Adventures in Ethics and Science

A big pain for biomedicine: anesthesiologist commits massive research fraud.

Category: Academic integrity

The headlines bring news of another scientist (this time a physician-scientist) caught committing fraud, rather than science. This story is of interest in part because of the scale of the deception -- not a paper or two, but perhaps dozens...

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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 3:45 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Students plagiarize, professor publicizes.

... and the university, in turn, fires the professor.

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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 12:27 PM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

From the annals of academic dishonesty: a bad way to fish for extra points.

As the new calendar year approaches, I can't help but anticipate the coming spring semester -- and to hold out the hope that this one will be the semester in which none of my students commits plagiarism. Otherwise, I'm facing...

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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 11:47 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

The ethics of performance enhancing drugs in academe.

In the 20/27 December 2007 issue of Nature, there's a fascinating commentary by Cambridge University neuroscientists Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir. Entitled "Professor's little helper," this commentary explores, among other things, how "cognitive-enhancing drugs" are starting to find their way...

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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 1:02 PM • 35 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Kids today!

If you're "writing" a philosophy paper and you're going to plagiarize, why would you plagiarize a sub-optimal source like Wikipedia? Why wouldn't you at least rip off a top-notch source like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy? It seems to me...

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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 6:05 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

What I'd really like one of these semesters

... is to get all the way through the 16 weeks without a single incident of plagiarism turned in as "student work". Alas, it appears this will not be the semester in which my fantasy becomes a reality. Dammit....

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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 3:43 PM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Is the NCAA encouraging academic fraud?

I'm pretty sure the National Collegiate Athletic Association doesn't want college athletes -- or the athletics programs supporting them -- to cheat their way through college. However, this article at Inside Higher Ed raises the question of whether some kind...

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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 2:24 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Memo to the FSU Athletics Department: 'learning' and 'cheating' are not synonyms.

Somehow, the Florida State University Office of Athletic Academic Support Services had in its employ a "Learning Specialist" who seemed to think it was part of his or her job to help a bunch of student athletes cheat. As reported...

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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 5:23 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Lessons from the Ward Churchill case.

The news today from Inside Higher Ed is that the University of Colorado Board of Regents voted to fire Ward Churchill. You may recall that in May 2006, a faculty panel at the university found that the tenured ethnic studies...

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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 2:08 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Knowledge, belief, and what counts as good science: More thoughts on Marcus Ross.

Following up on my query about what it would take for a Young Earth Creationist "to write a doctoral dissertation in geosciences that is both 'impeccable' in the scientific case it presents and intellectually honest," I'm going to say something...

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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 5:56 PM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks