In Reply to previous thread: Moral/Ethical Advice

This is in reply to a previous thread I started entitled "Moral/Ethical Advice" which has been CLOSED and may be found here: Moral/Ethical Advice - Nursing for Nurses

First of all, I apologize for taking so long to reply to this thread. I checked it a couple times after I started it but I became very busy d/t finals and the holidays. I read ALL the replies and hope I can adequately explain myself and help everyone understand.

Next, I want to say that I am replying to clarify - NOT to start up another argument and get everyone fired up. So please, try to remain civil and courteous to other people's opinions. As nurses and nursing students we should all be able to do this.

Ok, so here goes.

When I posted the thread, I was quite fired up myself. My classmate had JUST told me about what she had done that very day. It was finals week and I was super stressed which added to my anger/irritation. I should have waited until I could think and be more objective before posting about my dilemma. This gave rise to the personal information within the post, which has no bearing on whether or not I should alert someone to the issue - it only has bearing on my personal feelings of anger and irritation. At the time, I was too fired up and confused to properly articulate that fact.

Here are the facts: My classmate, we'll call her Amy, told me - face-to-face - that her co-worker was writing her papers for her in exchange for Amy working certain shifts for said co-worker. These papers were for a certain class of ours - they're not really based on nursing skills, they're on research and done in APA format.

Amy has told me - again, face-to-face - that her husband is disabled and that he does 95% of the housework so that she can work on school. I can't say this it 100% true, it's just what she told me - the same with someone else writing her papers. All I know is what she told me. She also told me that she was barely passing.

Another fact, my school does, in fact, only accept the best LPN students into the RN program. But if Amy is cheating on her papers now, wouldn't it stand to suffice that if her grades get worse and she's desperate enough, she'd be willing to cheat to get better grades? Also, it has happened when my school has taken average LPN students into the RN program because there weren't enough superior students to fill all the spots. Anything is possible.

As for the whole letting it slide if she were a single mom thing, I didn't articulate myself very well here either. What I meant was that I could UNDERSTAND. I could SYMPATHIZE. Of course it would still be wrong, but at least then I would understand why. It almost always helps to understand 'why'. When someone commits a crime, the victims and police like to understand why the person did what they did - but it doesn't make them any less guilty.

Being in NS, I KNOW that being a nurse holds me to a higher ethical and moral standard. However, I'm still a student and I'm still learning. I thought I could come here and talk with people who have more experience than I, to learn more on how to handle to situation. I have tried to deal with similar situations in the past and it always seems like I failed. I only wanted to handle it in the correct manner - without burning myself or any innocent people. I usually prefer to own my own actions - but NS is too important to me to risk, which is why I did consider anonymity.

As it turns out, I'm still debating this issue after something similar happened at another campus. Everyone at school is fired up about it and what I write about it actually happened. A woman turned a classmate in for allegedly cheating on a computerized exam. The woman alleges that the proctor was looking for something in a desk drawer and the cheating classmate took the opportunity to look at a slip of paper in her pocket. The school launched an investigation and ended up suspending the accuser instead of the alleged cheater. The school states that they suspended her for "unforeseen circumstances". I don't want to end up in the same boat as this woman - who wasn't even in the nursing program. It's not that I don't want to do the right thing, I just want to do it in the RIGHT WAY. I'm just taking my time - I don't want to rush in and sound like a tattletale. And of course I wouldn't bring up the personal issues I explored in my previous post - that was just me letting off steam. Which is why I'm taking my time - I want to present myself and the problem at hand in a favorable light.

I hope this clarifies many questions and I still need advice, if you have any CONSTRUCTIVE advice. Thanks.