2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Background: Engineering accreditation standards increasingly emphasize ethical responsibility; however, the integration of ethics within engineering curricula often varies in structure and visibility.
Purpose: This study examines how ethics-related content is distributed and framed across institutional curricula at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from 2019 to 2022. The goal is to identify patterns in curricular signaling and to explore how engineering librarians might use curricular mapping to support ethics education.
Methods: This study employed a curricular mapping approach to analyze publicly available course catalog data, including course titles, descriptions, and departmental affiliations. Courses explicitly referencing ethics, professional responsibility, research integrity, or related terms were coded into thematic clusters reflecting dominant ethical framing.
Results: Ethics-related instruction was widely distributed but decentralized. While philosophy departments maintained sustained offerings, engineering and computing fields incorporated ethics intermittently, often embedding ethical considerations within professional practice or technological contexts rather than as standalone requirements. Explicit connections to information literacy and data ethics were uneven and most visible in computing-adjacent areas.
Conclusions: The findings highlight the absence of a coordinated institutional strategy for ethics integration, particularly within engineering curricula. Curricular mapping offers engineering librarians a practical diagnostic tool for identifying gaps, strengthening collaborations, and supporting accreditation reporting and instructional planning.