Awareness of Information Systems' Students to Ethical: Decision making

As technological advances reshape society and the workplace, the effects of IT are complex, hard to estimate exactly, and probably have different values for different people at different times and places. Recognizing the importance of pursuing the ethical life as well as the unique ethical challenges caused by rapidly evolving technologies, scholars have recently discussed how best to integrate ethical education in the information technology (IT) curriculum The purpose of this study is to investigate the ethical issues in education in terms of Information Systems students' attitudes at Saudi universities towards misuse Information technology. We examine the differences in the ethical decision-making process; ethical awareness, and intention to perform questionable acts. We tested differences in attitudes towards different questionable actions. These consisted eighteen statements (eleven statements are personnel decision without any external interference, five statements with external interference on the decision, and two statements are from general situations to perform questionable acts) by using three different independent variables (gender, age and university level). The measures of awareness capture the extent to which respondents felt that a particular action was unethical according to each of several ethical criteria. This work explored information technology ethics in several ways. First, the work analyzed whether information technology use is viewed by individuals as an ethical topic. Second, demographic differences were explored. Significant differences were found in many cases between demographic groups based on ethical issues. These findings can be used to target and address ethical issues and enforcement in information systems curriculum.