Meeting the ethics challenge in engineering education: re-accreditation and beyond

Our experience has shown that one of the most effective and efficient ways to meet the ABET EC 2000 ethics challenge is a program of ethics across the curriculum integrated with an elective stand alone course in engineering ethics. In this presentation we describe the tools and strategies we have used to foster ethics across the curriculum in engineering at our university and to instantiate its continuous improvement. We highlight faculty training by focusing on the two-day workshop we have developed that has proven to be effective in providing engineering faculty with the skills to enable them to integrate ethics into mainstream engineering courses. We argue that our approach effectively fosters the ethics integration aimed at by ABET criteria. An integral part of our approach has been the use of ethics tests which allow for the integration of ethical considerations into engineering decisions and projects without requiring that engineers master the underlying ethical theory.