Professional Ethics: ACS Code of Conduct

Module Overview

“An essential characteristic of a profession is the need for its members to abide by a code of ethics. For the Australian Computer Society (ACS), this code is established as the Code of Professional Conduct. The ACS Code of Ethics requires members to uphold and advance the honour, dignity and effectiveness of being a professional.” [ Source: ACS Code of Ethics and ACS Code of Professional Conduct ]

O3. justify the professional responsibility to produce reliable software and systems;

O4. assess the social impacts of IT projects;

Materials

Class Agenda

Preparation

AI-assistants (LLMs) can be used for learning through dialogues by Socratic questions, role play, and case studies. In this moidule you will use an LLM of your choice for exploring case studies on professional ethics. For more information on using and LLM this way see Prompts for Practising I recommend that you install and use a local LLM for this test. My recommendation is Ollama for the following reasons But you are welcome to use other or online LLM systems such as Copilot of chatGPT. Remember to save the text of your dialogues (both the LLM questions and your responses) and submit the whole dialogue.

Class Activity

You will be given some case study scenarios for a software project. Groups will assess the risks and responsibilities in this case. Feedback and discussion in class. You will be given a case study scenarios for a software project. Assess the risks and responsibilities in this case.

Students work for 10-15 minutes in a Socratic dialogue with an LLM.

It is recommended that activity be followed by feedback and discussion in class.

Module Assignment

This module is assessed in the take home test through case study scenarios. This module is assessed with a 20 minute LLM-led Socratic dialogue for a given case study scenarios.

INSTRUCTIONS

Paste the prompt below into your LLM and then interact with the system to answer its prompts. Your dialogue should last around 10 to 15 minutes (set a timer). Take time to think about your answers - the benefit of this exercise is your insights not volume of text. Save your dialogue and paste the whole dialogue into the answer box below. For ease of marking, please edit your LLM dialogue by highlighting the text of your answers eg with another coloured text.

LLM PROMPT

Case Study (Source ACS case studies (2014) Case study 2): Three years ago Diane started her own consulting business. She has been so successful that she now has several people working for her and many clients. Their consulting work included advising on how to set up corporate intranets, designing database management systems, and advising about security. Presently she is designing a database management system for the personnel office of a medium-sized company. Diane has involved the client in the design process, informing the CEO, the director of computing, and the director of personnel about the progress of the system. It is now time to make decisions about the kind and degree of security to build into the system. Diane has described several options to the client. Because the system is going to cost more than they planned, the client has decided to opt for a less secure system. She believes the information they will be storing is extremely sensitive. It will include performance evaluations, medical records for filing insurance claims, salaries, and so forth. With weak security, employees working on client machines may be able to figure out ways to get access to this data, not to mention the possibility of on-line access from hackers. Diane feels strongly that the system should be much more secure. She has tried to explain the risks, but the CEO, director of computing and director of personnel all agree that less security will do. What should she do? Should she refuse to build the system as they request?

You are an expert in computing ethics and security. I want to study to topics of security and professional ethics for this scenario. Ask me questions. After each question that you ask, wait for my response. Then you should respond but do not tell me the answer. Instead, ask me questions and use the Socratic questioning approach to help me arrive at the answer myself.

Review

Lessons Learnt

LLMs are very encouraging (sometimes obsequious). This is good for student engagement in the exercise.

Let student know the expected time for their dialogue. 10-15 minutes seems to work.

LLMs may halucinate and may not ask perceptive questions, so this exercise is a good opportunity to discuss with students the limitations of LLMs and how they can make use of them critically and effectively.

Additionally, each dialogue will be different and sharing answers will provide a broader perspective.

For these reasons, it is strongly recommended that the 10-15 minute dialogue activity be followed by feedback and discussion in class.

See Preparation above for useful links

Lecturer: Rachel Cardell-Oliver 2025