'Do I Have to Take This Class?': A Review of Ethics Requirements in Computer Science Curricula

ABET criteria for accreditation of undergraduate computer science (CS) degrees require universities to cover within their curricula topics including ''local and global impacts of computing solutions on individuals, organizations, and society,'' and to prepare their students to ''make informed judgments in computing practice, taking into account legal, ethical, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility principles''. A growing body of research similarly identifies the need for CS programs to integrate ethics into their degree requirements, both through standalone ethics-related courses and embedded modules or case studies on the ethical impacts in 'technical' courses. The calls for increased attention to CS ethics education have become more pressing with the emergence of sophisticated consumer-ready AI technologies, which pose new ethical challenges in the forms of bias, hallucination, and autonomous decision-making. Yet it remains unclear whether current university curricula are adequately preparing future graduates to confront these challenges. This paper presents a systematic review of the degree requirements of 250 computer science bachelor's degree programs worldwide. We categorize each program according to whether a CS-related ethics course is offered and/or required by the department, finding that almost half of all universities we review do not offer any computing ethics courses, and only 33% of universities require students to take an ethics course to obtain their degree. We analyze differences among public US, private US, and non-US universities and discuss implications for curricular changes and the state of undergraduate computing ethics education.