Thank you for volunteering to be a judge at the International Business Ethics and Sustainability Case Competition. We have provided the guidelines below so that you can prepare for your judging responsibilities:
- First and foremost, please familiarize yourself with the judging forms (click here). There is no need to bring them with you to the competition; we will have copies for your use when you arrive.
- Please read through the Competition Overview and Presentation Guidelines pages to get an overall sense of the expectations we have laid out for the teams.
- You aren’t expected to know anything about the topic you’re judging. It is the team’s job to bring you up to speed.
- Please bear in mind the following when handling the Q&A and filling out the judging form: most students in the undergraduate division of the competition probably have had relatively few business courses. This is the first experience many of the students have had with such a comprehensive exercise. We want them to feel appropriately challenged in the Q&A, but not intimidated. Additionally, even though we ask students to address the legal and financial dimensions of the case, this is primarily a business ethics competition, not a business plan or a business law competition. Students have been instructed to explain the ethical issues in a simple and straightforward way in a way that is consistent with a secular, philosophical approach to ethics, and they have been advised to make it plain how these issues relate to business concerns. So, if you’re going to when press for more explanation, please concentrate more on these issues than on financial or legal ones.
- We’re trying to discourage two bad habits that students have demonstrated: reading from a script and reading from power point slides instead of speaking to the “audience.” Please consider these serious errors.
- Teams have been encouraged to handle the ethical issues in a way that would be most palatable to a business audience. That is, they should be trying to translate the technical, ethical issues into language that would fit with the mind set that would prevail in a business. They’re still responsible for considering the tangible good and harm that actions at issue might do, as well as the intrinsic ethical character of the actions. But you should find them doing this in a way that’s most appropriate to the audience they’ve chosen to address. See the “Ethical Issues” section of the Presentation Guidelines page to see how we have advised student to approach the ethical issues.
- Please view at least one of the presentations on our Video Resources page to see an example of a winning presentation.
- Please read the article “A Framework for Ethical Decision Making” by the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.