In which too much grading plus Mel Brooks leads me to ponder the nature of crowd reactions at scientific presentations.

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Fair warning: I have been grading for the last several days, and grading makes me silly. This post may give you a sense of just how silly.

Last night, during a brief break in grading, I caught the last half of Young Frankenstein on TV.

Dr. Frankenstein’s presentation of the Creature to the public, under the auspices of the Transylvania Neurological Society, is one of my favorite parts of the movie, not least because Dr. Frankenstein is so very quotable. “Please! Remain in your seats, I beg you! We are not children here, we are scientists!” and “For safety’s sake, don’t humiliate him!” are just two exhortations that I can imagine getting some good use in scientific presentations.

Also, when Dr. Frankenstein’s presentation of the Creature goes off the rails, members of the audience start pelting both scientist and monster with what look to be cabbages.

Which led me to notice that there are not too many scientific presentations nowadays at which audience members throw fruit or vegetables at the presenters.

Possibly this is a reflection of the current direction of scientific work — focused on findings so unsurprising (at least in a global sense) as to be unlikely to elicit strong reactions from those hearing them. Or, maybe scientists are channeling their disbelief and outrage to private channels, say, by fuming about presentations in lab meetings when they’ve returned from the conferences at which they’re presented, or saving the worst of their aggressive outburst for when they are the third reviewer.

On the other hand, maybe it reflects the limited supply of fruits and vegetables available at most venues for scientific presentations.

Your better complementary continental breakfast spreads can be counted on for apples, bananas, and oranges, but not so much for cabbages or overripe tomatoes. And, some conference venues (like the San Diego Convention Center) don’t really have free food so much as places to buy snacks — snacks which tend to be pretzels or muffins or cookies, items not traditionally hurled to register one’s disagreement with a research presentation.

Are warm pretzels too delicious an item to hurl at one’s fellow scientist to register one’s disbelief? Do muffins not fly well enough, nor generate sufficient force at impact? Or is it primarily a matter of the cost of these items that makes them unappealing as instruments of peer review?

Maybe this calls out for an economic analysis?

In the event that you had a cabbage handy, given the relative scarcity of cabbages at scientific meetings, would you tend to keep it rather than throwing it just in case the next presentation turned out to be even worse? And wouldn’t there be something like an opportunity cost associated with holding onto the cabbage, given how much room it would take up in the conference tote bag?

Really, someone should investigate this. But not me, because I still have grading to do.

Things I cannot do.

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To my students, during finals week,

I regret to inform you that I cannot

  • Tell you within an hour or two of your handing me your final exam what your grade for the course will be (as I need to grade about 130 of these exams and you will note that not all of the items were multiple choice),
  • Grade your answers on the basis of what you meant rather than what you wrote (especially on the items that were multiple choice),
  • Tell you, as you’re handing me your final exam, whether the exam grades will be curved, or if so, what the curve will look like (see above about the number of exams to be graded — and then entered into a spreadsheet to run the stats),
  • Reassure you that your participation will contribute positively to your final grade if you have attended class meetings so seldom that your face rings no bells for me at all,
  • Create an extra-credit assignment just for you to counteract the negative effect of your having blown off all the graded assignments besides the midterm and final exams (since it would be unfair to do so without offering your classmates the same opportunity, and since I’m already working on the very edge of what is possible just to grade the non-extra coursework to submit grades on time).

This whole exam thing, and the larger grading thing, is supposed to be about evaluating what you have learned during the semester.

I have done my best to make the material accessible and maybe even interesting. I fully recognize that it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. And, having been a student myself for a lot of years, I understand that life sometimes unfolds in ways that make it hard to focus on school, to come to class meetings, and to get the assigned work turned in.

Among other things, college can teach us that we’re not always going to get straight A’s (or, necessarily, passing grades) during semesters we can’t get it together to do the school work.

If you earn a low grade, that doesn’t make you a bad person.

And, if I give you the grade you’ve earned, that just means I’m doing my job. I don’t always enjoy it, but that’s how it goes.

When the mainstream is extreme: research on sexism in lads’ mags.

