James's Weblog

In the aftermath of the theft problem, Sony forced all of its contractors to take an ethics test. We had a choice between taking an hour-long online test or spending two hours in an ethics training class. I chose the test.

It turned out that the “online test” wasn’t online at all; it was a program that ran off of a CD. One of my coworkers explained it to me:

“How will the company know that I took the test?” I asked.

“Your boss will sign you off on it.”

“How will he know that I took the test?”

“You’ll tell him so. If you want, you can save an hour by just saying that you took it.”

Well, being the ethical person that I am, I wasted an hour of company time taking the test anyway. The whole concept of an ethics test seems pretty stupid to me. Wouldn’t unethical people just cheat? Sony’s test was particularly dumb; the questions it asked were all black-and-white, it was always obvious what answers the company wanted, and the questions were mostly about legal issues, not ethical ones.