Institutional Obstacles to Integrating Ethics into the Curriculum and Strategies for Overcoming Them

Abstract

Several national reports emphasize the importance of providing undergraduate engineering students with effective ethics education, and most engineering faculty and administrators agree that ethics is an important aspect of engineering undergraduate education. However, there are many obstacles to integrating ethics into the curriculum. This study investigated these obstacles at 18 diverse institutions and found five common themes: 1) the curriculum is already full, and there is little room for ethics education, 2) faculty lack adequate training for teaching ethics 3) there are too few incentives to incorporate ethics into the curriculum, 4) policies about academic dishonesty are inconsistent, and 5) institutional growth is taxing existing resources. This study concludes with recommendations for overcoming these obstacles.