There are direct links between the ethical problems which are commonly encountered by students and those encountered by professional engineers, and instructors must be able to make these bridges visible through classroom activities (Vesilind 1996).
Some scholars advocate that it can be useful for these discussions to be led—at least in the first instance—by students or faculty with industry experience, as younger undergraduates simply don’t ‘‘get’’ the difference between personal and professional ethics without this guidance (Abraham et al. 1997).
Others argue that students are able to reconcile the social expectations of engineers together with their own personal identity, as part of a process of role acquisition; and that they themselves are able to see how the skills that they have learnt in the classroom—working in teams, being neat and conscientious—can be transferred into their professional lives (Loui 2005).
Pfatteicher (2001) describes the types of discussion that might be introduced to tie together issues around personal ethics with professional ethics; here I build on her work to develop four areas of questioning for each of the three cases, detailed in Table 2, which can be used in the group discussions to draw out the links between the ethical facets of the cases and broader professional practice.