2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This research paper explores the ethical views of engineering faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students in the College of Engineering at the flagship campus of The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), a large, public institution located in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States.

Ethical concerns have beset the engineering profession for centuries. Some individuals have lost their lives due to the ethical lapses of engineers, though many other engineering ethics situations can be much more subtle and insidious. Prior ethical lapses partially have led to calls for the professionalization of the engineering profession and, in some segments of the profession, have led to the development of state licensure regimes. At the same time, undergraduate engineering programs operate under ABET (2023) accreditation criteria which requires effective ethics training for engineering students (Criterion 3, Outcome 4) and evidence of continuing program improvement (Criterion 4). In view of recent scholarship suggesting changes in engineering student populations and the concurrent backdrop of new ethical questions arising in relation to the mass adoption of artificial intelligence technologies, re-examining the state-of-play of engineering ethics acculturation is warranted.

This study adopts a theoretical framework centered on organizational theory, as informed by a philosophical viewpoint blending elements of post-structuralism and pragmatism. This study utilizes a convergent mixed methods research design (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2018) with subject responses collected via an online survey. The research survey, previously developed in Sottile (2023), proposes three ethics scenarios to subjects, collecting both Likert scale and free response information about the subjects’ reactions and opinions in relation to the scenarios. The first scenario explores a classically inspired engineering ethics scenario, designed to enable triangulation of subjects’ views with extant ethics literature. The latter two scenarios address modern challenges brought on by the pace of technological change.

Data collection for this study occurred during much of October 2023 at Penn State, yielding a total sample size of 152 respondents (31 faculty, 48 graduate students, and 73 undergraduate students), with quantitative results presented in this article. The results of this portion of the study suggest that some gaps in attitudes and beliefs exist between engineering students and their faculty, including with respect to estimating industry expectations and with respect to novel ethical scenarios brought on by technological change. Given the pace of changing technology occurring alongside parallel changes being seen in engineering student populations, it may well be that the ethics state-of-play is shifting beneath engineering faculty’s feet, necessitating the need for revisiting historical paradigms for teaching ethics to engineering students. Implications of these findings are explored herein.