HP Professional Standards & Ethics 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: An honors student discovers a classmate has submitted AI-generated text as their own writing in a research paper without disclosure. What is the most ethically appropriate first step?
- Report the classmate immediately to the dean
- Confront the classmate privately and encourage self-disclosure (Correct answer)
- Ignore it to preserve the relationship
- Post about it anonymously on social media
Correct answer: Confront the classmate privately and encourage self-disclosure
Encouraging self-disclosure respects due process while upholding academic integrity standards.
Question 2: Which principle best describes the honors program expectation that students produce work reflecting their own intellectual effort?
- Beneficence
- Academic honesty (Correct answer)
- Reciprocity
- Utilitarianism
Correct answer: Academic honesty
Academic honesty directly governs the requirement that submitted work authentically represents the student's own thinking.
Question 3: A professor offers an honors student extra credit in exchange for assisting with the professor's private consulting project. This situation most likely violates which standard?
- Freedom of association
- Prohibition against conflicts of interest (Correct answer)
- Fair grading policies
- Intellectual property law
Correct answer: Prohibition against conflicts of interest
Using a grade incentive to gain unpaid labor for personal benefit creates a conflict of interest between the professor's roles.
Question 4: Informed consent in academic research primarily ensures that participants:
- Receive payment for their time
- Understand the study's purpose and can withdraw freely (Correct answer)
- Are selected randomly from the population
- Sign a legally binding non-disclosure agreement
Correct answer: Understand the study's purpose and can withdraw freely
Informed consent protects autonomy by ensuring participants know what they are agreeing to and can opt out without penalty.
Question 5: When an honors thesis advisor has co-authored prior work with the student's external reviewer, the best action is to:
- Proceed without disclosure because it is common in academia
- Disclose the relationship to the honors committee and consider replacing the reviewer (Correct answer)
- Ask the reviewer to rank the thesis anonymously
- Have the student select an entirely new advisor
Correct answer: Disclose the relationship to the honors committee and consider replacing the reviewer
Transparency and possible reviewer replacement safeguard the objectivity of the evaluation process.
Question 6: Which behavior exemplifies professional integrity in academic peer collaboration?
- Sharing your completed assignment so a peer can copy key sections
- Discussing concepts together and then writing independently (Correct answer)
- Letting a struggling peer use your data without attribution
- Submitting a joint paper under only one student's name
Correct answer: Discussing concepts together and then writing independently
Collaborative discussion followed by independent writing reflects honest engagement with academic norms.
Question 7: An honors student notices that research data in their lab has been selectively excluded to make results look more significant. This practice is called:
- Triangulation
- Data cherry-picking or selective reporting (Correct answer)
- Inferential statistics
- Replication
Correct answer: Data cherry-picking or selective reporting
Selectively excluding inconvenient data to strengthen findings is a form of research misconduct known as cherry-picking.
HP Professional Standards & Ethics 2
An honors student discovers a classmate has submitted AI-generated text as their own writing in a research paper without disclosure.
What is the most ethically appropriate first step?