Category Archives: Academia

Claims and their logical consequences (or not)

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Within certain quarters of the administration of my fair university (and of the state university system of which it is a part), it is now taken as given that the classroom is a relic of a bygone era.

Lectures, it is declared, don’t work. Besides, the Internet abounds with free streaming lectures (the ones from MIT, the TED Talks). What could we possibly have to add to that? So, it’s time to phase out classes in classrooms and move our instruction online.

It’s interesting to me that what is offered is a general declaration, rather than an identification of any particular lecture classes of ours that are not working. As it happens, the particular classes are what we offer, not some abstract generalization of “the lecture class”.

Moreover, to the extent that lectures are a suboptimal delivery method for information and skills, this seems to be connected to a lack of opportunity to engage in what we in the biz call “active learning”. This can be as simple as a pause for questions, or to have students work through a problem where they try to apply or extend something presented in the lecture. It might also involve a more elaborate small group exercise or a facilitated discussion.

Here’s the thing: many (if not most) of us who teach “lecture” courses already incorporate a lot of active learning.

And, if the concern is that we should do more of it, or do it better, why would one conclude that the answer is to take this interaction out of the classroom and move it online? Why, especially, would one conclude that one should move it online while making class sizes much, much bigger?

Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to conclude that the way to increase active learning is to make class sizes smaller?

Of course, that would cost more.

However, if the goal is really better pedagogy, not just cutting a few million dollars here or there, it might be worth remembering that facilitating active learning — not to mention evaluating it to provide students with useful feedback and/or grades — requires more instructor labor, not less, when it’s done online.

Or, maybe the administration is only interested in improved pedagogy if the improvements (and whatever extra labor they require) can be had for free.

The whole thing kind of makes me wish the folks further up the org-chart than I am would just spell out exactly what they care about, and exactly what they don’t care about. As it is, enough is left implicit that it’s really hard to know whether there’s any common ground for us to share.

The things you can learn reading a comment thread.

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So, Chemjobber (whose blog focuses on “[q]uantifying the chemistry job market” and “helping chemists find jobs somehow”) wrote an interesting post on the supply/demand mismatch when it comes to chemistry Ph.D.s and how this might affect a person’s rational deliberations about whether it’s worth the gamble to pursue a chemistry Ph.D.

That post got me thinking (as good posts do), and I posted some of my thoughts about what we (in a sort of societal-level “we” that at least includes chemists and chemical educators, broadly construed, but that might also encompass higher education types and even society as a whole) might want to do about this supply/demand mismatch, and about how what we think we should do is probably connected to how we think about the point of education in the first place.

My post got Farked.

I went and read the comments. (I know, who does that?)

There, I learned:

1. Putting up a blog post that includes some typos (or maybe they were artifacts from the voice recognition software) means that your Ph.D. should probably be revoked. Immediately!

2. The existence of one commenter with a Ph.D. in chemistry who has an intellectually stimulating job that pays well means that there is no job crisis for Ph.D. chemists! (False alarm, kids! Come on back to the lab!)

3. The existence of one commenter who works placing interns for his university’s STEM college and reports a 100% placement rate for students looking for internships means that there is no job crisis for Ph.D. chemists! (Even though maybe these are undergraduate students being placed? And maybe some of these internships pay less than what you’d view as a living wage, or perhaps nothing at all? Still, companies will welcome cheap transient labor from science majors, so the economy is totally fine!!)

4. Ph.D. programs in chemistry are probably way easier now than they were 100 years ago. (Whither intellectual rigor?) Maybe these lower standards are to blame for the glut of chemistry Ph.D.s.

5. On balance, it is a good thing when a sub-par chemist finds a job teaching philosophy!

Thankfully, we sub-par chemists can look to Fark comment threads for helpful examples when we teach logic and critical thinking.

And, because I count it as due diligence, I immediately emailed Chemjobber to alert him to the news that he’s been mistaken about the chemistry job market. I expect by the end of the week he’ll shift his blog over to providing photos of labware with hilarious captions.

Finally, given that the blurb that went with the link to my posts reads:

The market value of a Ph.D. in chemistry is now limited to asking ‘Would you like fries with that?” On the positive side, chemistry students are bumping the hell out of English majors in the paper-hat careers

I could get all shirty about pointing out that my Ph.D. in a “useless” non-STEM field helped me secure a tenure-track job (and, ultimately, tenure) in a field where it’s maybe even harder to get an academic job than in chemistry. (Look at me being a dumbass with my sunk costs and such!) And, there are no fry-o-lators or paper hats involved.

