CIS3250: Ethics and Computer Science
Rebuilt FSU's computer science ethics course from the ground up in 2020, with a new textbook, and have run it for about a thousand students a year across four campuses since. SACS- and ABET-accredited.
CIS3250 is the ethics requirement in Florida State’s computer science bachelor’s degree, which makes it one of the few courses every CS graduate takes. When I took it over in 2020 it needed to be rebuilt for the decade it was in, so I developed an entirely new course on a new textbook: ten modules that run from ethical theory through ethics for IT workers, cybersecurity, privacy, freedom of expression, intellectual property, ethical decisions in software development, the impact of IT on society, social media, and the ethics of IT organizations.
Assessment is built to hold up at scale and under accreditation. Weekly quizzes and case-study discussions carry the modules; two proctored exams carry the theory; and a term paper asks each student to argue a position on a current issue using the analysis methods the course teaches, with an eye on the local and global impact of computing and on how a professional code of ethics applies. Those are the outcomes SACS and ABET accredit against, and the course is dual-accredited.
It runs at about a thousand students a year across the Panama City, Florida, Panama City, Panama, and Tallahassee campuses, with Valencia onboarded in fall 2026. At that size the instructor’s job is less lecturing than course engineering: consistent module and exam windows, discussion prompts that can be graded fairly by a team, and a readiness process that catches the defects a copied course shell reintroduces every term. That process is codified in the Claude skill library so it survives the semester rollover without me.