Effective Incorporation of Ethics into
Courses that Focus on Programming
Mary Elaine Califf
Illinois State University
School of Information Technology
Normal, IL 61790-5150
309-438-5203
mecaliff@ilstu.edu
ABSTRACT
This paper discusses some of the issues involved in incorporating
ethics material into programming courses. Incorporating ethics
into such courses raises particular challenges because of the time-
intensive nature of the courses and because of the difficulty of
finding material that is both relevant to the course and
comprehensible to the students. The paper presents four case
studies that we have used successfully when incorporating ethics
material into our own programming courses.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.4.1 [Computers and Society]: Public policy issues ethics.
General Terms
Legal Aspects
Keywords
Teaching ethics, CS1, CS2.
1. INTRODUCTION
Since the appearance of Computing Curriculum 91[3], computer
science educators have been increasingly aware of the importance
of including some coverage of the ethics of computing in our
curricula. The importance of ethics is also emphasized in the
accreditation criteria for computer science[6]. Two major
approaches can be taken when incorporating ethics into the
curriculum. Some institutions take the ethics course approach
where all students are required to take a course on computer
ethics. Other institutions take an approach that spreads ethics
coverage throughout the curriculum, expecting instructors to
teach small ethics modules in most, if not all, of the courses in the
computer science program.
There are clearly advantages to each of these approaches.
Consolidating ethics into a single course ensures that students get
similar experiences and leaves the teaching of this material to a
few instructors, presumably those most qualified to handle it (or
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347
Mary Goodwin
Illinois State University
School of Information Technology
Normal, IL 61790-5150
309-438-7953
mmgoodw@ilstu.edu
at least those most comfortable with the topic). However, this
approach may leave students with a picture of ethics as a side
issue, disconnected from the main business of computer science.
In order to be done well, the ethics course should be taught near
the end of the students academic careers so that ethics relating to
the advanced topics can be covered. Typically, the ethics course
is taken early on, when students do not have the understanding of
the field needed to fully understand the ethical issues. Also, in a
field that has many required courses, adding an ethics course
requirement might necessitate removing another required course.
Integrating ethics into a variety of courses throughout the
curriculum encourages students to see ethics as an integral issue
in the discipline and allows for ethics issues germane to the
specific course to be covered. On the downside, instructors
pressed for time might omit the ethics unit. Without careful
coordination, students might well cover the same case repeatedly
as they progress through the major. Students at universities where
multiple sections of CS1 and CS2 are taught necessitating a
number of instructors might well be exposed to entirely different
ethics cases because the instructor picks the cases. This approach
drops the burden of teaching ethics material into the lap of every
instructor in the program, many of whom may be quite
uncomfortable with these non-technical topics and may have had
no training in this area. These are the instructors that we seek to
give guidance to in this paper.
The authors teach in a computer science program that asks all
instructors to incorporate ethics modules into their courses.
Among the courses we teach are several that we consider to be
programming-intensive courses, such as CS1, CS2 and
Algorithms and Data Structures. In incorporating ethics modules
into these courses, we had several goals: 1) to engage the
students, 2) to leave the overall content and integrity of the course
intact, 3) to keep the ethics content relevant to the content of the
course, and 4) to meet the ethics requirements of the accreditation
board.
In this paper, we first review some of the literature on teaching
ethics of computing. Then we discuss some of our philosophy,
what we believe are characteristics of effective (and ineffective)
case studies for ethics discussion in programming-intensive
courses. We then discuss some available material that we have
used in our courses and characteristics of that material that makes
it effective for those situations. Finally, we present four original
cases, three based on real-life situations and one that is purely
fictional, and discuss characteristics of these cases and why they
are particularly effective in the courses for which they were
developed.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
In the past decade, there has been a definite interest in how to do
ethics in computing curricula. The ImpactCS initiative at
Georgetown University defined a set of knowledge units for
ethics coverage in computing and provided some online
resources[10; 13]. Several papers were written to help faculty
face the challenge of adding ethics coverage to their curricula [4;
11; 17; 18; 19]. Working groups were formed to face the
challenges of integrating ethics and social issues into a highly
technical discipline[9]. However, the majority of the resources
were directed primarily at teaching ethics and social issues in a
separate course rather than integrating ethical issues into technical
courses.
Among those who have looked at providing resources for helping
faculty integrate ethics into their existing technically-oriented
courses, most have not paid close attention to courses focused
primarily on teaching programming issues. The 1997 ITiCSE
working group report provides a number of interesting ethics
exercises for a variety of computing courses, but none for the
introductory programming, data structures, or algorithms
courses[9]. Bowyer also has some very nice suggestions for
assignments, but none that are clearly geared toward those
programming courses[4].
