oa A possible instrument for measuring ethical behavior of engineering students

Ethics is one of the most important competencies required of today's engineering graduates. All attempts towards developing that competency constitute, at best, conducting scenario and active learning-based courses and, at worst, delivering passive lectures. There is little chance of developing ethics with these methods. One must follow a systemic cycle of measures to build any such competency. Further, the measurement must be based on real-life situations with real stakes, especially for ethics, which is not easy. In fact, this is one of the most difficult competencies from both measurement and development perspectives.

Ethics is reflected in most of the professional decisions. A decision depends on being able to identify and acquire right information and being able to identify and execute a process based on that information. A competent and qualified engineer typically does not make mistakes in these two stages. The next step, which involves implementing the decision, is susceptible to unethical influence. An incorrect decision could be due to mistakes in the first two stages or in the third stage of implementation. It is difficult to ascertain the source. This dynamics makes measurement and development of the ethics competency an uphill task.

We have tried to develop a measure for ethical behavior of students. We have been using project- and team-based learning instructional strategy in many courses. We use peer evaluation using constant sum scale to assess performance of individual students. We posit that self-evaluation, as compared to peer-evaluation, can provide an idea of the ethical behavior of students. Since it is possible that students may make mistakes in the earlier two stages—information and process—we propose performing such assessment for a number of courses to even out that possibility.