CS290/390, Homework 1
Ethics Case Studies and Professional Codes of Ethics and Practice
Due: Thursday, March 16 (after spring break), 3:30 pm
How to submit: Use the ITC Toolkit. Submit a Word, text, or RTF file.
Choose any of the three ethics cases given in the class handout (also on
the web).
Then, read one of these two professional codes of ethics and practice
for computing professionals.
• The ACM Code of Ethics: http://www.acm.org/constitution/code.html
• The ACM/IEEE Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional
Practice:
http://www.acm.org/serving/se/code.htm
Find clauses or statements in the code(s) that you think directly relate
to issues in the case you have chosen to discuss, and list these with
their number and the text/description that goes with the number. For
example, your list might include items like these two:
SE Code, 1.05. Cooperate in efforts to address matters of grave
public concern caused by software, its installation, maintenance,
support or documentation.
ACM Code, 1.5 Honor property rights including copyrights and patent.
(Cut and paste, please!) For each of these, explain briefly why this
particular item applies to the case, whether the item indicates that a
problem has occurred or something should be done (or should have not
been done).
The goal of this exercise is to make sure you have read through at least
one of the professional codes of ethics accepted in the computing
community, and that you can recognize which items apply to a given
situation and why. We'll judge you on whether you have recognized all
the items that we think match each case.
NOTE: You only have to use one of the two codes for this. However, if
you were absent on February 9 when we discusses these cases, you can do
use both codes and make up for your absence on that day. Clearly
indicate you want this in your submitted document, please!