Between accreditation requirements [1] and national reports on the future of engineering, considerable attention has been given to the need for better ethics education in the engineering curriculum [2-3]. Several publications have been written about various approaches to addressing this need (e.g. see Herkert, 2000 [4]). The current state of affairs is a wide-array of pedagogies used in undergraduate engineering education to teach ethics, ranging from direct lectures on moral philosophy, to courses based on community service, to the use of online ethics tutorials. While there is an abundance of techniques for conveying ethics education, comparatively little work has been done in assessing the impact of these techniques on students. Overall, we have a good sense of "how" to teach ethics, but are less clear on the impact it is having on our students relative to other experiences they have while in college; in part because of a lack of assessment tools. To make matters worse, assessment is often limited to the context of the specific intervention (e.g. a single class or program) making the results less generalizable. Further, assessments are usually conducted at one point in time, or only over a single semester. An exception to this is the work done by Barry [5] who examined the impact of ethics education initiatives on students' knowledge of ethics as measured by Fundamentals of Engineering [6] examination results. And assessment efforts are usually not connected to a grounding theory of the ethical development of individuals through the college years. The result is a limited ability to separate the impact of a single intervention from other experiences that students may have during their academic careers.
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