But that would just be mean of me.

A hilarious book to get you through grading season: Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir).

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Yesterday, the Cave of Grading got something even better than hot-and-cold running margaritas. (OK, I recognize that hot running margaritas would be gross. Maybe hot running Irish coffee?) It got this:

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir) by Jenny Lawson (New York: Amy Einhorn Books, 2012)

I know what you’re thinking: How is a hilarious memoir about life in Texas (and on the internet) at all helpful in the project of catching up on a catastrophic grading backlog?

And it’s true, the book itself has not picked up a grading pen to help me get the job done. However, each of the conveniently-sized chapters in the book feels like a well-deserved reward after plowing through another 10 or 15 papers on the stack. Also, the guffaws Lawson’s writing provokes seem to restore some of the life-force depleted by grading. I haven’t subjected it to proper empirical investigation, but I hypothesize that these same guffaws result in better oxygenation of the blood, glossier hair, and a clearer complexion. Or at least they help me maintain enthusiasm for getting the job done, and restore me to a relatively cheerful baseline mood from which to evaluate student work with some modicum of compassion.

If you think your childhood was strange, or that you argue about weird stuff with your partner, or that the creatures in your yard or your house or your walls might be dangerous and/or haunted, Jenny Lawson pretty much has you beat, but you will still feel the comfort of recognition. You might also be moved to check to see when your last tetanus shot was.

Important stuff in this book:

  1. The observation that it may be harder to properly identify the type of bird in front of you than who that bird belongs to, and that this may have significant social consequences.
  2. Some liquids that have detectable odors and some that do not. Also, some liquids that are collectable, apparently, if that’s how your father rolls.
  3. Maybe the worst-ever attempt to “just fit in” with the other kids in high school, especially as it results in kind of getting stuck.
  4. A tremendously awesome discount outlet purchase that is not towels, but that someone maybe wishes had been after all.
  5. A frank discussion of what it can be like to live with an anxiety disorder, and how it’s much less hilarious to be living than its description might make it seem.
  6. Descriptions of parenting and grandparenting strategies favored by the author’s forebears, some of which involve sacks of animals of varying degrees of animation, some of which involve unconventional use of sugar cubes.
  7. Sufficient data for me to cross a job in HR off my list of potential careers if the academia thing doesn’t work out.
  8. Ample documentation of perfectly good words that spellcheck apparently did not want the author to use in writing her memoir, because spellcheck is kind of a jerk.
  9. Word problems. This book will exercise your brain! Not to mention guidance on the appropriate kickback for your English teacher (which, in my professional opinion, would also be appropriate for a philosophy professor).
  10. Flint-napping.

If it’s been too long since you’ve read a book that causes you to emit involuntary sounds of hilarity around others, you owe it to yourself to read Let’s Pretend This Never Happened.

(There’s also an audiobook version, but based on my experience of reading the book-book version, I would strongly advise against listening to it while driving on account of the uproariousness might cause you to lose control of the vehicle, hurting others and yourself. If you must, please save it for stop-and-go traffic.)

When patching the boat becomes unethical (a dispatch from a university in crisis).

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“We’ve spent years figuring out how to do more with less. It’s time for us to figure out how to do less.”

— my department chair, circa 2008

I have recently arrived at the suspicion that operating in crisis conditions undermines one’s ability to make objective judgments. My hunch is that the effect is especially strong when it comes to evaluating whether an on-the-ground response to an extreme reduction in resources will help or hurt the broader goals one (or one’s institution) is trying to achieve.

And indeed, this hunch is something I am just articulating to myself (rather than leaving it as a miasma that envelops my head and my workplace) as my assistance has been requested in devising a radical curricular response to “the new normal” of hundreds of millions of dollars cut from the budget (with more to come!) that we have been told are never coming back. The radical curricular response, as I understand it right now, would have the virtue of saving a significant amount of money. However, it would do so by taking particular pedagogical goals that it is difficult to achieve well in a 15 week semester and cramming them into about 5 weeks of another semester-long course — and by delivering the whole thing completely online to all of our incoming freshmen. This latter detail concerns me in terms of the workload it will entail for the faculty teaching the course and evaluating student work (since, in my experience, the time required teaching online has never been less than teaching the equivalent course in a classroom, and indeed has always been substantially more). And, it concerns me in terms of the challenges it will create as far as getting new college students to engage meaningfully with the course material, with their professors, and with each other. (My experience teaching upper division students online is that even keeping them engaged is a challenge.)

