0.3 Eac toolkit instructor module: being an ethical job candidate  (Page 4/5)

Informal assessment

• Preparing solution evaluation tables would help to provide assessment of decision making and ethical evaluation skills of students.
• Preparing a socio-technical system table outlining the components of the interviewing situation would help students to define problems and assess this activity.
• Students could role play as job candidates and interviewers and write scripts which would also contribute to assessment efforts.

Pedagogical commentary

Any comments or questions regarding this module? (For example: suggestions to authors, suggestions to instructors (how-to), queries or comments directed o EAC community, pitfalls or frustrations, novel ideas/approaches/uses, etc.)

• This module combines presentation and discussion formats : First presented by William Frey before students in a Mechanical Engineering Capstone Design course in spring 2007, this module integrates instructor presentation and student discussion. The student discussion begins with the class interacting with the presenter and then moves to more focused discussions of case scenarios in small student groups. This first presentation of the module followed closely the slides in the PowerPoint file provided below.
• Small Group Discussion Worked Well : After a quick preview of the Employment Guidelines, the important concepts (e.g., Sincere Interest), and the cases, the students were divided into small groups of four (the entire class consisted of around 60 students) and each group was assigned one of the 10 cases provided in the presentation. Students discussed the cases and responded to the decision points in the scenarios by designing value-realizing solutions. Then around half of the 10 groups debriefed. The entire activity took three hours.
• Student Mentors : In presenting the module before a large class of over 60 students, the instructor had help from mechanical engineering students taking business ethics who mentored their mechanical engineering peers. Business Ethics student mentors floated from one small discussion group to another to help these groups integrate values and ethics tests into their solutions to the decision points. Student mentoring has the potential to play a greater role in ethics integration exercises and also helps establish productive links between freestanding ethics courses and EAC integration exercises.
• Module could be converted into Gray Matters Format : Faculty members attending the presentation suggested providing solution alternatives after the cases and having the students rank and evaluate these alternatives. They felt this would allow for a more focused use of the ethics tests (reversibility, harm, publicity) as well as the values test. The student module developed after the presentation includes solution alternatives to the decision points of the scenarios.
• Students will express interest and want to share their experiences : Leaving space in the presentation for student comments led to several, unexpected but beneficial incidents. For example, students discussed non-disclosure clauses they had encountered in internship work and one student described his experience with a drug test held during an interview. Several students had specific questions about confidentiality and job mobility issues and one student discussed concerns about working on weapons projects one-on-one with the presenter.