Schulze and Grodzinsky did focus specifically on incorporating
ethics material into CS1 and CS2[15]. However, it is worth
noting that their suggestions for CS1 have nothing to do with the
programming aspects of the course. They suggest looking
primarily at computer user issues such as appropriate use of
email and internet access, because this would be most students
first experience as computer users, particularly their first
opportunity to use email and the internet. Their CS2 suggestion
for an assignment is very related to programming. They suggest
giving a programming assignment that meets pedagogical needs,
but is not a good solution from the point of view of all those
who would be affected by the software. Then students would be
asked to read the CACM How Good is Good Enough? article[5]
and discuss the assignment in light of issues raised by the article.
Townsend also suggests incorporating ethics into programming
courses by giving a programming assignment that raises ethical
issues[17].
3. PROGRAMMING COURSES AND
ETHICS: THE CHALLENGES
Why is there a relative dearth of material on teaching ethics in
courses that focus on programming? We can easily find ethics
exercises for operating systems courses, where issues of security
and related ethical and social issues are generally considered
absolutely essential to the course, or for artificial intelligence,
where ethical and social implications have been the subject of
numerous movies and novels. It seems likely that people havent
written a lot about incorporating ethics material into the
programming-intensive courses because its hard to do.
We have come up with some possible reasons for the difficulty of
incorporating ethics into courses that focus primarily on
programming. First, the courses are highly technical in nature;
students expect the focus to be on learning how to do things.
Ethics are fuzzy material that faculty might view as disconnected
from the hardcore content of the course. Second, CS1 and CS2
348
are generally the first and second, or maybe the second and third
courses in the major. Students dont have a lot of background in
the field, so instructors have difficulty finding scenarios or
activities that students can easily fully understand. Finally,
programming courses are usually very time-consuming courses
for many students. Students may have to spend many hours
outside of class trying to get programs working correctly. Class
time is often also at a premium. Thus, ethics activities can easily
become a burden on both students and instructors.
This brings us back to programming and a desire for ethics
activities and materials that relate specifically to programming
and that students can understand and relate to. A quick review of
either the ACM Code of Ethics[1] or the Software Engineering
Code of Ethic and Professional Practice[2] reveals a number of
relevant issues including software safety, software quality, quality
of documentation, software correctness, and ownership of code.
In searching for activities or scenarios for use in programming
courses, we believe that its important to address the issues raised
earlier. Students often dont see ethics as an integral part of the
discipline theyre learning. Therefore, we need to select activities
that are clearly relevant to the technical course content and
inherently interesting, not to us, but to our students. We need to
recognize the limitations of student background and time, and
avoid using activities that require students to wade through too
many complex details, or learn material that really belongs in
later courses, just to allow them to understand the scenario theyre
trying to analyze. For example, the Therac-25 accidents[12] or
the Case of the Killer Robot[8] are interesting and valuable cases
to analyze, but probably dont belong in programming courses
where time is at a premium. We need to make our goal the
selection or creation of fairly straightforward ethical scenarios
and activities that are not too extensive and resonate with the
course material.
4. ASSIGNMENTS THAT WORK
So then the question occurs, Is there anything out there that
works? And the answer is a definite yes. In addition to
possibilities described in papers referenced above, there are a
number of ethical case studies or scenarios available that can be
effective in programming courses. The key is to look for
relatively short cases that can be easily understood by the students
and have some relevance to the course material. Weve used
several existing cases successfully.
Its Never Right to Copy Software is a fictional case about a
math teacher whose new computers will not be useful without
software, but whose principal has limited funding and sees no
need to purchase more than one copy of the necessary
software[16]. This is probably relevant to students in any course,
since it brings up issues of software ownership. It also provides
the chance to discuss pirated software that the students might
have on their own computers. Students can be asked to view the
issue from the perspective of the programmer who wrote the
software, and reminded that in a few short years they might be
that programmer. The Patriot missile case addresses issues of
changing software specifications and software maintenance as
well as testing[14]. This can lead to questions of how much
testing is enough, whether the amount of testing needed varies
based on the use of the software, whether programs should be
written to just meet the specifications given, and what
documentation should be included with software.
Despite the existence of potentially useful exercises and case
studies, it can be most helpful to create a case study more
specifically targeted at a particular course or student population.
In the following sections, we present four case studies that we
have developed and used successfully in our programming
courses.
5. IT COULD BE YOU: CASE STUDIES
FOR CS2
These case studies are based on recent real life experiences of an
acquaintance of the authors. The names of the company and the
people involved are changed to protect both the innocent and the
guilty.1
Case 1: The Firing
The company
Widget Products, a well-established company, decided to
begin selling its products online. They hoped to have the
online site up and running by January 1, 2003.