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You may have seen the discussion various places (like here) about the recent research that indicates the descriptions of women given by convicted sex offenders and lads’ mags are well nigh indistinguishable. The research paper went up today on the British Journal of Psychology website. But, thanks to one of the authors of the paper (Dr. Peter Hegarty, with whom I shared a class in grad school), I got my hands on a pre-print, which I discuss in this post.

Horvath, M.A.H., Hegarty, P., Tyler, S. & Mansfield, S., ” ‘Lights on at the end of the party’: Are lads’ mags mainstreaming dangerous sexism?” British Journal of Psychology. DOI:10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02086.x

The general question prompting the study is what kind of influence is exerted by magazine contents on how young people perceive their social reality. In particular, how might magazines influence how young people approach sex?

The authors cite previous studies about the influences of exposure to pornography and other sexualized media on the attitudes young men have about women, but note that the effects of “lads’ mags” (i.e., magazines aimed at young male readers like FHM, Maxim, and Stuff) had not been studied.

And, while “if taken at face value, lads’ mags appear likely to teach young men sexist attitudes and practices,” the authors note that editors’ of these magazines argue against taking them at face value.

For example, Martin Daubney, the former editor of popular UK lads’ mag Loaded dismissed the possibility that magazines do or should educate young people about sex. Sexist content in lads’ mags is often characterized as merely ‘ironic’ (Benwell, 2003; McKay, Mikosza, & Hutchins, 2005) allowing editors to negate the possibility that their magazines influence readers, and to counter-argue that their critics have simply missed the intended joke (Jackson, Stevenson, & Brooks, 2001).

A reasonable question here is whether the readers on the lads’ mags are taking their contents as ironic — whether they are in on the joke that the critics are missing. However, even if they understand the articles and advice as humorous rather than serious, Horvath et al. mention that there may still be effects on the reader that are worth exploring:

Sexist humour may be interpreted as harmless irony by some men and not by others. For example, men who are more sexist find sexist jokes funnier (Eyssel & Bohner, 2007) and disparaging humour about women creates a context in which the expression of sexism becomes the social norm (Ford & Ferguson, 2004; Romero-S´anchez, Dur´an, Carretero-Dios, Megias, & Moya, 2010). For these reasons, editors’ claims about the social consequences of the content of lads’ mags ought not themselves to be taken at face value.

The overarching question posed by this research, then, was “whether lads’ mags may affect readers’ norms, making extreme forms of sexism appear more acceptable to them.”

The press coverage in advance of the publication of the paper focused on one piece of the study methodology — the comparison of statements about women taken from lads’ mags with statements about women taken from interviews with convicted rapists. Potentially, this detail might suggest that the researchers were studying whether lads’ mags cause readers to become rapists, or whether the lads’ magazines are the primary source of attitudes young men have about women or sex. Neither of these is an accurate description of the hypothesis the Horvath et al. research was testing.

Why the research drew on the statements from the rapists is that these might be taken as a plausible extreme as far as views men articulate about women. If they really do represent an extreme, then they should exist in a separate category from views lads’ mags articulate about women — or, perhaps, in instances where lads’ mags present views that on their face resemble statements made by rapists, the lads’ mags might present them in a way that clearly signals that they are intended ironically rather than literally.

Of course, Horvath et al. mention, there is research that suggests rapists have learned to make their own views seem less extreme:

For example, rapists learn a culturally derived vocabulary of motive that diminishes their responsibility, and normalizes their behaviour. Rapists blame women for their own victimization by describing women as seductresses, by claiming that ‘no’ means ‘yes’, by arguing that most women eventually ‘relax and enjoy it’ and by insisting that nice girls do not get raped (Scully & Marolla, 1984). As men who have mastered this vocabulary of diminished responsibility, convicted rapists have much to tell us about how sexual violence becomes possible and how it gets normalized (Scully, 1990). In other words, it appears that lads’ mags and rapists might share the commonality of using techniques to neutralize derogatory sexism.

