Your Feedback Brings Change: Addressing Students’ Potential Ethics Violations

Earlier this year, we asked program directors to complete a brief survey about students, their potential ethics violations, and ARRT’s involvement in such matters.

You let us know that you share our commitment to ensuring that future Registered Technologists are prepared—educationally and ethically—to provide safe patient care when they enter their professions.

As a result of what you told us, we’re altering our review process as follows.

• If a student reports a potential ethics violation that doesn’t relate to patient care, we’ll continue to ask you if you’ve investigated the situation. Those incidents include:
  • Failing to properly punch in or out of clinical settings
  • Plagiarism
  • Cheating
  • Academic exam subversion
• If you tell us you handled those situations following your institution’s policies and procedures, we’ll no longer conduct our own investigations.
• If the situation involves patient care, however, we’ll continue to investigate the incident as we’ve done in the past.

For now, we’ll continue to ask applicants for an ARRT credential about honor code violations, but our reactions to their answers will follow the process above.

We appreciate your feedback, and we’ll continue to use the results to update and improve our ethics processes.