By Sara Noelle On
Teams of BYU students will be faced with moral dilemmas in a competition format Friday, March 9.
The Ethics Bowl competition will be in the N. Eldon Tanner Building from 3 to 6 p.m. and will involve 40 teams of five undergraduate students each.
In each match, two teams will discuss ethical situations or scenarios, according to Nichole Greeff, 21, a junior from Boise, Idaho, majoring in psychology and anthropology, and the programming team and student coordinator.
People from the community and the university are chosen by team members to judge their answers to the ethical situations.
“The judges have to have undergraduate degrees. It”s great because it allows people to come in from the community and get involved with the university,” Greeff said.
The game was originally developed by Robert Ladenson specifically for college students and became a national competition in 1995, according to Greeff.
It is hard to advertise for the Ethics Bowl, because many people do not know what an ethics bowl is, Greeff said.
Most students participate because many ethics professors require it as a part of their coursework.
“When the teams first arrive they think it”s going to be tedious, much like school, but most of them find it”s really a fun atmosphere to explore ethical situations,” Greeff said.
Kevin Stoker, assistant professor in communications and the closing ceremonies speaker for this semester”s Ethics Bowl, has required his students to be a part of the BYU competition.
“It”s a great opportunity for them to apply in-class instruction on hypothetical situations,” Stoker said.
He feels the Ethics Bowl is an added benefit to what he has been teaching in class.
“It forces them to ask themselves, ”Do I really understand this stuff? Can I articulate it in such a way that other people can understand it?”” Stoker said.
Carolyn Peterson, 22, a senior from Salt Lake City, majoring in broadcast journalism, who will participate in the Ethics Bowl, feels it will be an extremely applicable experience for her career.
“I think ethics is very important in my profession at least. There”s a big problem with journalist credibility, because many people think they don”t have ethics, don”t have virtues and don”t have morals,” Peterson said.
Sherry Baker, assistant professor of communications, has been a judge for the National Ethics Bowl competition from which BYU”s Ethics Bowl has been patterned after.
“It”s very encouraging, because you see young people from colleges and universities all over the country who are concerned about difficult societal issues and who”ve developed their moral reasoning skills to think critically through those issues,” Baker said.
