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Computing students' views on ethics

Published: 22 March 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Computer ethics is a pressing matter and today's students are evidently at-risk when they are confronted with ethical decisions since they may not possess the necessary knowledge and awareness to discern and make the right decisions. The primary aim of this study was to gain insight into computing students' attitudes, perceptions and understanding of relevant ethical issues.
This quantitative study was conducted over six years (2014 -- 2019) at a university in South Africa and a total of 3571 first-year computing students participated in the study by completing the questionnaire.
Results indicated that the majority of the students believe that it is unethical to download copyrighted content but some students still admitted to often downloading copyrighted content and music. Furthermore, these first-year computing students do not all consider the misrepresentation of online identities as unethical and they present a neutral attitude towards the copying of the university's copyrighted software. Additionally, results indicated that there were no significant differences in participants' computer ethics views based on gender, academic performance or years. The paper concludes with some recommendations regarding information security and ethics at universities and IS departments.

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  • (2021)A Study on the Risk of Prosecution and Perceived Proximity on State University Undergraduates' Behavioural Intention for e-Book PiracyNew Review of Academic Librarianship10.1080/13614533.2021.197665528:4(406-434)Online publication date: 25-Sep-2021

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CSERC '20: Proceedings of the 9th Computer Science Education Research Conference
October 2020
111 pages
ISBN:9781450388726
DOI:10.1145/3442481
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 March 2021

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Author Tags

  1. applied ethics
  2. ethics
  3. unethical behaviour
  4. university students

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CSERC '20
CSERC '20: the 9th Computer Science Education Research Conference
October 19 - 20, 2020
Virtual Event, Netherlands

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Overall Acceptance Rate 24 of 60 submissions, 40%

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View all
  • (2021)A Study on the Risk of Prosecution and Perceived Proximity on State University Undergraduates' Behavioural Intention for e-Book PiracyNew Review of Academic Librarianship10.1080/13614533.2021.197665528:4(406-434)Online publication date: 25-Sep-2021

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