ENHANCING ETHICAL AWARENESS WITHIN UNDERGRADUATE MULTIDISCIPLINARY TEAMS BY PREPARING CODES OF ETHICS

摘要

This research paper addresses a new strategy for helping undergraduate students working on real problems within multidisciplinary teams to develop an awareness of ethical issues. High profile business scandals the last few years strongly support efforts to provide our students with a greater awareness of ethical issues and guidelines to address them. Another impetus for our focus, of course, comes from the ABET1 criteria that have evolved over the past decade focusing on professional skills, such as ethical awareness, and from the reports by the National Academy on the attributes of the engineer of 2020. While most engineering students have presumably been exposed to an engineering Code of Ethics, it has not been established that this exposure has a great impact on their future decision making. The ideal outcome, presumably, is that all students would be able to recognize a situation, in professional or personal life, that presented an ethical dilemma, would be able to analyze the challenge from a variety of perspectives and discuss it with relevant peers, and make an informed decision, recognizing the ways in which they were adhering to some codes of ethics but perhaps not to others.