It's only a matter of time before you're faced with an ethical dilemma on the job. What can an employer expect of you when you have a difficult decision to make? Will you have the judgment and courage to do the right thing? Take this quiz to get a sense of how your ethics measure up. Don't peek and please mark your answers on a scratch pad.

Question #1)
You're applying for a new job as a database administrator. You're currently a software engineer, but due to layoffs, you've been performing most of your department's database-related projects for almost a year now. You want your resume to be taken seriously for the database administrator position.

What Do You Do?
1A) Use the title database manager on your resume -- after all, you've been performing the duties of the person who last had that role.
1B) Use your official title, software engineer, on your resume, even though it doesn't accurately reflect the database skills you perform each day.
1C) Come up with a new job title altogether that better describes what you do each day. It's not your official title, but it delivers the message.

Question #2)
You're doing a yearlong occupational therapy internship at a local nonprofit preschool where some of the children have special needs. Most of these children's families are eligible for financial assistance from the county.

You suspect some of the families are understating their household incomes so they can receive more aid. One particular case involves an unmarried man and woman with a 2-year-old daughter. The family only reports the mother's income, thus boosting the daughter's financial assistance package by almost 50 percent.

You know the daughter would not be able to receive any of the services she's getting from your school without this money, and you know the child is benefiting physically and psychologically from the therapy she's receiving.

What Do You Do?
2A) Nothing. The child's welfare outweighs the county's need to know what's really happening with the family's finances. Besides, it's the county's responsibility to verify the household incomes of participants in the financial assistance program.
2B) Talk to your supervisor about the situation, even though you're pretty sure she must already know about it herself.
2C) Contact the county department that oversees the program in your county and report the matter as suspected fraud.

Question #3)
You are the entire information technology department for a small firm with 20 employees. The president of the company believes some of the employees are spending far too much time on the Internet doing tasks not related to work. The president asks you to start monitoring employees' Internet usage without their knowledge, something you could easily do from a technological standpoint.

What Do You Do?
3A) Start monitoring employees' email and Web usage, as the president has asked.
3B) Suggest that an acceptable Internet-use policy be developed.
3C) Talk to employees and tell them what the president has in mind so they'll change their habits.

Question #4)
You're in graduate school at a major research university, pursuing your PhD in chemistry. You've completed a series of experiments for your doctoral dissertation. Some of the data you've gathered in these experiments supports the hypothesis you've been trying to prove, while some does just the opposite.

Your doctoral program requires you to publish one academic paper based on your research in a professional scientific journal. If you were to write and publish a paper focusing solely on the good data you've gathered in your experiments, you'd be on your way to securing your PhD, and you'd likely get additional funding.

On the other hand, if you write and publish a paper highlighting all your data, you'd be taking a considerable risk. The organization paying for your research might be disappointed and terminate your funding.

What Do You Do?
4A) Write and publish a paper highlighting all your data, but focus mostly on the good data despite the risk of losing your research funding.
4B) Write and publish a paper highlighting only the good data.
4C) Tell the funding organization about the experiments and offer to repeat them in an attempt to get better data to support the hypothesis.

Question #5)
You're the development assistant for a small nonprofit health education organization, and part of your job requires you to oversee the printing of various documents. Typically, you write the documents, collaborate with a graphic designer to lay them out, and then work with an outside printer to get the documents printed in large quantities.

Your latest brochure, “GHB: A Growing Public Health Concern,” is about to come back from the printer. When they arrive, you spot an error in a small headline on the third page. It's supposed to read “GHB: An Emerging Public Health Crisis,” but instead it says “GHB: An Emerging Pubic Health Crisis.” What a difference one letter makes!

What Do You Do?
5A) Call the mistake to your supervisor's attention, even though it's relatively minor in the grand scheme of things and probably won't have any impact on the overall message the brochure is trying to communicate.
5B) In the interest of saving your organization money and time, you let the mistake go unnoticed and work extra hard to distribute all copies of the brochure as quickly as possible so you can get the document reprinted.
5C) Go to your organization's graphic artist, who probably should have caught the mistake during production, and ask what went wrong and why. Then, be prepared to tell your supervisor about the graphic artist's mistake if the supervisor should ask about it.