An investigation of how much ethics appears in undergraduate engineering curricula

Abstract

The consequential nature of many engineering decisions and ramifications of engineering projects suggest that it would behoove engineers to learn about ethical decision-making in their formal education. Despite the importance of engineers learning about ethics, however, there exist wide variations in the specific details - the when and where of engineering students learning about ethics, let alone engineering ethics, can be nebulous. Some countries address this issue directly and standardize their curricular expectations for ethics that undergraduate engineering students experience. That move makes it easy to identify at least one point when a professional engineer may have learned ethics. In the United States, there is no such standardization. Instead, there exists a potential for large variation in engineering students' undergraduate curricula as many colleges and departments make their own curricular decisions. What does that variation look like? We have an underdeveloped answer to that question of exactly when and where an engineer might be exposed to ideas about ethics in their formal education. Although the engineering ethics education community should want to have a better understanding of this how much problem, obtaining such a picture of the ethics education landscape is challenging. This research paper helps the engineering education community obtain a more detailed view of the how much dimension of the ethics education space by looking at the curricular requirements outlined by 148 engineering programs in the United States. While there exist several ways to address this problem - e.g., surveys, interviewing individual faculty or administrators, interviewing students to hear about their experiences - we chose a different approach to get a wider view of the landscape. Rather than repeating the efforts of several other research teams and surveying a theoretically representative sample of faculty members and/or students, we created a dataset by sampling program requirements from the top 30 engineering degree-producing universities (according to the 2018 ASEE By the Numbers publication) in the United States and. For each university, we looked at the publicly available curriculum documentation for the five most nationally popular engineering disciplines (based on number of undergraduate degrees awarded in 2018) - mechanical, civil, electrical, computer science, and chemical engineering. We asked (a) how much might engineering departments require their students to see engineering ethics in their coursework and (b) how much engineering departments may offer regarding engineering ethics. For this we present a basic descriptive statistical analysis. The results we present have implications for engineering ethics educators and administrators working at various levels in the entire undergraduate engineering education ecosystem.