An Ethics and Society Course for Engineering Undergraduates

This comprehensive engineering ethics course is designed to help engineering undergraduates understand and navigate the social and ethical issues they will face in their professional careers.

The comprehensive, undergraduate engineering ethics course “Engineering and Society” was established 20 years ago at the Univ. of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, called the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering.

By requiring this ethics course, the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering joined top-ranking engineering schools in elevating the role of ethics in their curriculum. Other schools incorporate ethics into a range of classes. These include dedicated introduction courses, an ethics course jointly taught between different schools, and others.

Such approaches to ethics education were carefully examined when the UCLA course was first formulated by me and my colleague Donald Browne. Browne was a key collaborator in developing the UCLA course content, recruiting and managing teaching assistants (TAs), handling the administrative load, and helping the course meet the ABET criteria. The late Joseph Miller, an adjunct professor at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and an executive vice president at TRW Inc., also helped formulate the original course.

This article describes our approach to developing and teaching the course for the benefit of other educators who may want to adopt or adapt aspects of our course for their students...