Work in progress - enhancing ethical awareness within undergraduate multidisciplinary teams by preparing Codes of Ethics

IIT, Lehigh, Michigan Tech, and Rice universities are piloting a strategy based on the book by Jones & Ferrill, The Seven Layers of Integrity (2006), to teach ethical awareness to engineers and scientists. Students at the four universities are expected to prepare a code of ethics for their own project or course problem context. These codes are evaluated and each code of ethics must have an over-arching principle as well as seven canons describing the standards of conduct to which the individual or professional working in the problem context shall be held. Each canon must be supported by descriptions of ethical pressures and risks. Each of these requirements is scored and the scores from these dasiacodepsila evaluations constitute evidence of the extent to which teams understand the principles of ethics and can translate that understanding into a code of ethics.

Introduction

Impetus for our research comes from the ABET¹ criteria that have evolved over the past decade focusing on professional skills, such as ethical awareness, and from the reports by the National Academy on the attributes of the engineer of 2020²³. While most engineering students have presumably been exposed to an engineering Code of Ethics, it has not been established that this exposure has any impact on their future decision making. The ideal learning outcome, presumably, is that all students will be able to recognize a situation, in professional or personal life, that presents an ethical dilemma, will be able to analyze the challenge from a variety of perspectives and make an informed decision, recognizing the ways in which they were adhering to some ethical canons or codes of ethics but perhaps not to others.