Engineers create airplanes, buildings, medical devices, and software, amongst many other things. Engineers abide by a professional code of ethics to uphold people’s safety and the reputation of the profession. Likewise, students abide by a code of academic integrity while learning the knowledge and necessary skills to prepare them for the engineering and computing professions. This paper reports on studies designed to improve the engineering student culture with respect to academic integrity and ethics. To understand the existing culture at a (...) university in the USA, a survey based on a national survey about cheating was administered to students. The incidences of self-reported cheating and incidences of not reporting others who cheat show the culture is similar to other institutions. Two interventions were designed and tested in an introduction to an engineering course: two case studies that students discussed in teams and the whole class, and a letter of recommendation assignment in which students wrote about themselves three years into the future. Students were surveyed after the two interventions. Results show that first-year engineering students appreciate having a code of academic integrity and they want to earn their degree without cheating, yet less than half of the students would report on another cheating student. The letter of recommendation assignment had some impact on getting students to think about ethics, their character, and their actions. Future work in changing the student culture will continue in both a top-down and bottom-up manner. (shrink)

Engineering ethics can be divided into three spheres, namely the technical, the professional, and the social. Ideally, engineering students should engage with all three spheres of ethics, but the literature suggests that this might not be the case. How do engineering students engage with the three spheres of engineering ethics during a global pandemic? The COVID-19 pandemic represents a dramatic and ongoing real-world challenge affecting many students personally. This research explores the extent to which engineering students engage with each sphere (...) of engineering ethics by examining how engineering students understand their roles in addressing the pandemic and its implications. We conducted a survey with undergraduate engineering students (n = 410) at a university in the Midwest. Qualitative analysis suggests that there was low engagement with both social ethics and professional ethics among respondents, while there was higher engagement with technical ethics. Quantitative analysis suggests that non-conservative engineering students from less wealthy families in our study show higher engagement with technical ethics as compared to conservative engineering students from less wealthy families. Non-conservative engineering students from wealthy families, however, show similar engagement with technical ethics as compared to conservative engineering students from wealthy families. In addition, engineering students from both wealthy and less wealthy families show higher engagement with technical ethics if they reside in urban areas as compared to engineering students from both wealthy and less wealthy families in non-urban areas. In addition, the difference in terms of engagement with technical ethics between non-urban engineering students from less wealthy families and urban engineering students from less wealthy families is larger than the difference in terms of engagement with technical ethics between non-urban engineering students from wealthy families and urban engineering students from wealthy families. Further investigation will be needed to explain these findings. However, qualitative results confirm that, despite the potential for the pandemic to encourage engagement with all three spheres of ethics, there continues to be low engagement with ethics beyond the technical level. (shrink)

Promoting the ethical formation of engineering students through the cultivation of their discipline-specific knowledge, sensitivity, imagination, and reasoning skills has become a goal for many engineering education programs throughout the United States. However, there is neither a consensus throughout the engineering education community regarding which strategies are most effective towards which ends, nor which ends are most important. This study provides an overview of engineering ethics interventions within the U.S. through the systematic analysis of articles that featured ethical interventions in (...) engineering, published in select peer-reviewed journals, and published between 2000 and 2015. As a core criterion, each journal article reviewed must have provided an overview of the course as well as how the authors evaluated course-learning goals. In sum, 26 articles were analyzed with a coding scheme that included 56 binary items. The results indicate that the most common methods for integrating ethics into engineering involved exposing students to codes/standards, utilizing case studies, and discussion activities. Nearly half of the articles had students engage with ethical heuristics or philosophical ethics. Following the presentation of the results, this study describes in detail four articles to highlight less common but intriguing pedagogical methods and evaluation techniques. The findings indicate that there is limited empirical work on ethics education within engineering across the United States. Furthermore, due to the large variation in goals, approaches, and evaluation methods described across interventions, this study does not detail “best” practices for integrating ethics into engineering. The science and engineering education community should continue exploring the relative merits of different approaches to ethics education in engineering. (shrink)

An honor code is certainly a good place to start teaching engineering students about ethics, but teaching students to live honorably requires far more effort than memorizing a code of ethics statement or applying it just to academic performance. In the School of Engineering at Grand Valley State University, we have followed the model provided by the United States Military Academy at West Point. For our students this involves an introduction to the Honor Code as part of a larger Honor (...) Concept at the very beginning of their studies and then making it an integral part of their preparation as engineers. The challenge is significant because the culture at large does not support living with an Honor Concept. This paper will begin with a discussion of the cultural context in which we must teach, because that context has changed significantly in the years since many faculty members were students themselves. The rest of the paper will detail the approach that we have taken to teach ethics as an engineer’s way of life. “The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world is to be in reality what we would appear to be. All human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice and experience of them.”. (shrink)

