Engineering ethics can be a tricky subject to teach.
It is meant to provide knowledge of the applied professional ethical issues which students will face in their future careers (Barry and Ohland 2009);
yet students are themselves merely apprentices who do not yet have professional experience to use as a context for these issues.
As a result, if engineering students fail to see the relevance of engineering ethics to their own lives they may view the subject as abstract and irrelevant (Abraham et al. 1997).
Engineering ethics curricula has been taught to mixed reception: some students say that it is the least interesting and most trivial part of the curriculum, and they would rather be learning engineering than ‘wasting time’ on ethics (Newberry 2004).
However, others have found ethics instruction to be a positive and enjoyable experience, often because it is so different from the technical courses which make up the rest of their workload (Lau 2004).