Ethics Newsline®

CHICAGO
A controversy over an ethics test heated up last week with the president of a university charging that officials administering the test, which several professors failed because they finished it too quickly, showed “an alarming lack of judgment and common sense” for flunking the test-takers.

“In my 28 years as a professor, I have never given a failing grade to a student for taking an exam too quickly,” Al Bowman, president of Illinois State University, wrote in a letter to the state’s executive inspector general, according to a report from the Chicago Tribune. “It is groundless and insulting to accuse employees of cheating simply because they finished the exam in less than 10 minutes.”

About 850 workers at three Illinois public-college campuses were told in November that the state inspector general had invalidated their completion of the mandatory course because they did not take enough time on the 80-screen computer presentation, according to the Tribune and the Associated Press.

According to the Daily Vidette, the student newspaper of the state-run Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, two professors who failed the test have joined with the local faculty association to file suit claiming the state did not inform test-takers of the time limit and had no right to impose such a restriction after the fact.

The training course and the concluding computer-generated test are mandated for all state employees.

According to a report from the Daily Illini, the student newspaper of the University of Illinois at Champaign, any state employee found “out of compliance” with the provisions of the annual training program could be fired.

One of the plaintiffs, math professor Marvin Zeman, says most of the answers were “common sense” and many were from the same material as presented in the previous year’s training course.

The state counters that test-takers were instructed to carefully read through the entire program and it would be physically impossible to complete the course in a few minutes.