The Engaged University:
Student Moral Development

Results of the Defining Issues Test (DIT2)

The Office of Institutional Effectiveness has completed the baseline assessment of Mercer students‘ moral development, by administering the Defining Issues Test (DIT2) to a sample of beginning and graduating students from all eleven of the University‘s schools and colleges (a sample of 833 Mercer students completed the instrument). The DIT2 is the most common measure of maturity of ethical judgment and moral reasoning.

This initial administration of the DIT2 at Mercer had some methodological challenges with sample sizes and adequate representation by gender, minority status, and academic program, but preliminary results showed some interesting results (to be checked against subsequent sample groups). Below is a summary of the results; the full report is available at this link.

Undergraduate Students

• Macon undergraduate students exceeded the national mean increase in moral maturity for collegiate students by 8%.
• Seniors in Liberal Arts and Music demonstrated the highest level of moral maturity, exceeding the national norm for college seniors by 12% and 28% respectively.
• Seniors in the Centers (CCPS and Education) and in Engineering demonstrated the least moral maturity, falling below the national norm for college seniors by 25% and 21% respectively.
• The difference between Macon senior and freshmen scores showed significant moral development (if these samples were representative of recent Mercer students).
• The data from two classes of freshmen students in the Mercer Service Scholars program, one of the QEP initiatives, showed that these students were 24% above the national norm for entering freshmen in their capacity for moral judgment.
  

Graduate and Professional Students

The sample sizes for third-year students in Medicine, Theology, and Law were perhaps too small to be fully representative, so those results should be read with caution.

• Only Theology students among the professional degree programs at Mercer showed a substantial difference between first-year and third-year scores.
• Third-year Theology students were also the only professional school students to exceed the national norm for professional degree recipients, surpassing the norm by 10%.
• Overall, the third-year students in Pharmacy, Medicine, and Law scored 21% below the national norm for ethical judgment for professional degree recipients.