Few months back in the beginning of economic recession, I read following discussion title at a social web site of professionals. “Are businesses and economies collapsing today because we’ve overstepped our moral ethics and practices as model citizens economically and socially?”
The recent economics offences, that affected worldwide as a recession, have been done by well educated professionals, so called “model” citizens. In addition to learning their profession they have learned the practices of offences or they have missed learning of integrity during their education. The Centre for Academic Integrity (CAI) defines “academic integrity as a commitment, even in the face of adversity, to five fundamental values: honesty, trust, fairness, respect, and responsibility. From these values flow principles of behaviour that enable academic communities to translate ideals into action.” The CAI also mentioned “research shows that student cheating is on the rise and that the pressures and opportunities for dishonest behaviour are increasing in many academic and professional contexts.” My last few years' experience in academic supports the same. In addition to plagiarism, cheating, lying, fraud and shoddy work in every activities of assessment (written assignments, software development including computer programs, exams, daily activities journal or diary, schedule tracking, reviews of their time spending, peer evaluations etc.) I have also experienced a dishonest behaviour during a simple fun activity which has no assessment connected to it. May be it becomes their habit due to their every day practice of dishonest behaviours!
Last semester I was teaching a topic software project management to a third year undergraduate class by applying learning while playing technique. The students had to do a simple exercise from a childhood play of origami, preparation of three types of paper aeroplanes in a team. The aim of this class exercise was to teach them, initially set quality and quantity target of a product, do planning and scheduling, carry out team work with harmony to achieve the target, check quality of the product and review the process to find out lessons learned. The class size was 211 students which were divided into 43 teams and each team had 4 or 5 students.
They have been informed the sequence of processes expected from them in the class exercise. In the first 20 minutes each team has to: read the instructions for making each type of paper aeroplane; prepare each types of plane to determine the time to prepare each type of plane; check quality of planes by flying them; plan team work for real production; and then set target statement, such that they will produce 20 planes of each type and all of them will be able to fly more than 3 meters high from one end to another end of the class hall. The next 15 minutes was for production of aeroplanes, next 15 minutes to check quality of the planes and the last 15 minutes was to discuss lessons learned in this exercise.
At the end of discussion on the expectations, all the teams have had shown their comfort with origami and were keen to enjoy the fun. When “Time starts” announced for the first 20 minutes of the exercise, all of them have had happily started to work according to the given instructions. As usual these are one of the moments provide me motivation to do as much as possible for my students when I see them learning with fun. But after 15 minutes, a student complained that a few teams have had started to work on the production of aeroplanes. Similar practice was followed by few more teams after knowing the complaint. They were not only missing the lessons from the exercise but also an innocent fun!
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