engineering ethics case study assignment

• Engineering Ethics Cases
• Markkula Center for Applied Ethics
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• Engineering Ethics

The following series of engineering ethics cases were created by interviewing numerous engineers from Silicon Valley and beyond.

The cases have been written, anonymized, and honed to highlight the ethical content from each interview. While these cases are meant for engineering students and professionals for their professional development, nearly all of the cases occur in the context of business, and therefore are also relevant for those seeking business ethics cases.

These cases are suitable as homework and/or for classroom discussion. The goal of this project is to acquaint engineering students and professionals with the variety of ethical experiences of engineering as practiced “in the field.” By becoming familiar with problems faced by other engineers we hope to thereby prepare those reading these cases if they too encounter difficult ethical dilemmas in their work.

Cases range from the mundane to the deadly. While we do not reveal how each particular case turned out, in general they turned out well – the people involved made the right decisions. But this is not to say that all of these right decisions came without personal cost. A few of the engineers did face negative repercussions and a very few even needed to find new employment. However, overall the interviewees were satisfied with how events turned out, even if they faced negative repercussions for their good decisions. They understood that doing the right thing is good in itself, regardless of the personal consequences they may have faced.

The engineering ethics cases can be sorted into the following categories:

• Academic Ethics
• Bioengineering
• Business Ethics
• Civil Engineering
• Computer/Software Engineering
• Electrical Engineering
• International
• Mechanical Engineering
• Science/Research Ethics

A quality assurance engineer must decide whether or not to ship products that might be defective.

An intern at a power electronics startup faces unkind comments from a fellow engineer. She suspects that her colleague is prejudice toward female engineers.

A chemical engineering professor discovers that a colleague has taken credit for his research.

A bioengineering researcher discovers an error in protocol and feels pressured not to report it to her supervisor.

A graduate student suspects her research adviser has earned tenure under false pretenses.

A computer startup company risks violating copyright laws if it reuses a code that is the intellectual property of another company.

A recently promoted manager at an industrial engineering company discovers that factory workers are asked to work more than eight hours a day without getting paid overtime.

Full transparency might prevent a project leader from closing a deal with a valuable client. Should he still clarify the situation to his client?

A manager at a consumer electronics company struggles over whether or not he should disclose confidential information to a valued customer.

A medical researcher is asked to trim data before presenting it to the scientific advisory board.

A technical sales engineer feels pressure to falsify a sales report in order to prevent the delay of her company's IPO.

When a computer filled with personal data gets stolen, a data company must decide how to manage the breach in security.

Employees of a computer hardware company are angered by a manager that demonstrates favoritism.

A project engineer believes his company is providing the wrong form of technology to an in-need community in East Africa.

A computer engineer is asked to divulge private medical data for marketing purposes.

Environmental engineers face pressure to come up with data that favors their employers.

In this ethics case, a woman is displeased with her work role at a computer hardware company.

A systems engineering company employee quits after getting pressured to falsify product testing paperwork.

A manager at a nonprofit mechanical engineering firm questions how responsible her company should be for ongoing maintenance on past projects.

An engineer for an environmental consulting firm must decide whether or not he should encourage his client to go with a more environmentally sustainable construction plan.

A genetic engineer feels a responsibility to educate colleagues on the truth behind stem cell research.

An engineering manager gets pressured to bribe a foreign official in order to secure a business venture in East Africa.

An African-American electronics design lead wonders whether his colleague's contentious behavior is motivated by racism.

A medical company asks blood sample suppliers to sign an ethically questionable consent form.

A quality assurance tester gets pressured to falsify data about a new product from a major cell phone company.

Should a production engineer prioritize a customer's desires over safety?

A female intern at a construction company faces disrespectful treatment because of her gender.

A new hire at an electronics startup struggles to decide between telling the truth and maximizing the company's profit.

A fellow for a global services program faces an ethical dilemma when a colleague asks him to falsify receipts.

A researcher of regenerative medicine meets a man who is eager sign up for potentially dangerous human testing.

A bioengineer's research leads to the discovery that a patient might have prostate cancer.

Two support engineers at a South Bay audio visual electronics startup question the fairness of a supervisor's decision.

An employee overseeing data analysis on a clinical drug trial has concerns about the safety of a client's drug.

The engineering ethics cases in this series were written by Santa Clara University School of Engineering students Clare Bartlett, Nabilah Deen, and Jocelyn Tan, who worked as Hackworth Engineering Ethics Fellows at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics over the course of the 2014-2015 academic year. In order to write these cases, the fellows interviewed numerous engineers and collected nearly 40 engineering ethics cases from Silicon Valley and beyond.  The Hackworth Fellowships are made possible by a generous gift from Joan and the late Michael Hackworth.

• Engineering Business

Case Studies

• Engineering disasters
• Covid vaccine distribution among wealthy and poor countries
• A NYC skyscraper in danger of collapse
• The Volkswagen emissions scandal
• Addressing climate change
• Racism and informed consent in clinical trials
• Using CRISPR to manipulate animal and human genomes
• Effects of social media on people’s lives and on society
• The power, promise, and dangers of rapidly advancing AI capabilities

We work hard to find short readings that are interesting and thought-provoking.

