An Approach for Incorporating the Topic “Ethics in Research” into an Introductory Statistics Course

The spate of highly publicized instances of malfeasance by corporate leaders in recent years underscores the importance of the following learning objective formally adopted by our business college for all its undergraduate business majors: the student will be able to recognize, and analyze and choose resolutions to, ethical problems explicit or implicit in decision making. Among the initiatives in our college in support of that objective, and consistent with the call of the Association to Advance Collegiate Business Schools. International's Ethics Education Task Force (2004, p. 18) for "coverage of ethical issues in the disciplinary content [of business school curricula]," is incorporation of the topic ethics in research into every section of our required sophomore-level course in business statistics. The purpose of this teaching brief is to share our approach for accomplishing that incorporation.