I hope you’ve noticed that Seed has sent a team to blog the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair currently raging in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
I love science fairs. I’ve judged them (and recruited others to judge them). At our county fair, I’m always sucked right into the science-fair-type exhibits entered by kids in the Young California exhibit hall.
And of course, as a kid, I did projects for our school science fair.
Category Archives: Academia
A few questions about final exams.
Someone forgot to tell our department photocopier that finals started today; rather than being a vengeful photocopier toying with the pitiful mortals in its thrall, it was a happy photocopier that photocopied my final exams beautifully. And since I wasn’t clearing any cryptic paper jams, my mind wandered into the question of how others approach final exams:
- Multiple choice, essay, something in between, or a combination of question formats?
- Scantron forms? Blue books? (If so, do the students have to buy them or does the prof provide them?)
- In-class or take-home?
- Open book or closed book?
- Clever cheating-deterent procedures?
- Plenty of time to finish or barely enough time to finish?
- Pedagogically useful or a necessary evil?
My answers below the fold.
Independent confirmation and open inquiry (investigation? examination?): Purdue University and the Rusi Taleyarkhan case.
My recent post on the feasibility (or not) of professionalizing peer review, and of trying to make replication of new results part of the process, prompted quite a discussion in the comments. Lots of people noted that replication is hard (and indeed, this is something I’ve noted before), and few were convinced that full-time reviewers would have the expertise or the objectivity to do a better job at reviewing scientific manuscripts than the reviewers working under the existing system.
To the extent that building a body of reliable scientific knowledge matters, though, we have to take a hard look at the existing system and ask whether it’s doing the job. Do the institutional structures in which scientific work is conducted encourage a reasonable level of skepticism and objectivity? Is reproducibility as important in practice as it is in the scientist’s imagination of the endeavor? And is this a milieu where scientists hold each other accountable for honesty, or where the assumption is that everyone lies?
The allegations around nuclear engineer Rusi Taleyarkhan — and Purdue University’s responses to these allegations — provide vivid illustrations of the sorts of problems a good system should minimize. The larger question is whether they are problems that are minimized by the current institutional structures.
An odd (but pleasant) milestone.
Today is our last day of classes before final exams, and it’s looking like this semester is notably different from the nine semesters that came before it:
As well as I can ascertain, none of my students have committed plagiarism in any of their assignments for me!
Yes, that should be the normal state of affairs, but we are painfully aware of the gap between “is” and “ought”, are we not? Some semesters, I’ve had to deal with multiple plagiarists. This term, no cheating-related paperwork for me.
Thank you, students, for restoring some of my faith in humanity. Be sure to eat healthy food, get adequate sleep, and kick ass on your finals.
Why wouldn’t this be a good way to do peer review?
When my “Ethics in Science” class was discussing scientific communication (especially via peer reviewed journals), we talked about what peer review tries to accomplish — subjecting a report of a scientific finding to the critical scrutiny of other trained scientists, who evaluate the quality of the scientific arguments presented in the manuscript, and how well they fit with the existing knowledge or arguments in the relevant scientific field.
We also talked about the challenges of getting peer review to function ideally and the limits of what peer review can accomplish (something I also discussed here). In many instances, the people peer reviewing your manuscripts may well be your scientific rivals. Even if peer review is supposed to be anonymous, in a small enough sub-field people start recognizing each other’s experimental approaches and writing styles, making it harder to keep the evaluation of the content of a manuscript objective. And, peer reviewing of manuscripts is something working scientists do on top of their own scientific research, grant writing, teaching, supervision of students, and everything else — and they do it without pay or any real career reward. (This is not to say it’s only worth doing the stuff you get some tangible reward for doing, but it can end up pretty low in the queue.)
Why, one of my students asked, don’t the journals hire people to do peer reviewing? Why not make it an actual paid job?
Mother’s Day appreciation (part II): Mom goes to grad school.
In part I of the interview, my mother described what it was like to be propelled by her dream of being an astronomer from being at home with four children to being in an undergraduate physics classroom and finding a serious mentor.
Part II: Out of the comfort zone and into the graduate program:
Mother’s Day appreciation (part I): Why Mom went back to school.
In honor of Mother’s Day, I want to celebrate the ways that mothers have blazed trails, knocked down barriers, and challenged expectations of what their daughters’ lives can be.
When we’re young, we don’t always appreciate how important our parents (or other adults in our circle) can be as role models. Part of this, I think, is that a kid’s world is smaller in some important ways. What you know of the world you know through school, through friends, through cartoons, and through your family. Lots of aspects of the wider world don’t really pop up in your consciousness until you have to confront them as an adult yourself.
I would not be who I am or where I am today without my mom, Sally Stemwedel. Although I probably couldn’t (or wouldn’t) fully grasp it when I was a kid, when she went back to school in her mid-30s my mother opened up my understanding of the world of higher education and of science, and offered me a vision of a woman’s work that the society at large did not. Given all the ways that her journey helped me to navigate – and even to imagine – my own educational and career path, I asked her if I could interview her for a set of posts here. I’m very grateful that she agreed.
Part I: What drives a suburban mother of four back to school?
What would it be like to be an engineer?
It has recently transpired that I will be teaching (and before that, designing and constructing) a brand new ethics module in the large introduction to engineering class at my university that all the freshman who are majoring in any of the multitude of engineering disciplines must take. I’m jazzed, of course, that the College of Engineering thinks that it’s worth cultivating in their students the idea that ethics is an integral part of being a good engineer (and a good engineering student), so much so that they are devoting two weeks in the fifteen week term to this. And, I want to do a good job pitching the material to the audience.
I have some experience teaching to frosh. But it occurs to me that I’m a little fuzzy in understanding just what makes an engineer an engineer.
Random bullets of “AAAAARGH!!”
I would like to rejoice that it is Friday. And yet, as the end of the semester draws nigh, the press of Tasks That Cannot Be Deferred Any Longer is sucking a good bit of the Friday-ness out of this Friday.
So, I suppose this post is the cyber-equivalent of an itemized primal scream:
What they said at the panel on the future of higher education.
Since many of you were kind enough to suggest questions to ask of Margaret Spellings at SJSU’s Founders Day “The Future of Higher Education” panel last Friday, I thought I should report back on that session.
First, the bad (but utterly predictable) news: while Margaret Spellings gave the keynote address, she didn’t stick around for the panel discussion afterwards — so she wasn’t there for the question and answer period. However, the panel of experts certainly had something to say about the Spellings Commission report on higher education.