Engineers need to master their technical areas, have confidence in their
knowledge, and take open positions on technical issues in business and
public settings. Engineering education should reward these attributes.
But often engineering educators give students no opportunity to demonstrate
their level of confidence, and sometimes grading practices positively reward
shameless bluffing. This paper explores the ethical implications
of these aspects of engineering education and professionalism.
Three major dimensions of professional knowledge are (1) What you know, (2) what you know that you know, and (3) the position you take in a public setting about what you know and don’t know. By the last dimension, I mean what you are willing to admit to others that you don’t know, or perhaps how ready you are to stand for what you know to be correct. Leaving aside for the moment the third dimension, let us discuss the four possibilities arising out of the first two dimensions, in an engineering context.
I. The engineer knows the answer, and the engineer knows that he or she knows the material.
This is the goal of professional education: knowledge plus confidence in that knowledge. Indeed, one might say that this combination identifies a true professional.
II. The engineer knows but does not know that he or she knows.
Knowledge is better than ignorance, as all would agree, but the lack of confidence in that knowledge bespeaks a serious flaw in the qualifications of a professional. Indeed a professional who seems uncertain discredits his or her opinion and could well undermine a project by compromising the best solution or frightening off potential stakeholders.
III. The engineer does not know and knows that he or she does not know.
Any professional in this state should seek the information or knowledge required to solve the problem at hand. One goal of professional education is to equip the engineer for life-long learning; epiphanies of ignorance are invitations to expand one’s professional competence.
IV. The engineer does not know, but thinks he or she knows.
This is a dangerous person the professional who offers incorrect
information or solutions with high confidence that all is well. This
is, in simple terms, a problem of incompetence. Hopefully
there are sufficient safeguards to protect the public or the company reputation
from professionals speaking beyond their competence.
Now let’s think about the social dimension of professional knowledge, as related to these four categories. We’re speaking here of the ethics of applying one’s professional knowledge in the realm of design or decision, or making public statements reflecting on technical matters related to the public good or company interests.
Whether one knows or does not know something is not an ethical issue, and for that matter neither is one self assessment of his or her knowledge, except in so far as one’s public stance is influenced by these dimensions of one’s knowledge. Below we discuss briefly the more interesting cases relating to the ethical dimension.
Case I. The ideal case is that the competent professional is ready to take a stand for what he or she knows to be correct, particularly when public health and safety is at risk. The successful whistle blower best exemplifies this competent and courageous individual.
Case II. The engineer without confidence will find it hard to take a strong stand for what he or she considered to be the correct position. This might compromise technical excellence or company success in a presentation, but it also could compromise public well being.
Case III. The engineer who knows the limits of his or her knowledge stands at a moral fork in the road. On the one hand lies admitting ignorance and taking steps to improve ones knowledge base. On the other hand lies the temptation to misrepresent ones ignorance, to pretend to know more than one actually knows. In poker this is called “bluffing.”
The consequences of bluffing are dire. Whereas there may be short term benefits in bluffing the public, e.g., making a sale, the long term effects are surely bad. “The wheels of the Gods grind slow, yet exceeding fine” is as true in the business and technical world as in the legal system.
Bluffing a technical peer or superior brings immediate discredit to the speaker. Let us say, for example, that an engineer is making a technical presentation before his boss and some fellow engineers. A question is asked to which the speaker does not know the answer and knows that he does not know the answer, but rather than admit ignorance the speaker gives a wrong answer. The immediate result is that the speaker’s ignorance and lack of integrity are evident to some if not all the audience. The speaker has just said, in so many words, “You cannot trust what I say.” This is a much greater setback for one’s professional status than admitting ignorance. Ignorance is forgivable and remediable; bluffing reveals a deep flaw in the individual and the trust lost in one such incident may never be recovered.
The three dimensions of knowledgewhat you know, what you know that
you know, and what you represent yourself as knowingall impact the
processional competence and effectiveness of an engineer. Our interest
turns now to the training of engineers and specifically to the way in which
the grading system addresses these dimensions.
For the most part, only the first dimension of knowledge is evaluated in the way most engineering students are graded. Typically the students are evaluated in the basis of a examination of their knowledge of the subject matter, their mastery of standard techniques, and their problem solving ability. This is accomplished by giving exams consisting of problems to be solved. Some are standard problems, and some are unlike problems students have encountered before, to test their insight into basic principles and their ability to apply these to novel situations.
