Teaching Assistants' Experiences of and Opinions on CS Ethics

Computer Science (CS) ethics coursework is required at many institutions for undergraduate CS majors. However, little is known about how students perceive the addition of this topic into the CS curriculum which is otherwise largely technical in nature. To understand perceptions of CS ethics as a course, we included questions about CS ethics instruction on a survey of 88 graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants (TAs) at two institutions in the United States. We found that learning CS ethics was not a universal experience for all TAs, but that a majority of TAs felt that CS ethics is a vital curricular topic. We recommend further research with a wider study population to better understand the perceptions of students of CS ethics coursework.