Which factors are correlated with undergraduate engineering distance learning students’ expectations of ethical issues?

Project leader(s): Joanna Sessford
Theme: Other
Faculty: STEM
Status: Archived
Dates: November 2022 to February 2024

Ethics is becoming an increasingly important part of engineering curriculum. Engineers need to be able to recognise and make ethical decisions in their working life. This is essential for a number of different reasons including to avoid potentially life taking disasters.

This project aims to determine the factors which correlate with expectations of ethical issues and to determine the influences on ethical values of distance learning engineering students. Data was collected using anonymous questionnaires, which were circulated to students taking modules at the three different levels of an engineering degree program. Student participation was very low with 40 students responding from 1100 students asked to participate.

Students were asked the influences of their ethical values, of the categories given, religion was the least influencer followed by Open University tutors. Students’ workplace instructors/managers appeared to have a more significant influence on students than their university tutors. However, this influence may not in all circumstances be viewed as positive. Students were more likely to feel that if they had experienced an unethical act in the workplace the unethical acts that they experienced in the future were likely to be of a similar nature.

Students who had encountered unethical acts were more likely to feel they would experience ethical issues or conflicts in the workplace. Students at level 2 were much more likely than students at level 1 to feel that their engineering studies had addressed ethical issues or conflicts this result was predicted because students at level 1 are at the beginning of their journey. It was surprising that students at level 3, were less likely than students at level 2, to feel that their engineering studies had addressed ethical issues which arise in engineering. One level 3 students did not believe that ethics had been covered. It is hypothesised that the reason for this is students at level 2 have a good memory of a compulsory module at the end of level 1, which had a high level of ethics incorporated in it and had ethics included in the assessments. To further explore students understanding of ethical issues, students were asked to describe plagiarism in terms of ethics, students’ answers suggested that the majority of students were not able to fully develop the reasons behind plagiarism being unethical behaviour. It is therefore suggested that more emphasis is needed on engineering ethics education. There is concern that students may not have the knowledge to identify problems as involving ethical issues, students were asked to rate how likely they thought it was that they would encounter ethical issues during their working life, with 1 being ethical issues or conflicts will never occur and 5 being they will occur frequently, the mean score was 3.6.

It is recommended that ethics is integrated throughout the module’s students study including in assessments. A further recommendation is that continuous personal development in the area of engineering ethics education is offered to all academic staff involved with engineering modules.

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