Teams from George Washington University, in Region 2, and Virginia Commonwealth University, in Region 3, recently won first prizes in IEEE Student Ethics Competitions.

Designed to give IEEE student members experience in applying the IEEE Code of Ethics and other ethical concepts to real-life situations, the competitions were started last year in Region 2 [see "Temple University Wins First IEEE Ethics Competition," The Institute, July 2005]

The competitions add fun and excitement to a subject that students often deem boring. But, as Shreekanth Mandayam, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rowan University, Glassboro, N.J., and chair of the Region 2 Student Activities Committee (SAC), observes, "It's not boring when you have a job and you're threatened with an ethics-based lawsuit; suddenly the whole subject becomes very interesting indeed."

This year the Region 2 competition was held in Philadelphia on 8 April during the region's annual SAC conference. The conference host, the Drexel University IEEE Student Branch, led by branch chair Owen Farrell, adapted an ethical dilemma from an article published in the 5 October 2005 issue of Embedded Systems Design magazine (CMP Media LLC) titled "The Great Divide," by Jack Ganssle.

Participants were asked to imagine that each was manager of an engineering team faced with the choice of cutting six months off a proposed product-development schedule or laying off three engineers because the employer lacked the money to support the longer effort. The ethical dilemma comes about because the manager does not believe that the project can be completed properly in the shorter time. (After all, if it could, wouldn't the shorter period have been specified from the get-go?) So she is being given a choice of promising something she suspects she can't deliver or laying off three people, which would slow down the development process.

After vetting by the IEEE's Ethics and Member Conduct Committee (EMCC), the dilemma was written up concisely and kept secret until the SAC conference. At the conference, it was presented to the competing teams, and the teams were each given two hours to create PowerPoint presentations that explained their solutions in detail, using the IEEE Code of Ethics to justify their positions. Each of the 16 two-student teams then presented their solutions separately to the judges.

The judges, a mix of people from industry and academia, including Region 2 Director Thomas Tullia and Director-Elect John Dentler, rated the presentations on the basis of the strength of the arguments and how well the students made use of the Code of Ethics. A first-place prize of US $400 offered by the region was awarded to Brendan Dahl and Alastair Surin of George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. Katie Schaffold and Thi U. Thach of Temple University, Philadelphia, came in second and won $200.

What distinguished the winning teams from the others, in Dentler's opinion, was the fact that they recognized the insufficiency of the information they were given. Most of the teams, he said, felt constrained not to ask any questions. The winners, however, wanted to know more about the development project. Could it be accelerated, for example, by being broken into pieces that could be performed in parallel? Might people be added for a short time to speed development? That sort of information would be in a real manager's possession, he says, and would be key in determining what to do.

ABOUT A WEEK EARLIER, Region 3 had held its first-ever student ethics competition, on 31 March, during SoutheastCon '06 in Memphis, Tenn., under the guidance of Eric S. Ackerman, chair of the region's SAC. Ackerman, assistant dean and director of graduate programs for the Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences at Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., uses an ethics case study supplied by the EMCC that was adapted from a workshop at Texas A&M University.

It pictured a situation in which Jane, a recent graduate electrical engineer laying out the wiring of a new home, is advised by Jerry, a mechanical engineer colleague, to specify 20-ampere circuit breakers even though the house will be wired with No. 14 wire, which has a continuous-current rating of only 15 A. "Forget that the house will be wired with No. 14," he tells her. "The overload caused by the appliances will last only a few minutes, and a 20-A breaker will provide adequate protection." Jerry wants to make the new homeowners happy by allowing them to operate more appliances at a time.

In the case study, Jane takes Jerry's advice, and the house is built with 20-A breakers. Subsequently, a toaster short-circuit causes a fire and damages the house. Since the 20-A breaker tripped, just as a 15-A breaker would have, it is not at all obvious that an oversize breaker caused the fire. However, it might have been; a 15-A breaker will trip sooner than a 20-A device at the same current. The original Texas A&M case and other electrical engineering case studies are available at http://ethics.tamu.edu/nsfcases/elen/case.htm.

Unlike the problem in the Region 2 competition, this one didn't ask for a solution to a dilemma. Instead the competition posed a series of questions based on the case study, such as "Did Jerry act in an ethical manner in giving Jane advice on electrical wiring?" and "Was Jane justified in specifying the 20-A breaker rather than the 15-A breaker for this house?" As in Region 2, the students were given two hours to analyze the dilemma and to create PowerPoint presentations with their answers. Six teams participated and were judged by four IEEE volunteers, two from industry and two from academia.

Erika Floyd, Kar Fedosh, and Kyle Winter, students at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, took first-pace honors. Thomas Dotstry and Seth Hooper, students at the Citadel, Charleston, S.C., took second. As in the other contest, the cash awards were $400 for first place and $200 for second place.

Details of the teams' answers have not been made public so that the sponsors would have more leeway to use the ethics dilemma in the future. It is clear that both Jane and Jerry committed serious Code of Ethics violations. (The complete code is available at http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/about/whatis/code.html.)

According to Ackerman, of Region 3, the students enjoyed the competition and learned a lot from it. Management-oriented students, in particular, expressed interest in taking courses in ethical management, he says, adding that he hopes to get more space for the event next year and to have twice the number of competing teams. Note that guidelines for the ethics competition developed by the EMCC recommend that at most six teams be invited to participate, so the competition with the judging can be completed in half a day. The guidelines also recommend that the presentations be judged in an open forum to engage as many students as possible in the experience.