Ethics Headlines
#77

Volume 2, Number 23                                                 Friday, June 16, 2006


Ethics Headlines is an ethics-in-the-news clipping file published each Friday by Greg Feldmeth, a high school teacher at Polytechnic School in Pasadena, California. It contains news items from the media in the past week that deal with some area of ethical inquiry.

SUBSCRIBE. You can receive the file via email every Friday afternoon with links to the original articles. Just email your address here and put Ethics Headlines in the subject line. If you know of others who would be interested, please forward the page to them.

This week's headlines--select the headline to read the article
  • High schools make room at top for grads. The push for multiple valedictorians began years ago, prompted by concerns that high school had become too competitive -- so competitive that a few students seeking the title filed lawsuits. As more students enrolled in weighted advanced classes and earned grade-point averages far above 4.0, educators wondered whether it was fair to single out one teenager. There was concern a student would take a less challenging class to guarantee an A or take on an unreasonable workload of weighted classes to boost a GPA.
  • Crossing line on cloning. Using cloned embryos to investigate the basis of disease in adults and children will often, if indeed not always, require that the embryos undergo maturation. Just a couple of years ago, these same would-be-cloners told us that permitting cloned embryos to mature was exactly the line that they would never cross. What scientists on the Harvard review board allowed such an obvious contradiction to be bypassed?
  • Teachers adjust lesson plans as web fuels plagiarism. Across the country, teachers and professors are abandoning the traditional academic chore of tidy margins and meticulous footnotes because the Internet offers a searchable online smorgasbord of ready-made papers. "Students are using the Internet like an 8-billion-page, cut-and-pastable encyclopedia," said John Barrie, owner of a company that makes software to detect plagiarism.
  • French philosophy student fails, therefore he sues. The nephew of a former Socialist minister has successfully sued the French state after failing a philosophy exam because his teacher rarely showed up in class.
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