The Survey of Engineering Ethical Development is a holistic assessment of the
curricular and co-curricular experiences of engineering undergraduates that lead to
improved ethical development. This project will collect data from 4,000 undergraduates
at 20 universities in the United States. We present a qualitative analysis of the cultural
summaries from the first 10 of these site visits. In particular we consider how students,
faculty, and administrators view ethics education within the context of the engineering
academic culture. Students, faculty, and administrators viewed ethics instruction as an
important aspect of engineering education, though they also highlighted numerous
barriers to its implementation. Furthermore, each group of participants commented on
the apparent disconnect between the emphasis placed on academic ethics and that placed
on professional ethics. Based on these findings, we make a number of recommendations
to overcome the integration of ethics in engineering curricula and to better unify
academic and professional ethics.National Science FoundationPeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/83693/1/REES_2009_Harding_et_al_Engineering_Culture.pd