The Ethics of Evaluating Instructional Computing - Equal Educational Opportunity - The Research Center on Computing & Society

Text-only Version

Marvin J. Croy

3.1 Equal Educational Opportunity

Moor’s discussion of equal educational opportunities is aimed at assessing the view that an instructor’s responsibilities in this regard would preclude assigning students to a control group. This discussion, however, would benefit from a distinction between opportunities and actual practices or achievements. Opportunities are mere possibilities for attaining some desired state. They provide favorable conditions for that attainment but give no guarantee that the desired outcome will occur in practice. Moor’s contention that an instructor may ethically offer different educational opportunities to different students is illustrated by an example of helping a student accidentally met in the hall while not helping other students in the same way. But this does not seem to be a case of offering different educational opportunities. Supposedly, the instructor would provide assistance to any student who came seeking it. Moor, however, suggests that an instructor who helps one student in this way is not obligated to help other students in the same way. This suggestion seems to be false if the issue concerns educational opportunities as opposed to practices. Helping one student in the hall does obligate the instructor to help other students in that same way, if the occasion arises. It does not mean that the instructor must take action to ensure that each student is actually helped in that same way. In sum, the instructor is obligated to provide equal educational opportunities which, in practice, may be taken advantage of by some students but not by others.

Nor is it clear that using different textbooks in different sections of a course is a case of providing different educational opportunities. Moor uses this example to reinforce his view that providing different educational opportunities may be morally permissible. However, instructors often have a general concept of what is to be learned in a course while having several different means of instantiating that concept, and using different textbooks may comprise one of several different practices that offer the same educational opportunities.(13) They are not necessarily providing different educational opportunities when they do so. The student demand for equal treatment is best understood here as a demand for equally effective instruction. Providing equally effective instruction is one way of providing equal educational opportunities. Equally effective instruction may be provided, in practice, by different means and may in fact require that some students be treated differently than others. So, the focal point here is not equal treatment but rather equally effective instruction as a means of providing equal educational opportunities. And it does appear that instructors have a responsibility to provide this.

Back to the top

Go to: 3.2 Optimum Instruction

Home > Teaching Resources > Computer Ethics Issues in Academic Computing > The Ethics of Evaluating Instructional Computing

The Research Center on Computing & Society
at Southern Connecticut State University
501 Crescent Street • New Haven, CT 06515
Director: (203) 392-6790 • e-mail: webmaster@computerethics.org

© 2000 – 2007 – Research Center on Computing & Society