Analysis of the Influential Factors of Students' Understanding of Professional Ethics

Abstract

The Research to Practice Full Paper focuses on the professional code of ethics which sets a standard for which each member of the profession can be expected to meet. It is a promise to act in a manner that protects the public's well-being. In the workplace, if we use shoddy materials or workmanship on the job, we can jeopardize the safety of others. Therefore, it is essential that all students shall fully understand the professional and ethical responsibility before they graduate for career development.Unfortunately, there is a consistent lack of data measuring students’ capabilities to understand their professional ethics due to the unmeasurable nature of moral reasoning. To address this issue and equip faculty with more tools to enhance students’ comprehension of ethical engineering practice, the present research proposes a quantitative approach to measuring ethical behavior and exploring its contributing factors based on a somewhat long duration (years 2013-2019) of senior exit survey data consisting of more than 1000 survey responses. The senior exit survey questionnaire is made up of a set of questions to gauge the students' self-rated capabilities of student outcomes (e.g., ethical responsibility, communication skills, life-long learning, etc.), collect background information (e.g., admission year, transfer or first-time freshman, etc.) and quantity the level of extracurricular participation (e.g., number of student clubs participated, the amount of engagement for part-time work, etc.).There is a broad range of statistical tools to deal with the multiple categorical responses (1- Poor; 2 – Fair; 3 – Average; 4– Good; 5 – Excellent) to the understanding of professional ethics as implemented in the survey, which includes nominal, ordinal, logit, and probit, and so on. Given the strengths and weaknesses associated with various modeling techniques, the study uses different combinations containing multinomial logit, ordinal logit, and ordinal probit. The multiple combinations are employed for two reasons: First, the comparison of these models is rarely conducted based on the educational data. Second, the common results identified from the different models would lead to reliable findings with more confidence. Distinct data preparation tasks such as data-centering, scaling, outlier identification, and covariate correlation analysis, were used prior to modeling development to ensure result accuracy. The findings illustrate various statically influential factors to enhance students’ professional ethics and therefore shed more insight into faculty who aims at improving student outcomes especially from the fact of ethics and morals.