Do ethics courses make engineering students more ethical?

To decide whether teaching ethics improves the ethical reasoning of engineering students, an online survey was used to assess their ethical reasoning before and after taking a course in which ethics is taught. Students were asked to consider scenarios requiring ethical judgment and their preferences for pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional reasoning were measured. Overall, students taking the course with the most emphasis on activities related to ethics showed small but significant movement away from pre- and towards post-conventional reasoning. Local and international and male and female results were compared.