Since you all were so helpful in response to my query about how engineers are different from scientists, I hope you won’t mind if I pick your brains again.
Specifically, I’m after information about the sorts of engineering labs (or whatever the right engineering analog for “labs” would be — projects?) freshman engineering students typically encounter.
What I’m interested in is the typical ways that the task for the students as envisioned by the instructor might go off the rails, presenting the students with temptations to do something to recover the hope of a good grade — something of which their instructors might not approve.
The analogous situation in a chemistry laboratory might involve using another lab group’s titration data (because your own seems wrong), or faking the melting point on an unknown you think you’ve already identified from the NMR, or dropping the data points that don’t fall anywhere near the line they’re supposed to fall on without having some good independent reason for dropping them.
I’m sure there must be little, everyday ethical challenges in the activities of the engineering student. But since I’m fairly innocent of the details of what engineering students do when they’re not in lecture or working on problem sets, I’m having a hard time coming up with concrete examples.
What lab-like thing to engineering students do? How could they cheat in those activities? And where are the attractive gray areas that seem like maybe they’re not really cheating but you’re still not going to advertise it to your instructor if you partake of them?
In one of my freshman engineering classes, we had to design and create a prototype of a product, and also do the user testing, reports, and presentations that go along with that. Some questionable actions I heard of other groups doing include completely fabricating user testing data and the always ubiquitous form of plagiarism in which only one or two words have been changed around.
It depends an awful lot on the stage of education, the nature of the project, and the kind of engineering. I’m trained as a Chem E, and I didn’t really have much of a freshman engineering lab. My sophomore and junior engineering “labs” (still had to do science labs) tended to be more problem solving and computer work, although the mech Es and the EEs were tinkering by then. Senior lab was chemistry, but with giant plumbing that didn’t work well. Regarding the computer modeling work that was done, the ethics seemed to be mostly not fudge the numbers to expectations, and to pull your weight in the team. There were always teams, and it’s pretty easy to shirk in computer lab. In the senior equipment lab, the experiments were set up such that you kind of knew what should happen. Ethical guidelines there, I think, would be along the lines of don’t lie about the data, and don’t steal it from your classmates when your experiments fail. Or steal their analysis. (Presuming your numbers don’t make sense, it may be reasonable, depending on teh local policy, to describe some measurements that do, and why yours failed.)
In grad school, chemical engineering research is pretty much indistinguishable from chemistry research. I’d think the ethics would be similar in either case.
Design a product, test, and report, as a freshman, E? Color me impressed! Way back in my day, when Ben Franklin taught electrical engineering with a kite and a key, product prototype design was a senior capstone project. The engineering programs I knew were heavy on science prerequisites in the freshmen year.
I remember being pretty frustrated by some ancient oscilloscopes in a physics lab. I think we were supposed to visualize and measure something about electric fields, but the experimental design made no sense to me and the ‘scope was less useful than Ben Franklin’s kite. Floating around the Net somewhere is a very sarcastic “student lab report” that describes that sort of experience in humorous, but realistic, detail. (Perhaps another reader recognizes the reference and can offer a link?)
I think you’re on the right track, though, Dr. Free-Ride, with the idea that a lot of frosh level labs probably are supposed to demonstrate something fundamental and supposedly straightforward: pV=nRT, V=IR, F=ma. Students know the expected outcomes, but sometimes the demonstrations don’t work as advertised. More cynical students sometimes suspect the hidden agenda is to teach creativity in explaining why a U-shaped data plot should be considered a straight line. (Hint: Sunspot activity.)
Good luck, and have fun with it. Cheers
In my engineering education, freshman year was basically filled with physics, chemistry, calculus, a couple intro engineering courses, and then some liberal arts courses. So we didn’t really get to any engineering labs until sophomore year.
A typical lab exercise in say, a digital circuits course, might involve designing the logic for some device and then implementing it on a bread board (I remember having to design a working stop light complete with red, yellow, and green LED’s). A temptation might arise to copy another groups’ Karnaugh maps or their state machines. I was also a TA during grad school for undergrad DSP and communications labs. The DSP labs started out doing some basic DSP stuff in Matlab, then moving on to things like audio signal processing, image processing, and adaptive filtering, followed by doing some work with TI DSP’s. Any temptations there would probably involve looking at somebody else’s code or possibly copying somebody else’s Matlab output. Most of the projects in the communications lab involved looking at different types of modulation (AM, FM, PSK, OOK, BPSK, etc.) and either building a modulator or demodulator circuit for that type or running a simulation in Matlab. Temptations would again be copying Matlab code, looking at other groups circuits, or copying various measurements (voltages, frequencies, etc.) from other groups. Both of these classes were senior level classes though, not freshman.
Copying is the big thing in EE labs like the basic logic labs I used to teach. Engineering student societies would have libraries of past assignments and labs, people would copy each others, etc. To some extent this is ok and good collaboration, but when it was mindless copying it hurt the students – those freshman labs really were teaching things that the kids really really needed to understand later.
Depending on the lab also, just like in Math and Physics there are some “weed out” labs where the unstated goal is to filter the students, not so much as to just get rid of unqualified ones but really to try to ensure that any were left were ok. If some good ones were lost that was fine. This is not really that much of a secret to anyone. So temptations in those labs are worse for students I think, because it sure seems like the class/lab itself, not anything about the materials learned in it, is the real “test”. In that case, it seems the gloves are more off and anything is acceptable.
etbnc, this might be the one you’re looking for. It’s a classic:
http://www.physics.usu.edu/dennison/3870-3880/Humor/hall.html
Back to the topic: at the freshman level though, like many have pointed out, the students often already know the outcome of the experiment they’re trying to do, and so (un)intentionally work towards that result. Throwing out data and samples which don’t behave as expected is common, at least in the labs I’ve taught before.
