Work in progress - enhancing ethical awareness within undergraduate multidisciplinary teams by preparing Codes of Ethics

IIT, Lehigh, Michigan Tech, and Rice universities are piloting a strategy based on the book by Jones & Ferrill, The Seven Layers of Integrity (2006), to teach ethical awareness to engineers and scientists. Students at the four universities are expected to prepare a code of ethics for their own project or course problem context. These codes are evaluated and each code of ethics must have an over-arching principle as well as seven canons describing the standards of conduct to which the individual or professional working in the problem context shall be held. Each canon must be supported by descriptions of ethical pressures and risks. Each of these requirements is scored and the scores from these dasiacodepsila evaluations constitute evidence of the extent to which teams understand the principles of ethics and can translate that understanding into a code of ethics.