The grading of the tests are based on student success in solving the problems. Occasionally an instructor will judge success solely on the answer given, right or wrong?, but usually partial credit is given for knowledge displayed, progress in the correct direction, or even for simply writing something.
Students learn throughout their educational years that they had better write something on every question; anything is better than nothing. If you write nothing, the grader is sure to give no credit, but if you write something, no matter how irrelevant or inane, you are likely to receive some credit. The reason is that the grader is usually sympathetic to the student and want to see the student grade to be as high as possible.
Thus, bluffing of the most irresponsible sort is positively encouraged by this grading system. Any professor who has graded thousands of exams has seen countless attempts to “solve the problem” which are nothing more that putting down memorized formulas or problem solutions that have nothing to do with the problem at hand. There is no question in the grader’s mind that the student does not know how to solve the problem; in most cases the bluffing is so transparent as to be comic. Nevertheless, some credit is usually given. Why? (1) Because the grader wants the students to do well; (2) Because students expect something and will often argue for points if none are given; and (3) the grader does not want to discourage the student unduly. So the problem is worth 30 points and you count off 20 or 25 points for the ridiculous answer offered.
Standard grading methods give no direct reward for student confidence. There is a direct benefit for confidence, fur the student can move quickly beyond the problems solved with confidence and focus on the remainder of the exam. But the student has no way of communicating his or her confidence and there is no incentive to do so.
In summary, the standard grading method recognizes knowledge displayed,
fails to recognize confidence, and positively encourages bluffing.
Considering first offering a positive reward for confidence. Assume that exams are designed the same as before, a series of problems to be solved. For the sake of discussion, assume further that the exam has four problems that are to count equally. Let us say that we give 80 points of the solutions, and reserve 20 “confidence points” for the student to allocate, should he or she wish, to the answers for which confidence is high. Before the student hands in the exam, he or she has the option of expressing their confidence by instructing the grader to make, say, problem 2, part b is worth 15 points rather than 10, based on correctness of answer. So if the answer to problem is correct, the student receives 15 points, and if the answer is incorrect, the students will receive up to 5 points based on partial credit for the solution written. The 5 possible points come from the original 10 minus the 5 confidence points the students lost due to the wrong answer.
One consequence of this system is that the student does not have to spend confidence points at all. The maximum score would then be 80, and the student is penalized for lacking confidence. If the student designated all 20 confidence but failed to get right answers, then theoretically the grade could be below zero.
Consider now the rewarding of integrity and discouragement of bluffing. Let’s say that the student doesn’t have a clue how to solve problem 3. In that case, the correct answer to problem 3 for that student is “I don’t know how to solve this problem.” That answer shows that the student knows that he or she does not know the answer and thus deserves some credit. The student should receive half credit (10 points) for that answer. This gives us some margin to penalize the student who thinks that he or she knows how to solve the problem, but really doesn’t, or else who bluffs.
In grading the exam, the grader can now reward an honest answer of ignorance
and punish an answer that is patently absurd. Of course, judgment
is required, but this is part of grading exams.
I have used this system two semesters. The “confidence points” feature works well, in my view. The students learn to evaluate their work on the various aspects of the exam and identify the parts that they are sure to be correct. In some cases I have had students place no confidence points at all because they were unsure of any part of the exam, and they know that these points will be subtracted if they are wrong. I was in that case disappointed in their lack of confidence in their knowledge, but I was impressed with the student’s maturity to know that he does not know with certainty.
The “I don’t know” feature was used more at the end of the semester than at the beginning in both cases, probably as a result of my severe grading of work that was badly incorrect. The second class in which I used this scheme, the final exam was a bit hard and students used the “I don’t know” to excess, to the point of arousing my anger. They worked the easy parts of the exam, said “I don’t know” for the rest. That had, in fact, already calculated how many points they had to score on the exam to make their target gradeAs a result of this abuse, I am limiting the “I don’t know” to one problem on quizzes, and they have to skip the entire problem, and two problems on the final.
When I present the reasons for the grading system, the students seem to understand the professional purpose, but in practice they seem to consider it a game. Their goal is to maximize their grade, and the professional and moral purpose doesn’t seem to matter. I guess that’s inevitable, considering that the education system trains students to set a high value on grades.
In summary, I plan to continue to develop these ideas and techniques
in the attempt to reward both knowledge and integrity.