There is a piece of me that loves problem-solving enough that I have been thinking through topics and readings and assignments that might efficiently achieve the pedagogical goals in question. There are people I respect, people I like, who believe this goal is attainable and consistent with our educational mission.

But, there is another part of me, one whose voice is getting louder, that says this is an exercise in patching a boat that cannot, cannot stay afloat under these conditions. This part of me argues that we need to recognize this radical curricular response for what it really is: a signal that we have passed the point where we can actually deliver a quality college education with the resources we will be given.

If that’s what it is, can it be ethical to proceed as if we can somehow deliver something close enough to a quality college education? Should we not, instead, call it as we see it and identify the resources we need to do the job we’re supposed to do?

Obviously, asking for appropriate resources does not guarantee that we will get them. It may result in our doing the job right but for fewer students. Conceivably, it might also result in the administrators finding ways to clear out faculty who say the job cannot be done with less (by eliminating our departments, for example, or by ramping up class sizes and cutting salaries to the point that the job becomes intolerable) until the ones who remain are the ones willing to play ball.

I have tended to view adaptability as a good thing, but I have long been suspicious of the assumption that we should regard the environment to which we might adapt as an immovable object — especially when that environment is made up of people making policy decisions. I think I’m ready to find out whether university system administrations can adapt when faculty take a stand for quality education.

In which the professor expresses her frustration with the perennial bashing of her occupation.

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I am generally a patient person, sometimes more patient than I should be. I am also usually optimistic about people’s potential to learn and grow, which is probably a good thing since I am in the business of educating adults and since a good bit of my job also involves being on committees.

But darned if I’m not starting to believe that there are some issues that are black holes of dialogic suck, around which people are absolutely committed to killing the potential for learning and growth where it stands, and where any speck of patience is likely to be rewarded with a punch to the gut.

I refer you to this steaming pile of fail that posits that college professors do not work hard enough.

Others, including Zen, and DrugMonkey, and Crooked Timber, and Echidne, and Lawyers, Guns and Money, have gone into some of the dimensions along which the author’s model of what’s happening in non-R1 colleges and universities (and what, therefore, should be done) veers widely from reality.

And there’s part of me prepared to jump in to lay out what kind of time it takes to teach college students well — the time that is invisible because it happens out of the classroom, when we’re prepping classes, and updating classes, and designing assignments, and refining assignments, and grading assignments in ways that actually provide students with useful feedback that helps them figure out what they can do better on the next round of assignments for twice as many students as the same number of classes had not ten years ago, and seeing students in office hours, and answering their emails, and providing websites with announcements pages and periodic email blasts to one’s classes to keep them on track — and these are just the demands on time and effort of teaching, not even starting in to what research and “service” activities or various sorts pile on.

But I’m not going to lay out all these details because the people who are reading David C. Levy’s op-ed and nodding approvingly just don’t care.

They will simply deny that my workload could be what it actually is.

Or, they will insist that I’m somehow exceptional and that everyone else in a tenured position in a teaching-focused state university is doing much, much less (and that those slackers at community colleges are doing less still).

But I’m pretty sure the ugly truth is that these people believe that my students, and the community college students, do not deserve quality education at a reasonable price.

And, I’m pretty sure they believe that professors at teaching-focused state universities and at community colleges (not to mention public school teachers, too) do not deserve to make a middle-class wage. Never mind that we sometimes work so many hours that it’s hard to find time to spend it (for example, to get to the grocery store to buy food for our kids, or OTC medicine for ourselves so we can drag our lazy, sniffly asses in to class to keep teaching).

It matters not a whit to these people how many years we have devoted to our education and training. A Ph.D. program (or two) is obviously just a multi-year exercise in sloth.

Verily, to these people I and my entire sector of the workforce are a problem to be solved. We are doing something of which they do not approve, and even if we were giving it away for free and living on alms, they would hate us.

I can’t argue with committed ignorance of that magnitude. I cannot counter such thoroughgoing selfishness.

So this time, I won’t even try. Instead, I’m going to fix myself a drink, make dinner for my family, and brace myself for as many more hours of work as I can manage before my eyelids refuse to stay open.

A hole inside where my optimism used to be.

