2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This engineering ethics WIP serves as documenting a work-in-progress to explore and analyze surveyed learning results of freshman versus senior students when considering challenging (and perhaps even quite debatable and potentially divisive) ethical issues. More particularly, the objective of this work is to explore how students perceive and perhaps modify their original assumptions, thoughts, and potentially even conclusions on ethical concerns directly affecting our engineering professions, as well as our society and world. Discussing engineering ethics during class time can be often perceived as boring or uninteresting. Thus, student engagement can be discouraging and not conducive to accomplishing learning objectives. However, it’s been observed that employing a contentious case study can often foster active student participation.
Choosing debatable issues seems to be more helpful when the topic addressed in class is both immediately applicable to almost everyone, as well as having challenging tradeoff concerns to spur active student engagement. Electric Vehicles (EVs) is among the top topics students resonate. Focused desire is for everyone to openly share their ideas assuming no wrong answers during brainstorming. Sometimes a solitary concern can trump someone’s thoughts or even change minds to resolve ethical dilemmas. For example, harvesting raw materials needed for EV batteries and solar panels has a particular sensitive issue of significant slavery in their supply chains. This, coupled with our cultures potent interest in the proper application of green technologies, generally captures poignant attention of virtually all students in classes over 70+.
This issue of slavery in an overwhelming majority of the world’s current EV battery supply chain even encouraged President Biden to sign into law the Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act (https://www.cbp.gov/trade/forced-labor/UFLPA) in 2021. The Uyghur’s are a marginalized Muslim minority, predominantly in western China. Since most (if not all) students generally abhor forced labor to anyone of any country, the direct impact to leadership in our engineering professions is incredibly highlighted with many often staying afterwards to discuss further. Many even ponder how they can help be part of a solution to spread awareness or even encourage a call to action for all in solving this challenging problem.
This work-in-progress will consider results of surveying these students in both the freshman level ENGR 1000, as well as the ENGR 4xxx senior level course. Currently, the key interest for the findings of this work-in-progress is threefold focusing primarily on awareness, perception, and ethical leadership on how best to respond as engineers to such an ethical dilemma, namely:
1) to determine how many freshman versus senior students were even aware of the issue of forced labor in EVs prior to our classroom discussions among other EV pros and cons,
2) whether our classroom discussion changed their perception of how rapidly we should encourage EVs as a society, as well as how the survey results compares and contrasts between freshmen and seniors, and
3) how active do both the freshmen versus senior students believe we engineers should be involved as an agent of change on this slavery issue in EVs as we seek to continue to provide a voice to our society with leadership in our roles as engineers.