THE ETHICAL VALUES OF ROMANIAN STUDENTS

Recently, the Romanian Ministry of Education has decided to promote mandatory courses on academic ethics and deontology in all Romanian universities (both at the Bachelor, and Master's level), a move which has its origins in some very public scandals concerning doubtful academic moral values (mostly plagiarism in doctoral dissertations, usually involving political actors). While this initiative seems creditable, we lack at this moment data concerning the current ethical values of students, in order to evaluate, after some time, the effects of such courses on the overall ethical status of Romanian universities. Thus, like in some other cases of educational policies, this endeavour could end in a mere formal and bureaucratic procedure. Therefore, this paper aims to be a simple investigation on the opinions and statements of Romanian students regarding some ethical issues such as plagiarism and cheating in exams, in a double perspective: one concerning the perception of each student's moral values, and another one concerning what she/he feels are the values of her/his peers. The results we provide point to a somehow surprising conclusion: while nobody denies that cheating and plagiarism take place in our schools and universities, it seems that the culprits are - every time - all around us, except us, of course. We must conclude that we need strong mechanisms to take plagiarism and cheating out of the shadow of denial at a personal level. (C) 2019 Published by Future Academy www.FutureAcademy.org .UK