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ITEC810 Ethics Assignment

This page outlines the requirements for your Ethics Assigment.

1 Submission Requirements

No later than 12 noon on Friday 29th May (Week 12), you should submit via Moodle a short essay of 1-2 pages in length. There are no specific formatting requirements for this submission.

2 The Aims of this Assignment

This assignment has the following aims.

  1. It encourages you to think about a specific ethical issue and to analyse your response to it.

  2. It ensures that you have carefully read the ACM Code of Ethics and thought about how they bear on a specific ethical issue.

3 The Assignment

Consider the following scenario:

You work for a large software company. You are involved in preparing a tender for a project which is essential for the company's survival: if you don't win the contract, you will have to fire two employees who report to you.

The software you would be developing is intended to track consumer buying habits in order to predict where advertising will be most successful.

Over a coffee, a friend suggests to you that one of the client's key market objectives is to determine the most effective way of reaching school children in the 16-18 years age-range with cigarette advertising.

Then:

  1. Write a page explaining what you think you would do in this situation and why.

  2. Now read the ACM Code of Ethics.

  3. Discuss what course of action the ACM Code of Ethics supports in this situation.

  4. If your chosen course of action is different from that which the Code of Ethics supports, is the Code of Ethics wrong or incomplete? Should it be changed to cover your case?

Please ensure that essay is submitted with a filename that has the following format:

So, for example, if I was submitting my ethics assignment as a PDF file, it would have the following filename:

6 Assessment

Your Ethic Assignment is worth 5 marks. It should be stressed that you will not be assessed on the basis of the particular ethical position you take, but on the basis of your demonstrating that your position is a well-reasoned and thought-through position, and demonstrating that you have read and understood the ACM Code of Ethics.

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Last Modified: 23rd May 2009