Teaching Professional Integrity: An Empirical Study on Engineering Students

Abstract

In higher education there seems to be a ‘gap’ between the levels of undergraduate student expectation of being confronted by ethical issues in engineering work, and the amount of effective ethics education. Within this context, the purpose of this empirical research is to investigate engineering students’ views on two issues: a) How vital professional ethics are in their field, and b) whether they believe that professional ethics must be a part of the syllabus in their School. Findings indicate that teachers should make special reference to and strongly emphasize in class the value of an engineer's ethical responsibility. Furthermore, they need to spend a number of teaching hours on tackling problems in professional ethics as well as organize conferences, workshops, lectures and discussions, where the main speakers would be experienced engineers and academics. This way the technical and technological education incorporates more the responsibility of building professional integrity that can guarantee the much needed social goods of progress and prosperity, along with safety.