The individual
Deborah graduated from college and landed a job as a
software engineer at Widget Products in the summer of 2001.
A year later, she was established as one of the most capable
engineers on staff. Consequently, she was assigned to be in
charge of (responsible for) more and more code.
The consultant
David was a software engineer hired as a consultant by
Widget Products. He was extremely knowledgeable about
making the pieces of the program communicate with each
other. He was hired for four months ending December 31,
2002, when the online sales site would be operational. He
was a friendly, gregarious 45-year-old, recently married.
Despite his knowledge and ability, he had two problems. He
was careless when coding, frequently committing code that
caused errors. As the release date neared, this became more
and more problematic, as the firms engineers worked 14 hour
days to eliminate all bugs. David also spent quite a bit of his
time talking with others. This interfered with his productivity
and that of the people he was talking to.
The problem
Two weeks before the online sales would begin,
management decided to fire David. Someone in the company
would have to be responsible for Davids code, maintaining it
and correcting any bugs found in it, and, therefore, had to
know the code. Deborahs manager called her in at around
noon and informed her that David would be fired later that
afternoon and why. She was then told that she would be
responsible for all of his code. Therefore, Deborahs manager
told her to spend the afternoon visiting with David and ask
him all about his code. She was to learn everything she could
from David without letting him know why she was doing this.
Deborah objected. She felt that he was a nice person and
his job would end in two weeks anyway, so he should not be
fired early. He was newly married, and she thought it would
1
The four case studies presented in this paper are available at
http://www.itk.ilstu.edu/faculty/mecalif/Ethics/CaseStudies.htm
349
be bad for him to have to go home and tell his wife hed been
fired. Deborah felt like she would be doing something
dishonest by pretending just to be interested when getting all
the info she could from him before he was fired. She stated
that she did not think this was right and would prefer not to
do it. Her boss said that David deserved to be fired because
his work was causing problems. Furthermore, the company
owned the code David had written and had a right to
understand it and learn all about the code. He argued that if
David were told why he was being asked all about his code,
he might refuse to help. He insisted that Deborah do as he
asked.
Deborah did spend the afternoon talking with David and
learned a lot. When she finished, she headed for the
bathroom down the end of the hallway. As she came back,
David was already at the elevator with his box of belongings,
having been fired. Deborah was quite upset about the events
of the day!
This case has been used in a CS2 course very effectively. We
generally present the case in pieces, asking students to consider
what people should do along the way and then continue telling
them what really happened until the next decision point.
We believe that this case exemplifies several characteristics of
effective ethics activities for programming courses. First, the case
is engaging. Its an interesting case with a lot of gray. There are
a number of points of view and three different people whose
actions can be analyzed. David is clearly in the wrong, but his
behavior patterns are some that students should recognize in
themselves, so looking at his actions is valuable for that reason.
Deborah is easier for students to relate to than many figures
students see in these ethics scenarios, because she is just a year
out of college (we do make a point of informing students that the
case is based on real life).
This case is also very relevant to the course and very
comprehensible to the students. The case raises real-life issues
relating to programming that are often under-emphasized in
programming courses, including the importance of maintenance
and bug fixes, the importance of care in coding and ownership of
code. Despite raising issues that students may be less focused on,
the case doesnt really get murky in terms of understanding what
the issues are and whats going onthough it may be a bit murky
when it comes to the question of what everyone should do.
Case 2: The Hiring
The company
Widget Products, a well established company, decided to
begin selling its products online. They hoped to have the
online site up and running on January 1, 2003. Widget
Products had two engineering divisions, front end and back
end. Front end engineers took data provided and prepared the
displays to be seen on the web. The back end engineers
wrote code that interacted directly with the data base and did
the underlying coding for the ordering program.
The individual
Deborah graduated from college with a major in
Computer Science. She was well versed in C, C++, and Java.
Upon completing her interview with Widget Products, she
was offered a job with the front end engineering group.
Noticing her hesitancy, the head of engineering told her he
 did not want to hire her if she were not excited about the job.
She explained that her training was for back end work and
that she knew almost nothing about the front end work, which
would be coded in JavaScript, HTML, XSL, C#, and several
other languages unknown to Deborah. The engineering
manager explained that the firm was happy to invest the time
needed for her to learn the front end material. Deborah then
gladly accepted the job offer.
The problem
Deborahs first assignment was to write the code
connecting the various sources of data together and
incorporating them in graphical displays. No one in the firm
knew how to do this. She was told to find online help and
purchase any books necessary to do the job. At the end of
three weeks, she was no closer to accomplishing the task than
when she began. She was frustrated and had no one to get
help from. Her immediate boss, the engineer in charge of the
front end, called her in for a conference.
