Education and Ethics Featured in Press Reports
Sep 15th, 2008 • Posted in: NewsGraduate schools take action after website allegedly supplies admissions test answers; a mandatory ethics and religion course in Quebec is expected to prompt a court battle; engineering students at Columbia earn course credit for volunteer work
NEW YORK and MONTREAL
Several of last week’s top stories dealt with the intersection of ethics and education last week. Among them:
- The Wall Street Journal reports that the prestigious Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania says it will cancel the admissions test scores of three current or former students because they allegedly consulted a website that posted questions from recent standardized admissions tests. Several other graduate schools also have canceled admissions test scores, though none yet has decided what, if any, action to take, reports the Journal. After a lawsuit, the subscription site that supplied the answers was shut down, though the location of the operator, believed to be from China, was not located.
- A religious high school in Quebec is on a collision course with the provincial government over a new mandated ethics and religion culture program. The Montreal Gazette reports that Loyola High School, a private, Jesuit institution, wants to teach its own version of the course. Religious schools are allowed to teach their faiths, but only in addition to — not in place of — the government’s course. Quebec mandates the course in part to promote harmonious social relations among various sectors of society, according to the Gazette. Hundreds of requests for similar exemptions are pending, and the province expects the matter to be settled in court.
- About 500 engineering students at Columbia University in New York will earn academic credit for volunteer courses in Harlem, part of a new incarnation of the popular “service learning” concept, reports the New York Times. Student engineers are engaged in such projects as designing a better walker for residents of an area nursing home, building an environmentally sustainable greenhouse at a high school, and manufacturing a trash can that can be used by the severely disabled.
Sources: Wall Street Journal, Sep. 12 — Montreal Gazette, Sep. 12 — New York Times, Sep. 12 — MSNBC, Sep. 11 — Montreal Gazette, Sep. 9.
For more information, see: Related Newsline story, June 9 — Related Newsline story, May 5 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 31 — Related Newsline story, July 7, 2007.
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