Can Our Students Recognize And Resolve Ethical Dilemmas?

ABET’s accreditation criteria have provided additional impetus for preparing engineering graduates to understand their professional and ethical responsibilities. Accordingly, engineering ethics courses have stressed skills acquisition rather than behavior change. However, to date, methods to assess students’ ability to resolve ethical dilemmas remain largely undeveloped. As part of a joint study at the University of Pittsburgh and the Colorado School of Mines, we are developing a measurement tool for assessing students’ abilities to recognize and resolve ethical dilemmas. To date we have constructed and validated an analytic scoring rubric for ethical dilemmas consisting of five components: recognition of and framing the dilemma; use of information (both known and unknown, i.e., facts or concepts needed to resolve the problem but not included in the case text); analysis of the scenario; perspective taken; and suggested resolution. We have used the rubric to evaluate the capabilities of 120 students, ranging from freshman to graduate levels using a test consisting of three ethical dilemmas for which the student provides a written analysis. The analyses are then holistically scored using the rubric that allows us to classify the student’s level of achievement. We present the results of these tests and discuss the lessons learned from this experiment. Our long-term objective is to develop a web-based assessment instrument similar to CSM’s Cogito system for assessing intellectual development that can be effectively used by engineering faculty to assess students’ ability to recognize and resolve ethical dilemmas.