Engineering students' attitude towards engineering ethics education

Abstract

Engineering ethics covers the scope of engineering standards and how these standards should be applied in daily engineering practice Engineering ethics combines societal, economic and environmental factors in order to produce a set of rules that could lead an engineer to make decisions that protect the public interest regardless of any pressures that they may encounter while serving for corporate organization. In this paper, an investigation was conducted to assess engineering students' attitude towards socio-ethical issues and attainment of the objectives of ethical education which they learned through engineering ethics subject that is taught in the engineering programme. A mixed method evaluation was administered to 50 final-year students who pursuing their electrical-electronics and telecommunications engineering programmes from Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman, Malaysia. All participants were in their final semesters before graduation. The findings of this study also showed that the students' attitudes towards socio-ethical issues related to engineering are low due to less emphasis being put forward by faculty of this study on the socio-ethical issues in the undergraduate engineering programme. It is clear that the socio-ethical education was not effective enough to achieve its objectives in producing socio responsible engineers. Some new strategies were proposed in teaching socio-ethical subject in engineering programmes to enhance the positive attitude towards socio-ethical issues among the engineering students.