A key difference, though, is that it’s less socially acceptable to look to a convicted rapist for advice about women and sexuality than to look to a lads’ mag for such advice. So, if lads’ mags actually were to have the effect of normalizing the kinds of views of women that rapists express — of making them seem like part of reasonable dating advice to young men — that might be useful to know. And, indeed, that’s what Horvath et al. set out to discover.

What exactly is at stake in normalizing a particular set of views is itself a contentious issue, so in our discussion of this research it’s worth acknowledging some logical possibilities: Possibly having a particular set of attitudes towards women — even sexist attitudes towards women — is completely independent from acting on those attitudes, for example by committing rape. Possibly having a particular set of sexist attitudes towards women might not create any harms for the women with whom one shares a society. Possibly expressing a particular set of sexist attitudes towards women might not create any harms for the women with whom one shares a society.

I am not a psychologist, but I reckon there is a body of research that explores the connections between attitudes, actions, and downstream harms of various sorts. Moreover, I reckon that Horvath et al. are fairly well versed in what that body of research has shown. However, it is important to be clear that they are not making claims here that men in their study who identify strongly with the sexist attitudes voiced by convicted rapists (or by lads’ mags) will themselves commit rapes, nor even act on that identification in any particular way. What exactly we can expect downstream from the normalization of a particular set of attitudes about women, in other words, is a question not directly addressed by this research.

Let’s look at the two connected studies in the reported research to see what questions this paper does address.

Study 1: Does attributing derogatory sexist comments to lads’ mags make it easier for young men to identify with them?

The researchers hypothesized that the men who were the subjects of this study would identify more strongly with quotes that were labeled as coming from lads’ mags than with quotes that were labeled as coming from interviews with convicted rapists. They also hypothesized that more sexist men would identify more strongly with the quotes from both sources than would less sexist men.

The researchers administered questionnaires to a sample of 92 men (between 18 and 46 years of age, with average age just under 23 years old) recruited at a university in the UK. The study participants got to complete the questionnaire in private and submit it to a locked box before debriefing. The researcher with whom they met before filling out the questionnaire was female; one wonders what kind of effect, if any, this had on how subjects completed the questionnaires.

All the questionnaires had some shared sections: the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI, Glick & Fiske, 1996), which is a measure of both “hostile” and “benevolent” sexist beliefs about women, and the Acceptance of Modern Myths about Sexual Aggression Scale (AMMSA, Gerger, Kley, Bohner, & Siebler, 2007). For both of these, subjects indicated agreement or disagreement with items on a Likert scale. Horvath et al. also included a four-item measure of the Perceived Legitimacy of Lads’ Mags (designed specifically for this study), which had participants indicate agreement (on a scale of 0 to 5) with the following items:

Lads’ mags are a positive way of learning about sexual relationships.
Reading lads’ mags is something every young male should do.
Lads’ mags have provided me with accurate and informative information about the opposite sex.
Lads’ mags educate young men accurately on society’s gender roles.

However, the first section of the questionnaire came in one of three different versions. Each of these versions included eight short quotes from editorials and articles from four lads’ mags with high circulations in the UK and eight short quotes from verbatim transcripts of interviews with convicted rapists. For these sixteen quotes, subjects were asked to indicate (on a scale of 1 to 7) how much they identified with the quote (from do not identify at all to identify strongly). In one version of the questionnaire, the sources of each of the quotes were correctly attributed (i.e., quotes from lads’ mags were labeled as being from lads’ mags, quotes from convicted rapists were labeled as being from convicted rapists). In the second version of the questionnaire, the attributions were switched (i.e., quotes from lads’ mags were labeled as being from convicted rapists, quotes from convicted rapists were labeled as being from lads’ mags). In the third version of the questionnaire, the quotes were presented on their own with no attribution of their sources.