Don’t know if this is what you are looking for.
As a first year Engineering student in Australia (is that a freshman?) we had to do a number of labs but as others have indicated in subjects like chem. and physics.
One that really sticks in my mind was a particular physics practical. It was actually a recreation of Millikans oil drop experiment.
A bit of background:
I came to the university as a mature age student at about 30 years old. For complicated reasons there were only two (2!) other students in that first year physics class. One was a guy who had failed from the year previously. The lecturer, who had a reputation for being a totally unreasonable human being, had precluded him from sitting the final exam of the year before because he hadn’t attended enough practicals during that year. The other student was the 12 year old son of the lecturer (who had been pressure cooked through primary and secondary school by his parent).
Well, we got down to do the experiment and after seeing us all there and ready to go, the lecturer left as was his habit. Shortly afterwards the failed previous year student scarpered as was his habit. He would later hand up a report based on last years results from either the few he actually did or from his second year colleagues.
Which left me and the 12 year old.
We actually had two pracs to do, I don’t remember the other one, and we would alternate on the equipment (this was normal) and we would do the pracs individually.
I still remember seeing those oil drops floating up and down and twiddling the voltage to hold ’em still. In the end I did the calculations to work out what the value for the electron charge was.
Did I get it right? Like hell, I didn’t even get within an order of magnitude!
A few days later I did ask the young lad and he got an answer pretty close to the magic 1.6e-19 and so did the second year using last years data. So obviously it was something I was doing.
Some weeks later after I got my (not so highly graded) report back I was talking to some of the second year students (there were twenty of them). It turns out that, on that particular experimental setup, nobody had ever managed to get the correct answer to within an order of magnitude, unless they did a bit of selective data editing during the write up and that was common knowledge amongst them.
So, the equipment probably wasn’t capable of resolving the result sought. Some (most) students either realised this or just rejigged their results habitually/unconciously. The lecturer kept seeing the “correct” results and assumed that everything was fine.
And now…
A google search doesn’t return any indication of the second year student, but that’s not surprising. He was a foreign student and is probably leading a productive life in his home country (and I might have spelled his name wrongly anyway).
The 12 year old completed his engineering degree and went on to a major university, where I think he did another degree, maybe maths, and got a phd. He become a lecturer at that university by the time he was in his early 20s. I see/google there are some papers of his on the internet to do with radar in the last few years.
The lecturer had a couple of episodes of student petitions to get him removed (I found him bad, but not _quite_ that bad) which I believe the uni tried to do, but the word “tenure” was used. I imagine he has since retired anyway.
And me, I lived happily ever after as an electrical engineer. (well, up till now at least)
Stephenk
I was a physics major but I hung out with a lot of engineering majors (both EE and ME). They had calc 1&2, chem 1 &2, physics 1, intro to engineering science, and then “core” courses the first year. One of my friends saw someone take a piece of physics homework from the collection at the back of the lecture hall, erase the name on the top, and then write their own! Probably copying homework was the most common ethical lapse but the beginning engineers were about as cut throat as business majors. It wasn’t until later semesters when these people were weeded out that they worked well on teams.
I was another physics major, but at a university where the lab equipment was lousy and everyone knew it was lousy. So all of our freshman (and sophomore/junior/senior) lab reports were filled with analyses of where the equipment was screwy and what could be done to improve it. The ethical problems were more in the problem sets, where getting to the (pretty clearly visible) answer in good form might require a couple of pages per problem of calculus tricks. The temptation to go from cooperative study groups to simply copying off the first person to get all the way through was not insignificant.
I can’t speak to freshman engineering labs, but after decades in the field I think there is one ethical dilemma that outweighs all the others engineers face: What do you do when management, sales, and marketing want you to “spin” your project?
The most common way this manifests for the average engineer is this: Your immediate engineering manager (or someone up that chain) wants you to give an unreasonable estimate for project completion. Any good engineering project manager has (at least) a high and low estimate of time to completion. You are asked to only report the low estimate, or even to give a completion date that is known by all to be too soon. (I should emphasize that when building truly novel products the high completion estimate is often integer multiples of the low one.)
The other form of the dilemma is when you are a customer-facing engineer, someone giving a talk at a conference or meeting with potential customers, and you are asked to overstate the qualities of your product or to avoid any discussion of its limits or known deficiencies.
All too often there is an implied or even explicit threat associated with the dilemma. “If you can’t say what I want you to say, I’ll replace you with someone who can.” Sometimes that’s presented as a professional failing. “I’ll get someone in here who CAN get the job done by this date.”
The first space shuttle disaster is a dramatic version of this, but some version of the engineer’s dilemma has occured on every one of the dozen or so projects I’ve been involved in over the last two decades (and every engineer I’ve ever met has a host of such stories to tell). Because it influences all engineering decisions (how fast, how effective, when will it be available, …), I think it’s the primary ethical conundrum faced by engineers. We should find some way to address this in the college curriculum.
That issue was partially addressed through some assignments and a couple hours devoted to the engineering code of ethics, but there probably should be a class. As long as there are people who are willing and able to compromise that code, can something really be done about it though? Would you be willing to lose your dream job to uphold an ethical code? I assume there are legal sanctions in place to prevent someone from being fired for that reason, but I’m also sure that if your boss wants to fire you (or demote you), he or she can find another way because no one is perfect.