> nowadays all PhD students generally take something called “Responsible Conduct of Research”
I think that is a broad generalization. I never had to take an ethics in research course as a PhD student.
> falsifying data, plagiarism, how to ethically work in animal models ... image manipulation.
My take is that this may be a "field"-dependent class. My PhD is in a non-experimental field (math); thus, we cannot have these sorts of issues (minus plagiarism).
FWIW, I did a PhD at University of Michigan, finishing in 2014. We did have to take this class -- I gather that the university put off implementing it for quite a while but eventually they gave in and did it. Nobody involved with it really seemed to want to be.
A lot of the class consisted of videos, the contents of which were mostly irrelevant to mathematics (dealing with things like falsification of data). The people assigned to teach it (it was someone different each week) would try to talk about what was in there, but there wasn't much to talk about because so little of it was relevant to math (mostly just plagiarism, as you say).
In an attempt to do something useful with the remaining time, most of the professors ended up turning it into something of a career-and-publishing Q&A, answering questions about various issues (though not really ethical issues) that can come up in writing and publishing papers. <shrug>
(I seem to recall one of the professors tried more seriously to actually stick to the material, but he was an exception...)
> I never had to take an ethics in research course as a PhD student.
What often happens is that a given program is required to include an ethics portion or course, so the university has some mandatory class whose syllabus reads "this class will include an ethics portion".
Then there just never seems to be the time needed to get to that material.
At least, that's how my computer science degree went.
I think that is a broad generalization. I never had to take an ethics in research course as a PhD student.
> falsifying data, plagiarism, how to ethically work in animal models ... image manipulation.
My take is that this may be a "field"-dependent class. My PhD is in a non-experimental field (math); thus, we cannot have these sorts of issues (minus plagiarism).