The Santa Clara University Engineering Ethics Prize

What: Prize awarded for best ethical analysis in a Senior Design Project ; $500 Prize to Winning Team
When: Due: 9am Friday, May 29, 2009
How: By e-mail to Professor Tim Healy or to David DeCosse, Director of Campus Ethics Program,
Who: Entry is open to all SD teams in Bio, Civil, Computer, Electrical, and Mechanical Engineering

Prize will be awarded based on the following criteria:

1. Best ethical justification for the SD project
2. How well it identifies the key ethical issues at stake in the project
3. How well it draws on such ethical sources as the ethical codes for each engineering discipline and the Framework for Thinking Ethically of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics

For more information, please e-mail David DeCosse

Background Information

For more than ten years the School of Engineering has offered an annual prize, the Engineering Humanities Award, to junior or senior engineering students. Awardees are nominated by humanities faculty on the basis of their performance in the study of the humanities and their overall record. We are now adding a second humanities award - the Engineering Ethics Prize - that focuses on ethical problems related to engineering design. The prize will be awarded for work related to the Senior Design Project. There will be a $500 cash award to go along with the prize.

The prize will be tied to the senior project design process in which every graduating senior participates in the year-long design of a system or product. The School of Engineering's accrediting agency, ABET, requires ethical study and reflection in our curriculum. We offer classes and co-curricular efforts that respond to this concern. And we believe that this prize can be a significant additional effort in this regard both by encouraging students toward ethical reflection and by recognizing outstanding student accomplishments in this aspect of engineering.

Moreover, the prize is to be awarded for work that is already required for the Senior Design Project: the ethical analysis that is a required component of each project. Thus students who wish to compete for the prize do not need to launch out in a direction that they would not otherwise have to take in the course of completing their Senior Design Project. They just need to have their team pay special attention to the component of the project requiring ethical analysis.

The senior project seems the ideal place to look for such accomplishment since it is a capstone program in which students bring their experience of four years to bear on a practical problem. It is an overall test of their academic accomplishments. Many of these projects have clear ethical dimensions, and one can find such content in the remainder with a bit of reflection. Recent projects that had obvious ethical dimensions include: development of a solar water-pumping plant for a village in El Salvador; a bicycle cart for carrying large quantities of rice in developing countries; a new way to make brick kilns in developing countries; a small solar system to recharge the batteries of utility vehicles on campus; an underwater rover that is used to study artifacts under the surface of oceans and lakes; and many more such examples.

Thus we announce the following with regard to the Engineering Ethics Prize:

1. The prize will only be available to teams as teams, not to individual students.
2. It is expected that a substantial number of the members of each team seeking the prize will have completed their Core Curriculum Ethics Requirement by the end of the Fall Term of their senior year.
3. The final ethical analyses of each project (from 7-to-10 pages) will be due by 9 a.m., May 29, 2009. A digital copy of the analyses may be sent either to Professor Tim Healy or to David DeCosse, Director of Campus Ethics Programs.

Each ethical analysis will be judged on the following criteria:

1. How well it explains the ethical justification for the overall project
2. How well it recognizes the significant issues that arise in the course of the project that are ethical in nature
3. How well it provides cogent, well-substantiated reasons for the actions taken in the course of the project
4. How well it draws on the relevant codes of engineering for each discipline (e.g., codes for electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, etc.)
5. How well it draws on the "Framework for Thinking Ethically" from the web site of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and on the discussion of the Framework in the Student Handbook for all SCU engineering students
6. How well it integrates additional concerns of ethical theory - e.g., concerns drawn from utilitarianism or from a theory of the common good - into its explanations
7. The quality of the senior project's engineering design and execution

The prize was established by the generous gift of two SCU alums concerned to educate engineers of the highest integrity.

For questions about the prize, please contact Professor Tim Healy or David DeCosse.