Ethical issues for student engineers.

1. Ethical issues for student engineers. Engineering 10 Spring 2008

2. Leading up to today: • How ethics are important in creating reliable knowledge, responsible technology • Special responsibilities of engineers • An ethical toolbox for thinking through situations and making decisions

3. Ethics not just important to the “grown-up” engineer! Working out how to behave ethically an important part of what you learn as an engineering student. Not behaving ethically can undercut your ability to learn what you’ll need to become a successful engineer!

4. As a student: • Looking ahead to joining the community of professional engineers. • Already part of a community of learning.(Many members of that learning community are future peers in engineering community.)

5. What practices support communities of learning? How should I behave? How should other students behave? How should our instructors behave? What kinds of norms govern the behavior of the community?

6. What ethicists mean by “norms”: • What people in the community believe they OUGHT to do. • What people actually do sometimes falls short of what they ought to do. • What people actually do sometimes goes beyond the minimum that they ought to do.

7. Clicker question: On tests and quizzes, I don’t cheat because: A. I don’t want to get caught and fail. B. I want to find out whether I really understand the material. C. It wouldn’t be fair to my classmates. D. It’s more work to cheat than to learn the material. E. Huh? Of course I cheat!

8. Clicker question: If my classmates cheat, it’s my business because: A. It might wreck the curve and hurt my grade. B. The instructor might stop trusting any of us. C. Employers might think SJSU engineering grads are dishonest/don’t know what they need to. D. I’ll have to work with people who don’t know what they ought to. E. Huh? It’s none of my business.

9. Clicker question: Our project is a disaster! It’s OK to: A. “Borrow” code from the internet. B. Grab a design from another team (but pass it off as our idea). C. Make up user testing data. D. Monopolize the instructor/TA until we’re on the right track. E. None of these seems OK to me.

10. How do I know what I ought to do? • Look and see what others are doing? • An authority figure tells us the rules? • Look into my heart? • Think about possible consequences of doing one thing vs. doing another?

11. Goals as a student: • Get the credits I need to graduate • Get good grades • Be able to get a job/get into grad school after graduation • Learn important materials and skills • Learn how to learn/find information/solve problems in the real world

12. How should I behave to achieve these goals? • Do things that will help me learn • Avoid things that undermine my learning • Avoid things that will get me into trouble

13. Learners and Learning Communities • Me against the course material? • Me against the rest of the class (grade distribution)? • Me against the instructor? In real life, building knowledge and technologies is a group effort. (Learning how to work in groups is important.)

14. Learners and Learning Communities Doing my own work … not resting on someone else’s work or knowledge. Helping my classmates … when is it fair collaboration?

15. Clicker question: Our instructor lets us work on problem sets in study groups. It’s OK to: • Split it up so each person does the same number of problems, which we all copy to hand in. • Have the smartest person do the problems, which we all copy to hand in. • Take turns doing the whole assignment for the rest of the group to copy. • Discuss the problems together so everyone understands how to do them.

16. How to tell what we should do? • Explicit rules from the instructor • What we know (or suspect) other groups are doing • What helps us to learn the material most effectively

17. Responsibilities of instructors toward learning communities • Present the material so learners can learn it (lectures, coursepacks, office hours) • Lab equipment capable of doing what we’re supposed to do with it • Fair methods of evaluation • Be clear about what is and isn’t acceptable, and why

21. Responsibilities of learners toward learning communities • Be fair to myself • Be fair to other learners in the community

22. Student Projects Where you learn the skills needed to be a good engineer: • Integrity in client relations • Competence • Adequate testing, quality control • Public safety • Good data collection, reporting, interpretation.

23. Integrity in Client Relations “Client” for student projects is the instructor. • What’s the defined task? • Constraints on how I can complete it?(Off the shelf components/code, individually vs. with a team) • Timeline • Performance • How accurately am I representing product?

24. Integrity in Client Relations • Instructor responds to what you put forward with feedback, a grade • Client responds to what you put forward by paying you (or not), deciding whether to hire you for future jobs (or not).

