Meeting ABET Outcomes through Teaching Students to Analyze the Ethics of an AI System

To address the challenge of meeting ABET outcomes for ethical judgment, communication, and teamwork, this paper presents an innovative team project that integrates these skills and scaffolds their development. The project requires students to analyze the ethics of an AI system by identifying use cases, developing methods of analysis, evaluating such issues as bias, transparency, and sustainability, and developing policy recommendations for improvements to the system or for use in applications. The major deliverables are a collaboratively written proposal and a final team presentation that presents the research and recommendations. Lessons in ethical reasoning; research, information management, and academic integrity; proposal writing; policy advocacy; collaboration; and presentation augment their self-directed study of both how specific AI systems work, and the ethical and sociocultural implications of employing that technology for specific use cases. Students gain both conceptual and applied knowledge of ethical principles, reasoning through complex issues, reaching consensus through structured processes, and analyzing the effects of technology. In addition, students gain an in-depth understanding of the implications of using LLMs in the research and writing process, which increases their ability to make ethical choices about whether to use the output of these systems.