Ethical quandaries

            Ethical and legal issues are all issues that surround our lives and especially in our work places. Ethics generally refers to the already set standards that govern a certain group of people or a person. I will have to make a complex decision that will ensure that I maintain my professional conduct as an engineer and that I make a decision that is ethical. In this case therefore, I will only grade the five students out of a class of twelve students as they are the ones who deserve to be credited in accordance to their contribution in the engineering training. The rest of the students will have to be discredited as they do not qualify to graduate since they are not qualified as per the training. So as to reach to this decision, I had to consider my obligation as an engineering profession and the various code of conduct as per the IEE and AEPP.

            In this case, as an engineer profession, I have an obligation to abide by the expected professional code of conduct. I have to ensure that I have a code that extends beyond any form of legal issues and to put across ethical standards such as telling the truth. Therefore I have to resist the temptation of telling a lie about these students by giving those marks that they do not deserve. This is unethical and it is not a standard as according to the code of conduct for engineers. Hence I have to go against the boss orders of generously rewarding the new graduate students. It would have been ethical to only reward those generously those students who did their work and to give credit to them as I penalized those who failed in this project.  These students needs to be punished and they should not be allowed to graduate as this will help to set an example unto other engineering students so as to uphold integrity and to produce highly competent engineers.

            According to the NSPE, as an engineer professional, one is not supposed to complete or either sign plans for those projects that are not in agreement with the applicable engineering principles. Hence, in this case, awarding these students grades for their project that is identical is not in compliance with the NSPE professional conduct (Illinois Institute of technology 2007). Hence so as to promote ethics in engineering practice as well as education, it is important to penalize the students and not to award marks to them since it is unprofessional. According to IEEE, an engineer expertise has to uphold and improve technological competence in engineering department and to offer honest claims of technical work so as to acknowledge and correct mistakes and thus provide proper credit to the contribution of others. Hence, I had an obligation to be honest of the claims as evidenced from the similarity of the project reports and in penalizing these students I was doing in accordance to the IEEE ethical expertise conduct as I will be correcting them not to repeat the same mistake of copying one another (IEEE n.y). In this case, I will be crediting them in accordance to what they deserve and I will have sustained and improved their technological competence thus qualifying them by training.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

Illinois Institute of technology. (2007). Ethics Codes collection. Retrieved from:

http://ethics.iit.edu/ecodes/node/4098

IEEE. (n.y). Retrieved from:

http://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html