In case you’re curious, here’s the table from the paper with the quotes:

Table 1. Quotes sourced from lads’ mags and from convicted rapists used as stimuli in Studies 1 and 2

Quotes sourced from convicted rapists
1 There’s a certain way you can tell that a girl wants to have sex . . . The way they dress, they flaunt themselves.
2 Some girls walk around in short-shorts . . . showing their body off . . . It just starts a man thinking that if he gets something like that, what can he do with it? . . .
3 What burns me up sometimes about girls is dick-teasers. They lead a man on and then shut him off right there.
4 You know girls in general are all right. But some of them are bitches . . . The bitches are the type that . . . need to have it stuffed to them hard and heavy.
5 You’ll find most girls will be reluctant about going to bed with somebody or crawling in the back seat of a car . . . But you can usually seduce them, and they’ll do it willingly.
6 Girls ask for it by wearing these mini-skirts and hotpants . . . they’re just displaying their body . . . Whether they realise it or not they’re saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got a beautiful body, and it’s yours if you want it.
7 Some women are domineering, but I think it’s more or less the man who should put his foot down. The man is supposed to be the man. If he acts the man, the woman won’t be domineering
8 I think if a law is passed, there should be a dress code . . . When girls dress in those short skirts and things like that, they’re just asking for it.

Quotes sourced from lads’ mags.
1 A girl may like anal sex because it makes her feel incredibly naughty and she likes feeling like a dirty slut. If this is the case, you can try all sorts of humiliating acts to help live out her filthy fantasy.
2 Mascara running down the cheeks means they’ve just been crying, and it was probably your fault . . . but you can cheer up the miserable beauty with a bit of the old in and out.
3 Filthy talk can be such a turn on for a girl . . . no one wants to be shagged by a mouse . . . A few compliments won’t do any harm either . . . ‘I bet you want it from behind you dirty whore’ . . .
4 Escorts . . . they know exactly how to turn a man on. I’ve given up on girlfriends. They don’t know how to satisfy me, but escorts do.
5 There’s nothing quite like a woman standing in the dock accused of murder in a sex game gone wrong . . . The possibility of murder does bring a certain frisson to the bedroom.
6 You do not want to be caught red-handed . . . go and smash her on a park bench. That used to be my trick.
7 Girls love being tied up . . . it gives them the chance to be the helpless victim.
8 I think girls are like plasticine, if you warm them up you can do anything you want with them.

The researchers found that there was a high correlation between identifying with the quotes (from both kinds of sources) and scoring high on the ASI (a measure of sexism), AMMSA (a measure of acceptance of sexual aggression myths), and the Perceived Legitimacy of Lads’ Mags. The overall level of identification was not especially high (averaging just under 3 on a scale of 1 to 7), and how strongly the subjects identified with the quotes overall was not significantly different in the three versions of the questionnaire (with correct attribution, false attribution, or no attribution of the sources of the quotes).

As predicted, no matter what the actual source of quotes, the men in the study identified with them more strongly when they were labeled as coming from lads’ mags and less strongly when they were labeled as coming from convicted rapists.

Surprisingly, though, the subjects identified significantly more strongly with the quotes taken from interviews with convicted rapists than they did with the quotes from lads’ mags — and this was the case across all three attribution conditions. In other words, the subjects identified more strongly with quotes from rapists than quotes from lads’ mags even when they had correct information about which were which.

So, Study 1 found a correlation between a subject’s measured sexism and that subject’s identification with both kinds of quotes. It also found that labeling quotes from lads’ mags as being from lads’ mags increased the level of reported identification with them, while labeling them as being from convicted rapists decreased the level of reported identification. Mislabeling the quotes from rapists as being from lads’ mags significantly increased subjects’ level of reported identification with them, but the subjects identified more strongly with the quotes from rapists when their source was misattributed, unattributed, or correctly attributed. The researchers find these results

consistent with the possibility that lads’ mags might normalize hostile sexism, because sexism appears more acceptable to young men when lads’ mags appear to be its source. Unexpectedly, the participants also identified more with the rapists’ quotes than the lads’ mags quotes. Jointly these findings suggest the possibility that the legitimation strategies that rapists deploy when they talk about women are more familiar to these young men than we had anticipated.

