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Ethics Across the Curriculum: An Effective Response to ABET 2000

William J. Frey, Halley D. Sanchez, and José A. Cruz University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez

I. Introduction

ABET 2000 challenges the traditional engineering curriculum by putting forward innovative general criteria to which any engineering program must respond. Engineering programs answer the challenge by developing objectives and measurable outcomes that represent locally generated instantiations of these criteria. Rather than elicit self-evaluations that merely tabulate activities designed to respond to surface criteria (bean-counting efforts), ABET obliges engineering schools to develop procedures to assess success in meeting these locally generated objectives and requires that they show that they have implemented a continuous process of self-improvement.

ABET has also made it clear that engineering programs must take engineering ethics seriously. The argument that engineers only make technical decisions, that they can (or should) delegate ethical responsibility to others (management, directors, government) no longer holds weight. It has been shown, for example, that the decisions an engineer makes when designing (such as trade off decisions) have strong ethical implications. 1 Hence, an essential component of a successful program in engineering requires that students understand their professional and ethical responsibilities. ABET also asks programs to ensure that students integrate ethical considerations into a "major design project." Even a quick look at these ethics requirements makes it clear that the ethical component of this new engineering curriculum cannot be completely delegated to the ethics expert, for example, a philosopher who would teach a freestanding course in engineering ethics required of all engineering students. For reasons that we will discuss below, the freestanding course, while an essential part of a successful engineering program, does not by itself achieve the integration of ethics into the engineering curriculum that ABET requires.

One of the leading trends in ethics pedagogy today is to have ethical components or modules incorporated into actual professional or occupational courses to supplement a freestanding ethics course. This is known as Ethics Across the Curriculum (EAC), a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to integrating ethical concerns throughout the university academic program. It is holistic because it coordinates a series of exercises integrated into ordinary technical classes, and interdisciplinary because it relies on faculty from all university programs, including—but not limited to—engineering.

We will argue that EAC provides the best response to ABET 2000 ethics requirements because it integrates ethical concerns into ordinary technical courses and shows how ethical issues are embedded in professional judgment, decision-making, and designing. In the following, we will discuss why EAC poses an effective strategy for complying with ABET 2000 and summarize three workshops we held last year at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. These workshops (originally motivated through a UPR central administration grant) introduced this

Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2002, American Society for Engineering Education

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Frey, W. J., & Sánchez, H. D., & Cruz-Cruz, J. (2002, June), Ethics Across The Curriculum: An Effective Response To Abet 2000 Paper presented at 2002 Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada. 10.18260/1-2--10558