A PhD student submits an ethics proposal for his research on the impact of feedback on economics grades. His proposal includes 3 studies, each of which is outline briefly below: 

1. He plans to survey second year students and to ask them about their experiences with positive and negative grade feedback, and how they feel this impacts their grades. 

2. He wants to tie the survey results in part 1 with students’ actual grades. He doesn’t want to tell the students that he is doing this, however (he says it might bias their answers to other questions), so he plans to just ask them to provide their student numbers as part of the survey. 

3. He hopes to run an experiment where he gives students an assignment, then gives feedback. The feedback will be randomly assigned (that is, it will not be based on actual performance on the assignment). Half of the class will receive positive feedback (these students will be told that they received a mark 10% above their own average for the course). The other half of the class will receive negative feedback (these students will be told that they received a mark 10% below their own average grade for the course). The PhD student argues that random assignment to feedback is needed so that he can see the impact of the feedback itself, rather than possibly confounding this with their actual performance. Consider the details above, and then answer the following questions:

 i. Identify any unethical behavior in this planned research. You need to note all of the parts that are unethical, as well as explaining why each of those parts is unethical.

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

There is unethical behaviour in this planned research in several ways First the researcher is not be... View the full answer