25. Competence • Skills I’m supposed to have • Things I’m supposed to be able to do with those skills (“canonical problems” we all know how to solve) • Judgments I should be able to make: • Do-able? • In how much time? • At what price point • With what reliability?

26. Adequate testing/Quality control • Device does what I say it will do(Testing is how I know it works) • Likelihood of errors/failures How good is good enough?

27. Public Safety (Lab/Shop safety) Does my product risk hurting people: • In its use/operation? • In its manufacture? • Through by-products of its manufacture? Safety of engineers matters, too!

28. Data collection, reporting, interpretation • Data: how we know what we know(what it actually did vs. what I thought it would do) • Good reason to believe it will do what I claim it will do • Results usable by other engineers(or by me, later)

29. Bad ways to deal with data: • Fabrication (making it up rather than actually gathering data) • Falsification (gathering data but then altering it before reporting it)

30. Ways to falsify data: Trimming - smoothing irregularities to make data look more precise From Harris, Pritchard, and Rabins, Engineering Ethics

31. Ways to falsify data: Cooking - throwing out data that don’t fit the desired result From Harris, Pritchard, and Rabins, Engineering Ethics

32. When is it OK to throw out data? Best is when there is an independent basis for deciding the data is bad (e.g. calibration curves show a problem with the instruments; statistical tests) Want to be objective about the data -- be on guard against seeing what I want to see instead of what the data really shows

33. Cheating How does individual dishonesty impact the community? • Grades don’t accurately communicate who knows what • To students • To grad schools/employers • To instructors

34. Cheating How does individual dishonesty impact the community? • Erosion of trust • Instructor can’t trust us • Grad schools/employers can’t trust us • We can’t trust each other(makes it hard to work with each other)

35. Clicker question: Who’s responsible for confronting a cheater? • Instructor/TA • Other students who see the cheating happening • Other students who hear about the cheating after it’s happened • Other students who hear about the plan to cheat before it happens • All of the above

36. Confront or remain silent? • What are the likely consequences -- short term and long term -- of confronting a cheater? • What are the likely consequences of not confronting a cheater? • Obligations to myself, the cheater, others in the community?

37. Plagiarism “At SJSU plagiarism is the act of representing the work of another as one's own without giving appropriate credit, regardless of how that work was obtained, and/or submitting it to fulfill academic requirements. Plagiarism at SJSU includes but is not limited to:

38. Plagiarism “1.2.1 The act of incorporating the ideas, words, sentences, paragraphs, or parts of, and/or the specific substance of another's work, without giving appropriate credit, and/or representing the product as one's own work;

39. Plagiarism “1.2.2 Representing another’s artistic/scholarly works such as musical compositions, computer programs, photographs, paintings, drawing, sculptures, or similar works as one's own.” http://info.sjsu.edu/web-dbgen/narr/catalog/rec-2303.html

40. Problems with Plagiarism • Unfair to source (which deserves credit) • Dishonest • Undermines the activities which should help you learn to write well • Presenting information without the proper connection to the person who generated it -- impossible to follow up!

41. It all starts here. How you interact with each other (and your instructors) as engineering students affects the habits you will develop. Are they habits that will serve you (and your community) well as grown-up engineers? If not, reconsider how you’re doing things!

42. Before next time: Wrap up discussion of “Lab Partners” discussion (in Ethics discussion group in Blackboard) Submit your response to the “Lab Partners” case in Blackboard (set up like a quiz) Interested parties, potential consequences, lab instructor’s obligations, main conflicts between obligations, what she should do and why. Discussion and Response due by 11:59 PM Friday!

43. Before next time: Read the “Improved Sampling Device” case Start discussing of “Improved Sampling Device” case (in Ethics discussion group in Blackboard) Discussion and Response for “Improved Sampling Device“ case due by 11:59 PM Friday, May 7.

44. Before next time: If you didn’t take the “Ethics Survey” in Blackboard, you have another chance. (Don’t throw away these points!)