Effects of engineering education on students' ethical attitudes

Abstract

Integrating teaching about ethics in engineering degree has challenges: Teachers focused on the degree core topics may lack the expertise to handle the ethics, and teachers with an ethics background may struggle to connect the ethics teaching to the field-specific issues. In addition, a portion of the students themselves may consider the non-core topic to be unnecessary or demotivating, which poses further challenges for the teaching. In the paper, we explore the ethical attitudes of students based on a survey conducted on information technology, electrical engineering and computer sciences students at our university. The survey received 224 responses. We compare the attitudes of students depending on their progress in their studies and whether they have had any ethics teaching included in their studies. In addition, we discuss the students' attitudes compared to the ethical attitudes of the graduated engineers from a survey of members of a national engineering association. As the goal is to understand how to better integrate ethics teaching into education, we also discuss the students' views on how the teaching should be integrated and if students' previous encounters with ethics teaching affect their opinion on the matter.