How Good are Engineering Students at Moral Reasoning?
© 2015 EPFL
A major paper on moral reasoning in engineering education was presented by the EPFL pedagogical team and the college of humanities at the European Society for Engineering Education Conference in Orleans, France in June.
One of the largest studies on engineering ethics carried out in the last twenty years, the study used the Engineering and Science Issues Test, developed in Georgia Tech and translated into French by the EPFL team. It highlights the challenges for students in developing independent ethical thinking in a context in which both their professional identity and their disciplinary epistemologies orient them toward rule following and individualism.