Ethical Development in Undergraduate Engineering: Results from a Multi-University Survey

During undergraduate engineering education, curriculum often focuses on technical knowledge rather than ethical development. The role of ethics within the engineering profession, whether broadly or as it applies to specific circumstances, is often given a cursory lesson rather than being woven throughout the curriculum for optimal understanding. When ethics is incorporated into curriculum, programs tend to focus on microethics concerning issues that arise in particular contexts and interactions between individuals, rather than macroethics that address societal concerns more broadly. Notably, students often obtain an informal ethics education—i.e., education outside of the classroom— through involvement in student organizations, internships, or daily interactions with peers. For instance, a student interning at a water resources engineering firm might visit the project site of a stormwater revitalization. Upon visiting, the student can recognize the disparities between communities that typically receive these services fist and those communities of color and lower socioeconomic status that are often ignored. Witnessing this unjust system firsthand can encourage that student to consider systemic inequities in future work. Experiences such as this contribute to a student's ethical development and can impact their work as an engineering professional. In this study, we aim to understand the differences in ethical development among students based on sociodemographic factors. In April 2020, we deployed a survey to undergraduate students at two universities to assess ethical development using the Defining Issues Test (DIT). The results of this test include a numeric rating indicating the student's level of ethical development based on Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development. By using the DIT, we were able to produce a standardized metric to evaluate ethical development across universities, majors, and sociodemographic factors. We used statistical inferencing to explore how sociodemographics were associated with ethics. Here we present the survey analyses, showing that certain demographics may impact a student's ethical development. For instance, the preliminary results of this study show that women scored higher on the DIT than men. Additionally, those students who identified as liberal had a higher score than those who identified as conservative, and those who identified as less religious scored higher than those who identified as very religious. These results suggest that ethical decisions are grounded in political and religious beliefs. Further research can identify why and how political and religious views influence ethical decision-making.