2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This submission is a Research Paper for the Engineering Ethics Division.

Concern for teaching ethics in engineering has existed for some time with most attention given to how to teach students these topics. Research in this domain often explores which instructional practices foster ethical reasoning and decision making; reporting on the development of an intervention, evaluating student performance on ethics related course work, and/or comparing their pre/post course performance on ethical reasoning tests. There is less attention given to how faculty perform on ethical reasoning tests which could be an important consideration when understanding the education environment that students are receiving their ethical education.

This motivates the guiding questions for this work, which are: 1) Do engineering faculty perform better on the Engineering and Science Issues Test (ESIT) than undergraduate students? and 2) Do engineering faculty who report teaching ethics topics in their courses perform better on the ESIT than their peers who do not teach ethics topics?

The Engineering and Science Issues Test (ESIT) is an available tool for the measurement of moral judgment tailored to technical dilemmas. This test presents six case studies with ethically problematic situations a scientist or engineering might reasonably expect to confront in practice. Taking this test requires both rating and ranking statements about these studies that are used to generate scores of moral judgement. This tool has been used in multiple student populations across institutions and has recently been used at the University of Alabama (UA) to assess the ethical reasoning of freshman engineering students but has not yet been used at UA to assess faculty.

To answer the motivating study questions, an online survey was distributed to 154 faculty in the College of Engineering at the University of Alabama to collect their responses to the ESIT and gather details on if the courses they teach include engineering ethics. From this online recruitment 52 faculty completed the survey, yielding a response rate of 33.8%. This work will provide an overview of the faculty ethical reasoning scores, performance on individual case studies, comparison of scores between faculty groups (those reporting teaching ethics topics in engineering and those who do not), and comparison between faculty scores and previously reported student scores.