Author Archives: admin

Ask Dr. Free-Ride: My college wants me to inflate grades.

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A reader sends the following query:

I’ve only recently begun teaching in a big state university, maybe tier C in the field I’m in. I’m in a quandary as to how to manage pressure to pass students who are under performing. The first semester, I had to lower the passing to a basically ridiculous level and the college still inquired why so many failed (10 %). Now, I’m again feeling pressure to pass students who do not deserve to pass. I’m getting very disillusioned by this type of practice. Grade inflation seems to be so common that I even have students who think that a 60 is a B. I’m wondering what your thoughts are regarding this, and would appreciate any suggestions you might have.

How to grade fairly is one of those perennial questions with which academics struggle, and it would be sufficiently challenging even without pressure from students or administrative types. However, as my correspondent notes, there is also pressure from students and administrative types who want academics to change their grading methodology, so that they will get the grade they want for the amount of effort they are willing to put in, or so that the department or college will pass “enough” of the student population to satisfy the powers that be.
Let’s start with the question of how to properly calibrate a grading scheme and then move on to the related question of how to defend that grading scheme.

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Friday Sprog Blogging: bad dreams.

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The Free-Ride offspring have been enjoying their Spring Break visiting with the Grandparents Who Lurk But Seldom Comment. The night before they left, however, the younger Free-Ride offspring awoke in the wee hours because of a bad dream.
As we all know from the peer reviewed literature on the subject, the best treatment for that is to climb into bed with one’s mother, stealing all the covers as one falls back asleep.
Before all the covers were stolen, the younger Free-Ride offspring generated a list of questions for further research:

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Standing up for what we believe.

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Lab_mouse_copy.jpg

(Click to embiggen)
Tomorrow, April 8, 2010, Pro-Test for Science will be holding its second rally in Los Angeles in support of humanely conducted, ethical animal research and the people who conduct it. Their first rally last April drew approximately 700 people to the streets to support the scientific research that offers hope to patients (both human and veterinary) and their families.
Speaking of Research has details on tomorrow’s rally:

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Friday Sprog Blogging: peer review.

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Unlike some of my dear readers, the elder Free-Ride offspring, upon reading yesterday’s post, immediately recognized it as an April Fool’s Day joke. (This recognition was accompanied by only the barest hint of a smile. A mother’s fine, dry wit is, apparently, an acquired taste.)
Although that post was bogus, some of its content seemed worth discussing.
Dr. Free-Ride: Do you know what peer review is?
Elder offspring: No.
Dr. Free-Ride: Do you have a guess? Do you know what a “peer” is?

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How do researchers perceive peer review?

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ResearchBlogging.orgYou don’t have to look far to find mutterings about the peer review system, especially about the ways in which anonymous reviewers might hold up your paper or harm your career. On the other hand, there are plenty of champions of the status quo who argue that anonymous peer review is the essential mechanism by which reports of scientific findings are certified as scientific knowledge.
So how do scientists feel about anonymous peer review? A 2008 paper in Science and Engineering Ethics by David B. Resnik, Christina Guiterrez-Ford, and Shyamal Peddada, titled “Perceptions of Ethical Problems with Scientific Journal Peer Review: An Exploratory Study”, attempts to get a preliminary handle on that question. They write:

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Preventing Plagiarism.

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ResearchBlogging.org
Especially in student papers, plagiarism is an issue that it seems just won’t go away. However, instructors cannot just give up and permit plagiarism without giving up most of their pedagogical goals and ideals. As tempting a behavior as this may be (at least to some students, if not to all), it is our duty to smack it down.
Is there any effective way to deliver a preemptive smackdown to student plagiarists? That’s the question posed by a piece of research, “Is There an Effective Approach to Deterring Students from Plagiarizing?” by Lidija Bilic-Zulle, Josip Azman, Vedran Frkovic, and Mladen Petrovecki, published in 2008 in Science and Engineering Ethics.
To introduce their research, the authors write:

Academic plagiarism is a complex issue, which arises from ignorance, opportunity, technology, ethical values, competition, and lack of clear rules and consequences. … The cultural characteristics of academic setting strongly influence students’ behavior. In societies where plagiarism is implicitly or even explicitly tolerated (e.g. authoritarian regimes and post-communist countries), a high rate of plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty and scientific misconduct may be expected. However, even in societies that officially disapprove of such behavior (e.g. western democracies), its prevalence is disturbing. (140)

Here, there is some suggestion of potentially relevant cultural factors that may make plagiarism attractive — and not the cultural factors I tend to hear about here in California, on the Pacific Rim. But maybe we can extend Tolstoy’s observation about how each unhappy marriage is unhappy in its own way to recognize the variety of cultural contexts that spawn dishonest students.
And this is not just a matter of the interactions between students and teachers. Bilic-Zulle et al. point to plagiarism in school as something like a gateway drug for unethical behavior in one’s professional life — so potentially, reducing academic dishonesty could have important consequences beyond saving professors headaches.
In any case, the big question the researchers take on is how to reduce the prevalence. Is it effective to emphasize the importance of academic integrity, or to threaten harsh penalties if plagiarism is detected?

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Problems in the scientific literature: vigilance and victim-blaming.

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That post about how hard it is to clean up the scientific literature has spawned an interesting conversation in the comments. Perhaps predictably, the big points of contention seem to be how big a problem a few fraudulent papers in the literature really are (given the self-correcting nature of science and all that), and whether there larger (and mistaken) conclusions people might be drawing about science on the basis of a small fraction of the literature.
I will note just in passing that we do not have reliable numbers on what percentage of the papers published in the scientific literature are fraudulent. We may be able to come up with reliable measures of the number of published papers that have been discovered to be fraudulent, but there’s not a good procedure to accurately count the ones that succeed in fooling us.
Set that worry aside, and the legitimate worry that “little frauds” that might not do too much to deform the shape of the scientific literature might end up having significant effects on the scientific career scorekeeping. Let’s take on the big question:
How much of a problem is it to leave the scientific literature uncorrected? Who is it a problem for?

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What causes scientific misconduct?

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ResearchBlogging.org
In the last post, we looked at a piece of research on how easy it is to clean up the scientific literature in the wake of retractions or corrections prompted by researcher misconduct in published articles. Not surprisingly, in the comments on that post there was some speculation about what prompts researchers to commit scientific misconduct in the first place.

As it happens, I’ve been reading a paper by Mark S. Davis, Michelle Riske-Morris, and Sebastian R. Diaz, titled “Causal Factors Implicated in Research Misconduct: Evidence from ORI Case Files”, that tries to get a handle on that very question.

The authors open by making a pitch for serious empirical work on the subject of misconduct:

[P]olicies intended to prevent and control research misconduct would be more effective if informed by a more thorough understanding of the problem’s etiology. (396)

If you know what causes X, you ought to have a better chance of being able to create conditions that block X from being caused. This seems pretty sensible to me.

Yet, the authors note, scientists, policy makers, and others seem perfectly comfortable speculating on the causes of scientific misconduct despite the lack of a well-characterized body of relevant empirical evidence about these causes. We have plenty of anecdata, but that’s not quite what we’d like to have to ground our knowledge claims.

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