Case 2: The Ethics of Requiring Students To Subsidize a Plagiarism-Detection Service

Background

You are the chair of your university’s nine-member Student Council. The purpose of the Student Council is to give students a voice in university governance. The university’s administration often presents to the Student Council its ideas on ways to improve students’ academic and social lives. The Student Council then discusses these ideas and sometimes solicits the views of the entire student body before responding to the administration.

The subject of this month’s meeting is a letter from the Provost, Mary Lingram, to you as the chair of the Student Council. In the letter (Document 2.1), Provost Lingram discusses the university’s plan to reduce plagiarism by purchasing a site license to CopyCatcher.com, a plagiarism-detection service.

You distribute copies of the letter to the other members of the Student Council, and you can see that they don’t look happy. After a minute, you ask, “What do you think?”

Crystal Noack responds first. “Well, speaking as someone who’s over twenty thousand dollars in debt,” she says, pausing for effect, “I’m not wild about paying a for-profit company to check up on whether I’m plagiarizing.”

“Yeah,” agrees Adam Levanger, “I don’t plagiarize. How is it fair that I have to pay?”

“How do we even know how big a problem plagiarism is in the first place?” Laura Kim asks. “The Provost didn’t say anything about how pervasive it is here.”

Sa’id Hamdi says, “What about my rights as a student? I don’t get a say in whether my paper gets uploaded to CopyCatcher? Isn’t there an intellectual-property issue here?”

“Okay, it seems that this is kind of complicated,” you say. “How about we do this: Let’s take a look at the site and see if we can understand how it works. By Monday I’ll write a post to our discussion list, soliciting your arguments. I think the best strategy is to look at the ethics of how this would affect us, not the cost—”

“That’s right,” Adam interrupts. “Six bucks a year is three coffees.”

“Okay,” you continue. “If we don’t like it, it has to be because it violates our rights, or something like that. So let’s come at this from the ethics angle. But we need to think about what the Provost said about how it’s in everyone’s best interest if people realize we’re not all a bunch of cheaters. If you all post to the list by the end of the week, I’ll post a draft of a letter to the Provost by Monday. Then we’ll take it from there.”

Download the document below, and then begin your assignment.

Download a copy of Document 2.1.

Your Assignment

Once you’ve familiarized yourself with the case background and document, complete the assignment below. Your instructor will tell you how he or she would like you to submit your work.

1. Analyze the ethical implications of the university’s plan to require that all students subsidize a site license for Copycatcher.com. Consider the plan from the perspective of the four ethical standards (rights, justice, utility, and care). Do all of the standards pertain? Which standards enable you to make apersuasive case for your recommended course of action?

2. Present your findings in a letter to Provost Lingram.

Reflecting on Your Work

Once you’ve completed your assignment, write a reflection about your work using the prompt below.

Question