The multi-disciplinary unit Social Responsibility in Action was developed for students with an interest in ethics who were completing undergraduate degrees in Arts, Commerce, Design or Science at an Australian research-intensive university. The academic objectives of this unit were to increase student awareness, knowledge, understanding and critical thinking skills related to various ethical issues. Lecturers from five disciplines collaborated in the design and delivery of SRA, which comprised lectures, tutorials and a research-based project. Anonymous surveys were administered at the start (...) and end of the semester to obtain feedback on student expectations and learning experience, respectively. Data across three student cohorts showed that at the start of semester, 80% of student comments indicated a desire to expand their interest of ethical matters, 59% a desire to gain understanding and knowledge and 59% to gain critical thinking or communication skills. SRA was extremely well received by students, with 98% of respondents indicating that this multi-disciplinary ethics unit had met their expectations. Students also found that the variety of teaching styles, unit content and multi-disciplinary approach stimulated learning. (shrink)

Engineering ethics is usually focused on engineers’ ethics, engineers acting as individuals. Certainly, these professionals play a central role in the matter, but engineers are not a singularity inside engineering ; they exist and operate as a part of a complex network of mutual relationships between many other people, organizations and groups. When engineering ethics and engineers’ ethics are taken as one and the same thing the paradigm of the ethical engineer which prevails is that of the heroic engineer, a (...) certain model of the ideal engineer: someone both quite individualistic and strong enough to deal with all the moral challenges that could arise. We argue that this is not the best approach, at least today in our interrelated world. We have achieved a high degree of independence from nature by means of technology. In exchange for this autonomy we have become increasingly tied up with very complex systems to which we constantly delegate new tasks and powers. Concerns about safety keep growing everywhere due to the fact that now we have a sensitive awareness of the huge amount of power we are both consuming and deploying, thus, new forms of dialogue and consensus have to be incorporated at different levels, in different forums and at different times. Within these democratic channels of participation not just the needs and interests, but also the responsibilities and mutual commitments of all parties should be taken into account. (shrink)

Ethics teaching in engineering can be problematic because of student perceptions of its subjective, ambiguous and philosophical content. The use of discipline-specific case studies has helped to address such perceptions, as has practical decision making and problem solving approaches based on some ethical frameworks. However, a need exists for a wider range of creative methods in ethics education to help complement the variety of activities and learning experiences within the engineering curriculum. In this work, a novel approach is presented in (...) which first-year undergraduate students are responsible for proposing ethics education activities of relevance to their peers and discipline area. The students are prepared for the task through a short introduction on engineering ethics, whereby generic frameworks for moral and professional conduct are discussed, and discipline and student-relevance contexts provided. The approach has been used in four departments of engineering at Imperial College London, and has led to the generation of many creative ideas for wider student engagement in ethics awareness, reflection and understanding. The paper presents information on the premise of the introductory sessions for supporting the design task, and an evaluation of the student experience of the course and task work. Examples of proposals are given to demonstrate the value of such an approach to teachers, and ultimately to the learning experiences of the students themselves. (shrink)

Research misconduct has been thoroughly discussed in the literature, but mainly in terms of definitions and prescriptions for proper conduct. Even when case studies are cited, they are generally used as a repository of “lessons learned.” What has been lacking from this conversation is how the lessons of responsible conduct of research are imparted in the first place to graduate students, especially those in technical fields such as engineering. Nor has there been much conversation about who is responsible for what (...) in training students in Responsible Conduct of Research or in allocating blame in cases of misconduct. This paper explores three seemingly disparate cases of misconduct—the 2004 plagiarism scandal at Ohio University; the famous Robert Millikan article of 1913, in which his reported data selection did not match his notebooks; and the 1990 fabrication scandal in Dr. Leroy Hood’s research lab. Comparing these cases provides a way to look at the relationship between the graduate student (or trainee) and his/her advisor (a relationship that has been shown to be the most influential one for the student) as well as at possibly differential treatment for established researchers and researchers-in-training, in cases of misconduct. This paper reflects on the rights and responsibilities of research advisers and their students and offers suggestions for clarifying both those responsibilities and the particularly murky areas of research-conduct guidelines. (shrink)