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The ethics tutorial program I devised at Case involved a "customized" individual tutorial that the judicial office arranges between the violator and one of tutors who is selected from among the deans, judicial affairs personnel, and the few faculty who volunteer to serve in the ethics tutor pool. All first-time violators at Case are required to complete an ethics tutorial. The one-on-one tutorial is very labor intensive and, combined with a greater numbers of reported violations, can overwhelm a tutor pool. It has done just that at Case and now is an option (along with an on-line tutorial from Ball State called the MITT) for first-time violators. The judicial office makes a judgment as to whether the violator can reflect and learn best through the on-line tutorial or needs the more intensive one-on-one ethics tutorial.
A key element of the ethics tutorial is that it does not depend upon a standardized set of materials; it is adaptable to meet the students' needs and level of ethical development. One reading -- the first few chapters of Stephen Carter's 1996 book entitled Integrity -- is required as the core reading. But the readings assigned after that are tailored to the individual student and selected by individual tutors. If the student was found guilty of lying, for example, I would assign Sissela Bok's 1978 book Lying. For a plagiarist, I received permission from the New York Times to copy and assign a set of articles that recounted the far-reaching consequences of Jason Blair's plagiarism and fabrications. If the student needed some basic understanding of the "what" and "whys" of academic honesty, I might assign a few chapters from Charles Lipson's 2004 book Doing Honest Work in College, or would instruct the student to research a half dozen college and university web pages devoted to explaining academic integrity and citation practices. I also used Randy Cohen's 2002 book, The Good, the Bad, and the Difference, to help students "practice" assessing and reflecting upon ethical situations and coming up with responses. I found that it was very important to treat the ethics tutorial at the start as an academic exercise to diffuse some of the resistance, defensiveness or hostility that most students bring to the tutorial table. My approach was to have students understand integrity in the abstract and then have them apply my "concentric circles of consequence" principle (the range of consequences beyond harm to self) to ethical situations and finally to their own conduct.
Within the tutorial, students were given a variety of short writing assignments from among: reflection papers on the readings, a log of their decision making and ethical deliberations, analyses of ethical dilemmas, and/or applications of core principles to their own behavior. They would discuss their writing and musings with the tutor. The ethics tutorial was "completed" when the tutor signed off that the student understood that actions have consequences beyond the immediate and obvious and the student "saw" the ethical dimension in everyday life (beyond the rules of academic integrity.) Some tutorials lasted a month, some lasted 6 months. If I polled the tutors, most would say that only a small percentage of violators truly "got it" but that most students learned something from the tutorial (often provoked in a final assignment that would ask a student to analyze his or her thinking before and after the tutorial.) A small few never got it at all -- and often fulfilled our prediction that they would violate a second time.