Engineering Ethics Toolkit

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Case Studies

Case studies (also called "case histories") are descriptions of real situations that provide a context for engineers and others to explore decision-making in the face of socio-technical issues, such as environmental, political, and ethical issues. case studies typically involve complex issues where there is no single correct answer--a student analyzing a case study may be asked to select the "best" answer given the situation 1 . a case study is not a demonstration of a valid or "best" decision or solution. on the contrary, unsuccessful or incomplete attempts at a solution are often included in the written account. 2.

The process of analyzing a case study encourages several learning tasks:

Exploring the nature of a problem and circumstances that affect a decision or solution

Learning about others' viewpoints and how they may be taken into account

Learning about one's own viewpoint

Defining one's own priorities

Making one's own decisions to solve a problem

Predicting outcomes and consequences 1

Student Learning Outcomes in Ethics

Most engineering case studies available pertain to engineering ethics. After a two year study of education in ethics sponsored by the Hastings Center, an interdisciplinary group agreed on five main outcomes for student learning in ethics:

Sensitivity to ethical issues, sometimes called "developing a moral imagination," or the awareness of the needs of others and that there is an ethical point of view;

Recognition of ethical issues or the ability to see the ethical implications of specific situations and choices;

Ability to analyze and critically evaluate ethical dilemmas, including an understanding of competing values, and the ability to scrutinize options for resolution;

Ethical responsibility, or the ability to make a decision and take action;

Tolerance for ambiguity, or the recognition that there may be no single ideal solution to ethically problematic situations 2 .

These outcomes would make an excellent list of attributes for designing a rubric for a case analysis.

Ideas for Case Study Assignments

To assign a case analysis, an instructor needs

skill in analyzing a case (and the ability to model that process for students)

skill in managing classroom discussion of a case

a case study

a specific assignment that will guide students' case analyses, and

a rubric for scoring students' case analyses.

Below are ideas for each of these five aspects of teaching with case studies. Another viewpoint is to consider how not to teach a case study .

1. Skill in analyzing a case

For many engineering instructors, analyzing cases is unfamiliar. Examining completed case analyses could help develop case analysis skills. As an exercise for building skill in analyzing cases, use the generic guidelines for case analysis assignments (#4 below) to carefully review some completed case analyses. A few completed case analyses are available:

Five example analyses of an engineering case study

Case study part 1 [Unger, S. The BART case: ethics and the employed engineer. IEEE CSIT Newsletter. September 1973 Issue 4, p 6.]

Case study part 2 [Friedlander, G. The case of the three engineers vs. BART. IEEE Spectrum. October 1974, p. 69-76.]

Case study part 3 [Friedlander, G. Bigger Bugs in BART? IEEE Spectrum . March 1973. p32,35,37.]

Case study with an example analysis

2. Skill in managing classroom discussion of a case

Managing classroom discussion of a case study requires planning.

Suggestions for using engineering cases in the classroom

Guidelines for leading classroom discussion of case studies

3. Case studies

Case studies should be complex enough and realistic enough to be challenging, yet be manageable within the time frame. It is time-consuming to create case studies, but there are a large number of engineering case studies online.

Online Case Libraries

Case Studies in Technology, Ethics, Environment, and Public Policy

Teaching Engineering Ethics: A Case Study Approach

The Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science

Ethics Cases

The Engineering Case Library

Cases and Teaching Tips

4. A specific assignment that will guide students' case analyses

There are several types of case study assignment:

Nine approaches to using case studies for teaching

Written Case Analysis

Case Discussions

Case analyses typically include answering questions such as:

What kinds of problems are inherent in the situation?

Describe the socio-technical situation sufficiently to enable listeners (or readers) to understand the situation faced by the central character in the case.

Identify and characterize the issue or conflict central to the situation. Identify the parties involved in the situation. Describe the origins, structure, and trajectory of the conflict.

Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments made by each party.

How would these problems affect the outcomes of the situation?

Describe the possible actions that could have been taken by the central character in the case.

Describe, for each possible action, what the potential outcomes might be for each party involved.

Describe what action was actually taken and the outcomes for each party involved.

How would you solve these problems? Why?

Describe the action you would take if you were the central character in the case. Explain why.

What should the central character in the situation do? Why?

Describe the action you think that the central character in the case should take. Explain why.

What can be learned from this case?

Delineate the lessons about ethical (or other) issues in engineering that are illuminated by this case.

This list is adapted from two online case analysis assignments by McGinn from 3 & 4 ):

5. A rubric for scoring students' case analyses

Case studies help students explore decision-making in the face of issues. Thus, for an engineering ethics case study, the outcomes that can be assessed by scoring case analyses are a) sensitivity to ethical issues, b) recognition of ethical issues, c) the ability to analyze and critically evaluate ethical dilemmas, d) the ability to make an ethical decision and take action, and e) tolerance for ambiguity. Scoring rubrics for ethics case analyses should address these outcomes, not basic knowledge of the ethical standards of the profession. Professional standards can best be assessed by a traditional graded exam in which students must demonstrate, for example, which practices are ethically acceptable versus which are in violation of ethical standards given a hypothetical scenario 5 .

Making Scoring/Grading Useful for Assessment

General principles for making scoring/grading useful for assessment ( rubrics )

Example rubrics

For a written analysis of a case study in engineering

For a written analysis of a case study in general #1

For a written analysis of a case study in general #2

For a written and oral analysis of a case study by a group

For an oral analysis of a case study by a group

For a written analysis of a case study on ethics

For a self-assessment of learning from a case study