Academia Stack Exchange
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Questions tagged [ethics]

On making a decision based on morals or common ethical codes instead of etiquette, rules, institutional or government policy, or technical or procedural reasons.

You almost never want to use this tag together with or .

Meta discussion on the use of this tag: On the over use of "ethics"/"ethical"

2028 questions
61
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7 answers

Is it bad practice to study or reference the work of an academic who has fallen from grace?

I was recently reading a textbook, written by a professor from an elite university, which I was finding to be very informative and well-written. Excited to learn of other works or talks by this individual, I searched for him on Google, but was…
justin
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9 answers

My research supervisor is asking me to fake results, what do I do?

My research supervisor wanted to produce a cost-benefit analysis for an infrastructure project (civil engineering). First he had someone else work on it, then he involved me. When I got involved, I noticed that the benefits were inflated and the…
IfeelExploited
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53
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8 answers

Ethics of Accepting Unneeded Merit Based Scholarships

I come from a fairly wealthy background, and am lucky enough to have parents who are both footing the bill for my tuition, as well as providing a very comfortable living stipend while I'm in school. Without thinking much about it, I dropped a resume…
ebrts
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13 answers

How do I help my friend who went down the path of crankery?

I went to undergrad with someone who I am good friends with. He was always very bright and got into a top tier grad school. I went to another grad school and we're both postdocs now (again, at different universities). However, in grad school he got…
user148619
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39
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5 answers

Is it appropriate to assign Mechanical Turk-type tasks as extra credit?

By the end of the term, I always end up with quite a number of D and F students who want to improve their grades. Meanwhile, I usually have lots of menial tasks on hand during the summer, e.g. data entry, translations, proofreading, photo tagging,…
Village
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33
votes
9 answers

Is it ethical to use past years' final exams that the professor hasn't explicitly given, to study for a final in the same class?

This happened to me in my 2nd year of grad school, in a STEM field. As many do, our professor gave the class the last year's final, to give us an idea of what areas to study and what to expect, etc, which he obviously isn't required to do and is…
YungHummmma
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32
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10 answers

Supervisor does not allow use of commercial software for student project, against student's interests

My supervisor does not allow me to use commercial software for my project. I believe that they want to reuse, modify and build upon what I do and thus are interested only in tools/libraries that are widely-accepted in the scientific community (which…
user50998
30
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5 answers

Is it ethical to date a graduate student of the same university where you are a faculty member?

I am a 32 year old Assistant Professor. I met a girl at a conference. I liked her, but I realized she is a graduate student at the same university where I am faculty member. She is from the same school, but from a different department. Is it ethical…
Kumar
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5 answers

What can I do when a TA asks me to marry her so that she can obtain a green card?

This pertains to an American university graduate program. A TA recently surprised me with a proposition to marry her (we've neither dated nor hooked up), so that she could obtain a green card to stay in the United States -- she wants to leave the…
User001
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28
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3 answers

Is it plagiarism to copy the form and structure of an article?

As an undergraduate student, I wrote a science paper. Because I was learning to write, I used the form and structure of a paper on a completely different topic; in fact, it was a slightly different discipline all together. So my paper has a similar…
Science123456
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23
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5 answers

How to evaluate student team members who did minimal work on a team assignment?

I have this class where at the beginning of the term the lecturer pretty much randomly creates groups of 5 people (who usually do not know each other at all) and assigns them a project. At the end of the term we do a presentation and a written…
Koray Tugay
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23
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1 answer

Finish previous work during current position

I will soon change of lab, moving from a PhD student position to post-doc position. During the last months of my contract as a PhD student, I tried to finish everything I started but I still have a few projects in progress. These projects include…
Wiliam
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22
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5 answers

I collected interviews/questionnaires but didn't know I had to do an ethics review. What do I do now?

For my master's thesis, I completed a systematic literature review and supplemented it with surveys and patient interviews. The topics required no medical information of patients. My supervisor was aware of both the surveys and interviews and ethics…
Alex T
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17
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3 answers

Are there ethical guidelines prohibiting penalties against potential research subjects who have not yet provided consent?

Are there any ethical guidelines that would prohibit the use of penalties against individuals who sign up for a research study but have not yet provided consent and are therefore not yet officially subjects? Please provide references. Background In…
AlexR
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17
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7 answers

Is "because it's fun" an acceptable justification for choosing a certain research path (when communicating to peers/colleagues)?

When asking a peer or colleague why they are pursuing a certain research direction, I have often heard the answer "because it's fun". This bothers me: Shouldn't we all be capable of providing an honest narrative explaining why our chosen research…
mario
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