Teaching and Assessing Ethics in a Specialized Professional Skills Course

Ethical considerations are featured prominently in the professional codes of ethics of various engineering professional societies. Arguably, having a code of ethics is a requirement for a field to be recognized as professional. The importance of ethics is further exemplified by accreditation requirements from, e.g., ABET. One of seven ABET Student Outcomes states: “4. an ability to recognize ethical and professional responsibilities in engineering situations and make informed judgments, which must consider the impact of engineering solutions in global, economic, environmental, and societal contexts”. The teaching of engineering ethics would ideally be done across the curriculum and in a proper engineering context. However, due to many practical considerations, this is done in a few, often specialized, courses. In this paper, we report on the implementation of ethics education in one such specialized course at the senior (fourth year) level. We discuss the course structure and how we use rubrics to assess students’ attainment of course outcomes related to ethical reasoning. We also provide guidance on scaffolding teaching materials and constructing assignments