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 A social studies professor bases students’ final semester grades in an introductory course on 2 multiple choice tests. A professor lowers grades for late work by one letter grade for each day. A professor considers student effort when determining grades. A professor considers a student’s growth in assigning grades.

Activity: Ethics and Grading 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. A teacher uses student peer ratings as 40% of the grade on an oral report. 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”