Salt Lake City, Utah
June 23, 2018
June 23, 2018
July 27, 2018
Civil Engineering
15
10.18260/1-2--30431
https://peer.asee.org/30431
483
Ron Welch (P.E.) received his B.S. degree in Engineering Mechanics from the United States Military Academy in 1982. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana in 1990 and 1999, respectively. He became the Dean of Engineering at The Citadel on 1 July 2011. Prior to his current position, he was the Department Head of Civil Engineering at The University of Texas at Tyler from Jan 2007 to June 2011 as well as served in the Corps of Engineers for over 24 years including eleven years on the faculty at the United States Military Academy.
Dr. Tara Hornor currently serves as Associate Provost for Planning, Assessment and Evaluation & Dean of Enrollment Management at The Citadel, providing leadership for the institution’s strategic planning, accreditation, assessment, institutional research, admissions, financial aid, and graduate college offices. She holds a Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration from the University of Arizona and master’s degrees in counseling, instructional design, and human resource management.
Robert Rabb is an associate professor and the Mechanical Engineering Program Director at The Citadel. He previously taught mechanical engineering at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the United States Military Academy and his M.S.E. and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. His research and teaching interests are in mechatronics, regenerative power, and multidisciplinary engineering.
Dr. Kevin Bower is the D. Graham Copeland Professor of Civil Engineering and Head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at The Citadel, Charleston, South Carolina. Dr. Bower’s teaching research interests are in improving active learning environments and the development of classroom pedagogy to improve moral development in engineering students.
Even though our university has an honor code, there is the perception that too many students are dismissed through honor violations and too many graduates find themselves in less than honorable situations. We have effective implementation of a student run academic integrity policy through our honor code, but not all faculty enforce or inform the honor code process uniformly. Therefore, the university has developed an Ethics Across the Curriculum as its current Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) for our Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC) reaccreditation. The goal is to infuse ethics and the ethical decision making process into each academic program through the teaching of ethics across the curriculum. The infusion of ethical discussions as they apply to each major with a focus on the primary industries where they are employed will support the academic honor code and result in fewer academic dismissals due to honor violations. The Ethics Across the Curriculum theme for the Quality Enhancement Plan provided additional opportunities for embedded indicators in the engineering programs’ assessments, thus meeting part of the ABET requirement. Some academic programs imparted classroom discussions and scenario based problems to engage students multiple times in their academic majors. This paper will outline our QEP, how it is being implemented, the assessment of the implementation and improved ethical awareness, the decrease in honor code violations over the five years and outline the next steps for the institution's ethics curriculum.
Welch, R. W., & Hornor, T., & Rabb, R. J., & Bower, K. C. (2018, June), Enhancing Student Learning Through Accreditation Paper presented at 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--30431
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