What is the role of ethics in accreditation guidelines for engineering programmes in Europe?
Résumé
The Washington Accord emphasises the role of ethical and societal considerations in
the practice of engineering. Increasingly, national accrediting bodies are also
expecting to see evidence in the delivery and assessment of ethics throughout
engineering programmes. Nevertheless, there is still little known on how the process
of evaluating ethics can best serve the function of accreditation ensuring quality
assurance and quality improvement. The aim of this paper is to look at the top-down
approach and analyse what role engineering ethics plays in national accreditation
documentations in Europe. A multi-country analysis of how and where ethics
appears in the systems of accreditation was carried out for the UK, Ireland, France,
and Switzerland. The competencies, programme outcomes or learning outcomes
were reviewed and explicit or implicit references to ethics education were identified.
A quantitative and qualitative word analysis was carried out by extracting verbs and
comparing verb definitions that were stated. Verbs were categorised under Doing
actions, Thinking actions or both and compared to Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning. In SEFI 2021
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all cases, ethics was explicitly mentioned however limited to 1 or 2 sections of the
documents reviewed. The majority of statements linking to ethics were implicit,
opening room for interpretation. A more conscious effort to engage engineering
ethics in all aspects of engineering programmes as well as using higher levels of
Bloom’s taxonomy should be made where engineering ethics education is applied in
practice.