Engineering culture and the ethical development of undergraduate students

Abstract

The Survey of Engineering Ethical Development is a holistic assessment of the curricular and co-curricular experiences of engineering undergraduates that lead to improved ethical development. This project will collect data from 4,000 undergraduates at 20 universities in the United States. We present a qualitative analysis of the cultural summaries from the first 10 of these site visits. In particular we consider how students, faculty, and administrators view ethics education within the context of the engineering academic culture. Students, faculty, and administrators viewed ethics instruction as an important aspect of engineering education, though they also highlighted numerous barriers to its implementation. Furthermore, each group of participants commented on the apparent disconnect between the emphasis placed on academic ethics and that placed on professional ethics. Based on these findings, we make a number of recommendations to overcome the integration of ethics in engineering curricula and to better unify academic and professional ethics.