two undergrads doing research and one just can't seem to wait
to come to lab and do work. That's who I'm teaching for and who makes
teaching worth while. One really good student does wonders to make the
other 60-100 bearable."
I'm sure Cynthia didn't mean this in the way it looks to me. But it
reads as if the other students are a nuisance and only the 1-2% who
are already good at science are worth our time.
This has to make me think about *our* end of the ethics debate.
Are we, sometimes without thinking about it, giving the impression
that we're only invested in the few good students and view the other
99% of them as cash cows? When we inadvertently give the impression
that we are ready to take the mediocre students' money without really
being invested in teaching them, we undercut any preaching we might
do about ethics.
Pat Bowne