Discussion
At this point the students are asked what they think will
happen during the conference. They are asked to consult the
ACM code of ethics and professional conduct. They are asked
what the code has to say regarding management of employees and
assignment of duties.
The conference
During the conference, Deborahs boss apologized for
assigning her a task that she could not do. He said his job
was to assign tasks that she could succeed at. He then
assigned her to a different task, and explained that the
company was going to hire outside consultants to do the task
previously assigned to her.
Case 3: The Demo
The company
MMM Software is a start up company in Silicon Valley
that began in early 2002. Their product is a software
application whose initial release was January 2003. During
the following twelve months, the US economy was poor, and
consequently sales were slow.
The individual
Sarah graduated from college and landed a job as a
software engineer at MMM Software in the summer of 2002.
Sarah believed that the product was well done, and that sales
would pick up once the economy rebounded.
The problem
A major software development company (well call them
BigCo) became very interested in using MMM Softwares
product. They invited MMM Software and one competitor to
make presentations. After the initial presentation, BigCo
dismissed the competitor and told MMM Software they were
impressed and most interested. They gave MMM Software a
100 page document containing their wish list of tasks that
they wanted MMM Softwares product to perform. MMM
Software was invited to give a presentation to the CEO of
BigCo in two weeks.
There were many tasks on the wish list that MMM
Software could easily incorporate in their product, but that
currently were not in the product. The decision was made to
350
hard code the presentation to look like what would happen if
the item in fact was operational. Sarah was asked to do some
of the hard coding. She was assured that BigCo would be
informed regarding which demo items were not currently
functional. Sarah was concerned about the ethics of the
situation. She would not be present at the presentation.
Discussion
Should Sarah comply with her assignment? What is her obligation
to ensure that BigCo is correctly informed of the status of various
tasks? What if Sarahs employer had always been honest with her
in the past? What if she suspected a fudging of the truth in prior
communications from the management? Clearly not all
employees could attend the presentation in order to verify that
BigCo was correctly informed. Are there alternative solutions to
the problem?
All of these cases tend to provoke good class discussion. They
raise issues that students have not considered, but that they can
understand and do see as relevant. They relate well to Sarah and
Deborah, because they easily picture themselves as recent
graduates on their first jobs. The issues are comprehensible but
not black and white. We find that such cases help students to
consider the ethical realities of their intended profession in
context.
6. WHATS THE ISSUE?: A CASE STUDY
FOR AN ALGORITHMS AND DATA
STRUCTURES COURSE
The last case study is an example of a completely fictional
scenario created very specifically for use in a course. This
assignment is used in our algorithms and data structures course,
which is the first course in the students program that seriously
examines the analysis of algorithms at all. One of the primary
foci of the course is on learning not only the various algorithms
and data structures, but also how to select the right algorithm or
data structure for a specific task. Therefore, we wanted students
to have that focus reinforced in an ethics assignment. So we
created a writing assignment in which students read the following
very short scenario and do a one-page write-up analyzing the
case.
Case 4: Search Time
Dan Johnson is a software developer working for
Pflugerville Data Management Services (PDMS). The
primary source of revenue for this company comes from
clients storing data on servers provided by PDMS and
then doing searches on this data. Clients pay a monthly
fee based on the storage used for their data, and they pay
for searches based on CPU time. Dans friend Nancy
Greene works for one of PDMSs biggest clients, the
Pflugerville Pflag. She has made the comment to him
that the storage charges seem reasonable, but that the
amount of CPU time used for searches seems excessive.
Dan has investigated and determined that all of the data
is being stored in arrays and searched using simple linear
search.
We ask them a set of fairly standard questions about stakeholders,
ethical issues, sections out of the code of ethics that apply,
possible courses of action, and so forth. Then we also ask them to
explain why this case is relevant to the course theyre completing.
Students generally have no problem recognizing that linear search
is, in fact, a very poor choice of algorithm, and then go on to
address the issues of how Dan can bring up the problems and how
the company might ensure its continued survival if it loses
revenue from having more efficient searches and so on. One of
the gratifying aspects of this fairly simple assignment is that
students respond very well to it. Almost all of them recognize
that there is a major issue here, but one they would never have
recognized before taking the course. They also appreciate being
given a problem to grapple with that they find straightforward and
believable.
7. CONCLUSION
We have presented some thoughts about how ethics can be
effectively incorporated into programming courses along with
four original case studies that we have used effectively in such
courses. We believe that the keys to success in this area are to
keep cases short and comprehensible and to make sure that they
are relevant to both the students and the course.
8. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
An early draft of this paper was developed at a writing workshop
held by the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Illinois
State University. Thanks to Dr. Kathleen McKinney and Dr.
Doug Hesse who organized the workshop as well as to other
attendees for their comments.
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