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I have discovered that whatever patience I may have once had for students who think it’s a reasonable strategy to try to deceive their way through “meeting” requirements in an ethics course has completely eroded. There’s not a bit of it left, just a gaping hole where it used to be.

What’s more, I think I came to the mistaken impression that I still had some patience in reserve largely due to my lack of inner shout-y-ness* about these students.

It turns out the inner shout-y-ness is gone because the part of me that regulates it has concluded that it’s wasted energy. I cannot save adults who have decided to cheat at ethics for a grade. This is not to say I believe they cannot change — just that I cannot change them. At least, not with the tools at my disposal.**

This realization leaves me feeling kind of sad.

Also, I think it has changed my strategy with regards to setting explicit expectations (for example, specifying that students are only allowed to use class readings and notes, discussions with classmates, and their own wits on certain assignments, and that using any other materials for these assignments is forbidden), and then enforcing them with no wiggle-room. At this point, if a student specifies (in writing) that he or she understands the rules and agrees to follow them else fail the course and face administrative sanctions, I am going to treat that as an enforceable contract.

Because honestly, with a critical mass of students who do seem willing to conduct themselves ethically in an ethics class, it’s probably better for everyone if I can remove the few who are not.

I only wish removing the bad actors didn’t leave me feeling dead inside.

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*Shout-y-ness is so a word.

**This is not an oblique request for a torture chamber. That’s not really my scene.

Some things I think are elitist.

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Given that some presidential hopefuls think it’s elitist for President Obama to support universal access to higher education, and given that I work in higher education, I figured this might be a good time for me to tell you about some things I think are elitist.

It’s elitist to decide “college isn’t for everyone” — not that people who choose not to go to college don’t deserve guff for that (I agree, they don’t), but that the people you’ve decided are needed to do the manual labor in your society shouldn’t go to college, because really, what would be the point?

Perhaps the point is that some of the people who attend to your manual labor needs want to go to college. Maybe they would find immersing themselves in higher education for a while enjoyable, something that feeds their needs as human beings. Just because higher education is not a requirement for workers in a particular kind of job does not mean that it would be “wasted” on those workers. Making the blanket assumption that it would be wasted on them is elitist.

It’s also elitist to decide that, even if it’s not strictly necessary for a career path, college is a fine way for people of means to spend their time and money, while deciding in the same breath that it’s an extravagance for people without lots of disposable income to partake of it. This attitude casts higher education as a commodity that only the wealthy deserve. It’s the same attitude that scolds college students for accumulating lots of student debt studying “useless” subjects with which they will not be able to secure big salaries upon graduation and swiftly pay off their student loans. It’s the same attitude that motivates tax payers to lean on lawmakers in their states to get rid of “frivolous” subjects in state university curricula (usually humanities, but pure sciences — and really, much of what isn’t business or engineering — regularly make these lists of curricular frivolity), the better to turn publicly supported higher education into no-frills trade schools.

Indeed, I don’t know how it isn’t elitist to decide for loads of other people you don’t even know (let alone for people you do know) what it’s worth their time to study. I have no problem if you decide that you don’t want to explore Latin American philosophy, or German literature, or interior design, or forensic chemistry, but once you tell someone else that she shouldn’t? You’re deciding that you know what’s best for her with no clear basis for this judgment beyond your commitment that people like her don’t need to study [X] (and thus shouldn’t).

And the cherry on top of the elitist sundae is for anyone — professors, politicians, parents, whoever — to decide that it’s appropriate to remake someone else in your image. No other human being, child or grown-up, is a lump of Play-Doh whose role is to take your impression. Treating others primarily as fodder for your attempts at self-replication is deeply disrespectful and elitist in that it singles out certain people as appropriate impression-makers and everyone else as an appropriate impression-taker.

My job as a liberal arts college professor is to give my students the tools to set their own paths in life (to the extent one can in a world in which we share space and other resources with other people, and have to pay rent, and such). I’m not going to tell them who to be. I don’t want to tell them who to be. I want to help them find the space, and to have the freedom, to figure out who they want to be, and then to set about being that person. And, I believe that all of my students (and all of the humans who are not my students) are entitled to this without regard to socioeconomic class.

If that’s what’s passing for “elitist” these days, then I’m going to need a new dictionary to keep up.

On being asked a question to which I did not have a ready answer.

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After my “Ethics in Science” class today, one of my students asked me a question:

“What is philosophy?”

My immediate response was, “That’s a good question!”

