As quality control engineer for your company, you must approve all material shipments from your suppliers. Part of this job involves testing random samples from each delivery and making sure they meet your company’s specifications. Your tests of a new shipment of carbon steel rods produced yield strengths 10 percent below specification. When you contact the supplier, they claim their tests show the yield strength for this shipment is within specifications. What do you do?

a. Reject the shipment and get on with your other work.

b. Retest samples of this shipment to see if new data will meet the specifications.

c. Accept the shipment, since the supplier probably has better test equipment and has been reliable in the past.

d. Ask your boss for advice.

Use the Engineering Ethics Matrix.