Illinois may soon feel the backlash from state employees who failed the state ethics exam.

State employees that passed the ethics exam in less than 10 minutes received a noncompliant packet that must be read and signed, or the employee risks job loss. As a result, two tenured professors at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale have filed a lawsuit intended to counter the state’s current solution.

“I believe that taking the additional training and signing the certification would be an admission that I was noncompliant, though I was not,” said Marvin Zeman, a SIU mathematics professor, in a written statement. “It would be unethical for me to sign this document.”

Frank Bucaro, an award-winning public speaker who specializes in business ethics, said the SIU professors are making a statement based on personal principles and called the state’s noncompliant solution a “coward’s way out.”

“The noncompliant issue gives the perception of a guilty plea,” Bucaro said. “To be noncompliant, in this case, is like pleading ‘no contest’ in court. You don’t actually plead guilty, but you still have to pay a price.”

Bucaro said state employees should not sign any noncompliant option if they feel it is unethical.

“An online ethics course with a 30-minute time frame reeks of being a waste of time, a joke and ineffective,” Bucaro said. “Quality ethics training must be interactive, ongoing and enforceable.”

Bucaro said the ethics exam in Illinois is not a lost cause; the state can remedy the situation. He thinks the state should make the experience more interactive and applicable in real-world situations and make the training an ongoing process instead of a brief examination.

Deborah Haliczer, NIU director of Employee Relations and Human Resource Services, said state employees at NIU have generally cooperated.

“Most have been turning in their signed sheets,” Haliczer said. “No one has been happy about it, but they know that the university does not consider them to be noncompliant.”

Haliczer said most NIU employees argued they were already familiar with the material on the ethics exam, on top of being educated individuals who are adept at reading and processing information quickly.

“This has caused embarrassment to the employees in this group, all of whom felt that they had complied with the training requirement and had passed the quiz,” Haliczer said. “It came as a huge surprise to them.”

“The Inspector General arbitrarily decided that scoring 100 percent, as I did, matters less than how long I took to complete the training,” Zeman said.

Haliczer said many of the employees the state has deemed non-compliant have protested through the media.

“It has added more time and cost to the program,” Haliczer said. “We had to copy and print over 600 letters and orientation packets and send them around campus.”