Although there is widespread agreement that computer science curricula should include content that encourages students to think deeply about the ethical and societal impacts of their work, a majority of institutions of higher education do not require Computer Science majors to take a course on ethics in order to graduate. While adding a required course to the curriculum may be difficult, students can still be required to consider issues of ethics, societal impact, and cultural competency when those issues are explicitly incorporated into the curricula of other courses.

In this work, we explore adding modules on ethical considerations to existing courses in Algorithms, Data Science, and Statistical Learning. We find that after only a few classes devoted to ethical considerations (<3hours total) students provide thoughtful responses in essays and open-ended labs that demonstrate they internalized the issues relevant to the course. Our results also suggest that a majority of students appreciate the addition but would like to see further integration within the curriculum.

Student responses also broadly follow recommendations from the literature: students believe that schools should teach a course dedicated to ethics, that ethical considerations should be integrated into the entire curriculum, and that we should spend more time working with our colleagues in the Social Sciences and Humanities to develop better ethics instruction for our computing students.