I didn’t have a course catalogue handy from which to crib a pithy description, nor my department website (although it turns out that describes instrumental reasons one might want to study philosophy rather than pinning down what exactly it is that you’d be studying).

I could have gone the Potter Stewart “I know it when I see it” route, but I have too many memories of people doing this in my graduate department — and in a way so narrow that is seemed often to put everything that was not logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, or old school philosophy of science on the “That doesn’t look like philosophy to me!” side of the line.

What I ended up saying is that philosophy tends to take things we take for granted — justice, right and wrong, friendship, time and space, knowledge, science, beauty, what have you — and interrogate what we think we know about them.

Do we have a coherent concept of (say) cause and effect? Do we have a consistent view? Is it a view that corresponds to actual stuff in the world, or just to the structures of the human mind organizing the information we can get about the stuff in the world? Do we need that concept to do other stuff we care about? Would we be better off without such a concept (and if so, how)?

What comes out of these efforts at interrogation varies. Sometimes we come away with a better understanding of the concept or practice about which we’ve been asking questions. Sometimes we come away with a lot of unanswered questions (some of which may even leave us without good strategies for trying to nail down answers). Sometimes we piss people off, upset the social order, and get handed the cup o’ hemlock.

Maybe this means that philosophy is less a unified subject matter than a set of habits of mind, “question[ing] everything … except your intelligence,” as the Philosophy Talk guys describe it in their tagline. Or maybe it means I need to be sure I have a concise answer at the ready the next time this question comes up … except that I had a real Suzanne Farrell moment* thinking about the question: I didn’t know the answer to the question, but I love that my student made me think about it again.

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* Let the record reflect that this was a Suzanne Farrell moment that did not involve an affair with the parent of one of my students.

Things to do instead of grading that first stack of student papers.

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  1. Staple any papers held together by paperclips, folded corners, or sheer force of will.
  2. Print out papers turned in by email, stapling if necessary.
  3. Alphabetize papers by students’ surname.
  4. Divide papers into sets of ten and paperclip together.
  5. Create a grading rubric.
  6. Create a spreadsheet in which to record the grades.
  7. Find a supply of appropriately colored grading pens.
  8. Try to locate your drawing board.
  9. Double-check that the state and county correctional facilities will not, in fact, correct papers, not even those from state university courses.
  10. Leave papers, grading pens, and rubric on kitchen table overnight to see if elves will come to grade the papers.
  11. Write a blog post about ways to put off actually getting started on grading those papers.

GRE scores and other tools to evaluate people for lab positions.

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In the last 24 hours there has been an interesting conversation on the Twitters (with contributions from @drugmonkeyblog, @CackleofRad, @mbeisen, @Namnezia, @dr_leigh, @doc_becca, @GertyZ, @superkash, @chemjobber, @DoctorZen, and a bunch of other folks) on the value of standardized tests (like the GRE) in evaluating candidates for a lab position.

The central question at issue seems to be whether GRE scores are meaningful or meaningless in identifying some quality in the candidate that is essential for (or maybe reliably predictive of) success in the environment of an academic lab. And, it’s worth noting that the conversation has not been framed in terms of using GRE scores as the only piece of evidence one has about applicants. Rather, it’s been about the reliability of GRE scores as a predictor compared to college transcripts, letters of recommendation, personal essays, and the like.

I have thoughts about this issue, thoughts which are informed by:

  • my teaching experiences
  • my own experiences with the SAT and the GRE (I aced them)
  • my own experiences doing research in four different lab settings (three of them while I was an undergraduate)
  • my experiences teaching test preparation courses (for SAT I, SAT II, and MCAT)
  • my experiences as the graduate student representative on a graduate admissions committee (albeit not for a science department)
  • my experiences on hiring committees (where GRE scores weren’t an issue but things like letters of recommendation, grades, and personal statements were)
  • broader ongoing conversations with colleagues about the challenges of finding reliable proxies with which to assess the success of our educational efforts.

