Four Cameron University students will head to the national championship competition of the APPE Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl® in February after narrowly defeating Virginia Tech in the regional competition. The CU team of Jonelle Dunham, Alyssa Martinez, Tara Ostergard and Taylor Spores remain undefeated as they look toward their next competition, where they will face winning teams from the other 11 regional competitions.
During the regional competition, the CU team earned a berth at the upcoming national competition by placing third behind Texas State and Georgetown and finishing ahead of 25 teams from universities including Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Duke. Cameron was the smallest school in the competition, with the Aggies facing teams from significantly larger schools.
“I’m proud of the work these students did to prepare for this competition,” says Dr. John “Ken” Masters, associate professor of business and mentor/coach of the CU team. “I think it shows that Cameron students can compete with students from any university in the country.”
Dunham, Martinez, Ostergard and Spores first competed at the state level, beating the University of Oklahoma before moving on to the regional championship. The team’s participation was made possible by assistance from the Virginia Brewczynski Endowed Chair in Business Leadership, which was created by the Lawton Retail Merchants Association in July 1994.
Dunham is a sophomore pursuing a Bachelor of Business Administration degree, Martinez is a junior pursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree in Strategic Communications, and Ostergard is a senior pursuing a Bachelor of Accounting degree. All are from Lawton. Spores is a sophomore from Apache who is pursuing a Bachelor Business Administration degree.
Presented by the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, the APPE Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl® is a tiered competition. The top scoring 36 teams in 12 regional ethics bowls qualify to compete in the APPE IEB® National Competition.
In advance of competition, each team receives a set of cases created to explore a variety of topics within practical and professional ethics. Cases are drawn from areas such as: the classroom (e.g., cheating or plagiarism), personal relationships (e.g., dating or friendship), professional ethics (e.g., engineering, law, medicine), or social and political ethics (e.g., free speech, gun control).
Teams prepare an analysis of each case. During each competition match, a case is selected from the set and a moderator poses questions based on that case. These questions seek to delve deeper into the multiple ethical dimensions of the case. A panel of judges probes the teams for further justifications and evaluates answers. Rating criteria are based on intelligibility, focus on ethically relevant considerations, avoidance of ethical irrelevance and deliberative thoughtfulness.
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PR# 23-175
