Transcript Tue_2_Finn_Ethical Responsibilities

Ethical Responsibilities
of Teachers
AAUP Statement of Professional Ethics
Teacher’s professional duties cover 5 roles:
• Scholars
• Teachers
• Colleagues
• Institutional member
• Community member
AAUP Statement of Professional Ethics
The Scholar Role
“Their primary responsibility to their subject
is to seek and state the truth as they see it.
To this end professors devote their energies
to developing and improving their scholarly
competence.”
AAUP Statement of Professional Ethics
The Teacher Role
“As teachers, professors encourage the free
pursuit of learning in their students. They
hold before them the best scholarly and
ethical standards of their discipline.
Professors demonstrate respect for their
students as individuals…”
Research and Teaching
• “The expectation is not simply that professors
actively engage in their discipline; it is that we
engage in a discipline in a way that supports
our teaching."
• “[We should not] engage in trivial research at
the expense of our teaching."
*Peter Markie, A Professor's Duties,
Activity: Ethics and Grading
1. A social studies professor bases students’ final semester
grades in an introductory course on 2 multiple choice tests.
2. A professor lowers grades for late work by one letter grade
for each day.
3. A professor considers student effort when determining
grades.
4. A professor considers a student’s growth in assigning
grades.
Activity: Ethics and Grading
1. As a teacher finalizes grades, she changes one student’s
course grade from a B+ to an A because tests and papers
showed the student had mastered the course objectives
even though he had not completed some of his homework
assignments.
2. A teacher uses student peer ratings as 40% of the grade on
an oral report.
3. To encourage lively discussion in English 101, a teacher
counts class participation as 30% of the final grade.
One Model of Grading
Grading is an information process concerning mastery of course content
“Now, contaminating the grade with information beyond the
academic content of the course makes the transcript unreliable, even
useless, in determining levels of knowledge and competence. Imagine
a USDA meat grader who grades the farmer’s beef carcasses in part
on the great effort that the farmer expended in getting the beef to
market or because of how much progress the farmer had made in
raising beef cattle after a long career as a philosophy professor.
Certainly, grading such beef ‘Prime’ when it would otherwise not
have been graded so highly is unfair. In this case, the grade of ‘Prime’
is best regarded as an outright lie, and consequently a grave violation
of professional duty.” – Daryl Close, “Fair Grades”