To judge by recent headlines, we live in a world increasingly troubled by unethical behavior. All the more reason to applaud Region 4 (Central United States) for sponsoring a student ethics competition to promote awareness among engineering students of ethical concepts and challenges.

The contest was held 21 October at Valparaiso University, in Indiana, in conjunction with the Region 4 Student Branch Leadership Conference. A team of three senior engineering students from Valparaiso won the competition, earning it a US $400 prize. Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Ind., came in second. Teams from four schools participated.

Holding the competition in parallel with the leadership conference wasn’t an accident. “By having concurrent sessions, we made it impossible for the branch leadership both to attend the leadership sessions and take part in the competition themselves,” said Member Anu A. Gokhale, a professor of electronics and telecommunications at Illinois State University, in Normal, and the region’s IEEE student activities chair. “This meant the student leaders had to fulfill their primary mission as leaders and motivate others to participate in the ethics program.”

CASE STUDY The ethics competition centered on a fatal accident that “occurred” when a group of army troops removed a solid-propellant rocket from its packing case and then allowed it to get too close to a grounded metal antenna. The fuel in the missile ignited, burned through the rocket motor casing, and killed several troops. The culprit was found to be the sparks from an electrostatic charge build-up.

Ethical questions about the incident arise because one of the engineers who worked on the project years earlier realized that a rocket could be ignited in this way. He told his supervisor, and the two agreed that the likelihood of such an accident was remote. Moreover, there was no data to help them evaluate the probability of one occurring. Nevertheless, they shared their concerns with the project’s military procurement officer, who agreed that the mechanism was possible, but unlikely. Moreover, the officer said that any design changes then would delay the missile’s deployment.

Based on this scenario, the students had to answer a series of questions about the behavior of the people involved. The contestants were judged not only on the keenness of their analyses but also on factors such as how well they communicated their conclusions and how well their responses related to the IEEE Code of Ethics.

WORKPLACE VALUE How valuable are competitions like this? IEEE Member Richard Freeman, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Valparaiso, says the scenario forced students to address issues such as public safety and welfare, conflicts of interest, and ethical dilemmas related to faulty engineering practice. “The competition gave students an opportunity to apply the engineering profession's code of ethics to a situation that could happen in the workplace,” Freeman says.

But Elizabeth Racop, a member of the winning team and an electrical engineering student, had a somewhat different view of the competition’s value. She believes that people handle ethical dilemmas on the basis of their moral values and upbringing. The value of the competition, she says, is more as an attention-getting device: it makes the participants (and onlookers) aware that there are ethical dilemmas that need attention in the first place.

For more information about the ethics competition program, visit http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/committee/emcc/competition.html