This paper is on developing a set of questions to assess students’ professional values. The context for the development is a project-based course involving three universities, two in the US and one in Sweden. Values formation is difficult to measure, partly because of a possible disparity between what students say and what they do.

The process of developing questions begins with creating actionable value statements: What would you expect of an information technology (IT) professional? What have you observed? These statements are based on four published reports. The 63 statements based on the literature were then validated by a panel of 12 IT experts, from seven countries, who scored based on their agreement with the statement. Interquartile ranks, the difference between the scores for the third quartile and the first quartile, were used as measures of disagreement between the experts. Statements with high interquartile scores were eliminated, as well as statements where the experts disagreed whether the pertinent behavior was desirable or not.

The culled list of 20 statements was presented to students and alumni. (Only nine alumni responses were received, compared to 26 student responses.) In general, experts, students, and alumni were in agreement about the value of each statement. From each statement, two questions were then formulated: What have you seen? And what would you do? The questions were deployed to current students. The paper analyzes the results. One result is that students generally reported their own behavior to be somewhat better than what they observed. The paper presents much detail, probably more than many readers want.