What grade should a student receive?

Scenario

After taking the final exam, a student’s course grade is 59.5% (on a scale where passing is 60%).

Discussion

1. Address the grade assignment using a virtue ethics framework.

   What grade would the virtuous professor assign? Would it make a difference if the grade was between an A- and an A? What virtues would be involved in the decision?

2. Address the grade assignment using deontology.

   You have been asked to write a program that will determine grades so that the grade assignment is less subjective. Come up with an algorithm (for that program) for assigning grades when a student is near the borderline between two grades.

3. Compare your answers from questions 1 and 2. How are they similar and/or different?

4. The following items come from the ACM Code of Ethics. Once you have finished the exercises on the grade scenario, look over these items. Choose one of them and consider how it might influence a choice that you might have to make as a future software engineer or project manager. Be prepared to share it with the rest of the class.

Partial ACM Code of Ethics

• Contribute to society and to human well-being, acknowledging that all people are stakeholders in computing.

• Avoid harm

• Be honest and trustworthy

• Be fair and take action not to discriminate.

• Respect the work required to produce new ideas, inventions, creative works, and computing artifacts.

• Respect privacy

• Honor confidentiality

• Strive to achieve high quality in both the processes and products of professional work.

• Maintain high standards of professional competence, conduct, and ethical practice.

• Know and respect existing rules pertaining to professional work.

• Accept and provide appropriate professional review..

• Give comprehensive and thorough evaluations of computer systems and their impacts, including analysis of possible risks.

• Perform work only in areas of competence

• Design and implement systems that are robustly and usably secure.