What I have observed from these:

  1. There are extremely smart, capable people with severe test-anxiety. I’m talking puking-at-the-very-thought-of-sitting-fot-the-test anxiety. The people I’ve known with this manifest it most strongly when faced with standardized tests; generally they’ve found ways to deal with the other kinds of exams that are part of their schooling. I doubt that GRE scores would be reliable indicators of the fitness of such people for a position in an academic lab, unless that position involved taking standardized tests on a regular basis.
  2. My own success on standardized tests is mostly a measure of how well I understood the structure of those standardized tests. This is a lesson that was reinforced by my experience teaching others how to do better on standardized tests. I did not make my test prep students smarter about much of anything except strategies for taking the standardized tests. (In a few instances, my work with them may have helped them identify conceptual issues or problem solving skills that they needed to sharpen before test day, but again, I take it the “help” they got was primarily a matter of knowing what material and skills the test was going to assess.) Is understanding the structure of the GRE, or developing a good strategy for taking it, a crucial component of success in an academic lab? Probably not. Is it a reliable proxy for something that is? Maybe, but it would be nice to see an explanation of what that is rather than just putting our faith in the test to tell us about something that matters.
  3. Plenty of people with awesome test scores are hopeless in the lab. Plenty of people with non-awesome test scores are really successful in the lab. What’s the level of correlation? I don’t know, and you probably don’t either. Maybe someone should do an empirical study so we know.
  4. One place that standardized tests seem to be of use (or so I’ve heard repeatedly over the years from lots of admissions committee folks) is in “calibrating” grades, especially of schools with which one might have less familiarity. What does an A at Podunk U. mean compared to an A at Well-Known Tech? Presumably the GRE scores of the candidates give us some information (so, if they’re really low from the Podunk U. student, maybe Podunk U.’s As aren’t requiring the same level of mastery as Well-Known Tech’s As). But, there’s always the possibility that Well-Known Tech has a better developed organization from the point of view of getting its students into grad school, and that part of this might include in-house test prep. Also, what if the lone Podunk U. student who is applying to your program has test-anxiety?
  5. GRE scores are often thought of as an objective counterbalance to letters of recommendation because, as the common wisdom has it, letter writers lie. Or maybe they just put the best possible spin on the candidate’s talents. Or maybe they’re actually just overestimating the candidate’s potential. Or maybe they don’t write good enough letters for the students who are not like them in certain relevant respects (including scientific style, socioeconomic background, gender, race, sexuality, etc.). Surely, in many cases there is something like a positive bias in letters of recommendation (and some faculty will advise students to ask someone else for a letter if they themselves are unable to write a glowing recommendation). And, there are instances in which a letter writer will undervalue the talents and potential of students (although one hopes that the other letter writers in such cases will compensate). Still, the letters at least present a space in which actual concrete examples of the student’s awesomeness (or shortcomings) can be discussed. Some of these examples may touch on situations or challenges directly relevant to what the applicants may have to face in the academic lab in which they are seeking a position. Plus, at least in fields that are not totally enormous, there is (or could be) a professional cost to lying to a colleague in the profession, even in a letter of recommendation for a student.
  6. If I had to rely on just one proxy, it would be the applicant’s personal statement. Again, it strikes me that this is an instrument that creates a space where an applicant can describe past experiences and current interests, challenges overcome and lessons learned from them that might be applied to future challenges. A personal statement can give you a glimpse into what the applicant cares about and why. It can also give you a sense of whether the applicant can think and communicate clearly. However, this is probably another area where someone should do some empirical work to see what kind of correlation there actually is between the quality of the personal statement and the success of the applicant in the position for which the personal statement was part of the application package.
  7. Every single proxy we might look at to select among applicants can fail. It’s not clear to me that it could be otherwise, especially given that we’re using the proxies to try to predict future success, which you can’t do with perfect accuracy unless you have a machine for seeing into the future (and even then …).
  8. It strikes me that active thinking-on-your-feet interview questions might provide more relevant information. It used to be that you couldn’t really use these for things like grad school admission because you couldn’t afford to fly all your applicants out to campus. (By the time you saw prospective grad students, they were admits trying to choose between the programs that had accepted them.) But maybe now with tools like Skype those looking to make sensible choices among applicants should do some video interviewing?
  9. Then again, if video interview questions for lab positions become a thing, someone will probably set up a video interview preparation company.

Yeah, I’d say to take GRE scores with a grain of salt. But, I think that’s the right attitude to take to all the bits of evidence an applicant presents. Honestly, my attitude toward test scores probably has a lot to do with my knowledge about how easy it can be to do well on them (at least compared to the other pieces of one’s application package). It probably also has to do with at least a few gatekeepers who treated GRE scores as definitely more reliable simply because they were quantitative, rather than qualitative.

If you have an applicant-screening item that has never led you astray, please share it in the comments.