Horvath et al. point out one possibility for the unexpectedly higher identification with the rapists’ quotes, namely that the sample of quotes from the lads’ mags were more extreme than those taken from the interviews with the convicted rapists. This might make a certain sort of sense: magazines are competing for eyeballs and being extreme might help with that, while rapists may have an investment in justifying their actions and not coming across as monsters. Still, at the very least this finding undermines the assumption that the view of women presented by lads’ mags is less extreme than that voiced by rapists.

Study 2: Can young men and women reliably distinguish the source of descriptions of women from lads’ mags and from convicted rapists?

The second study used the same 16 short quotes that appeared on the questionnaires in Study 1, eight from lads’ mags and eight from interviews with convicted rapists. Here, each of the quotes appeared on its own laminated card with no information about its source.

The subjects (20 men and 20 women between the ages of 19 and 30, with an average age just above 23) were presented with three sorting tasks using the 16 cards. In the first, they were asked to arrange the 16 quotes in order from most degrading towards women to least degrading towards women. In the second, the task was to sort the cards into two stacks, one containing quotes the subject considered degrading towards women and the other the subjects considered not degrading towards women. For the third sorting task, the subjects were told that some of the quotes came from lads’ mags and that some came from interviews with convicted rapists, and they were asked to guess which quotes came from which sources. For this third task, the researchers asked the subjects to explain what it was about the quotes that made them think they came from the source they guessed.

In addition to these sorting tasks, each of the subjects in Study 2 completed the Perceived Legitimacy of Lads’ Mags items.

The results of the first sorting task (ranking the quotes in a continuum of how degrading subjects found them to women) were that on average, the quotes from the lads’ mags were ranked as more degrading than those from the convicted rapists.

In the second sorting task, the subjects ranked an average of 11.65 of the 16 quotes as derogatory (and an average of 4.35 of them as not derogatory).

And, in the task which asked the subjects to guess whether each quote came from a lads’ mag or from an interview with a convicted rapist, on average the subjects identified slightly more of the quotes to rapist than to lads’ mags, and the subjects had a hard time correctly identifying the sources of the quotes. About 56% of the time they correctly guessed a quote’s source as a lads’ mag (which meant they incorrectly guessed it was from a rapist about 44% of the time), and they correctly guessed the source of the quotes from rapists only about 55% of the time. In other words, they distinguished the sources of the quotes at a rate only slightly better than chance.

These results, by the way, showed no correlation with attitudes measured by the Perceived Legitimacy of Lads’ Mags items.

The paper includes an interesting discussion of how subjects explained their sorting of the quotes into the ones they thought were from rapists and the ones they thought were from lads’ mags:

Many participants drew upon the idea that lads’ mags printed views that fell within the range of what men might ‘normally’ say while those attributed to rapists were too offensive, or too violent to fall within this category. Participants also drew on the ideas that lads’ mags give advice to young men, and are humorous. Others drew upon the ideas that rapists use ‘techniques of neutralization’ to excuse their actions (Gilbert & Webster, 1982), and that rapists lack understanding of how to interpret sexual refusal (Frith, 2009). … Finally, we aimed to see if participants expressed evaluations of the quotes themselves. While most participants described the quotes negatively or neutrally, explicit agreement with victim-blaming ideas was evident in a few instances (N = 5, e.g., ‘ . . . some girls do lead men on. . . the way they dress all the time, in really short skirts . . . and really really low tops, so what do they expect? They want men to look at them though don’t they?’ Female Participant).

Horvath et al. note that the nature of the sorting tasks the subjects were asked to complete in Study 2 may well have affected how sensitive those subjects were to instances of sexism in the quotes.

The upshot of Study 2 seems to be that despite the subjects’ descriptions of lads’ mags as “normal, funny, and advice giving, but not too violent or offensive”, they could not reliably distinguish quotes from lads’ mags from those from convicted rapists, and moreover the subjects ranked the quotes that were actually from lads’ mags as more derogatory. Their evaluation of the quotes, in other words, seemed to undermine their theory of lads’ mags as closer to the cultural mainstream and of the views of rapists as an extreme fringe.

Overall, what can we conclude from the results of these two studies? The researchers note that the views of women’s sexuality articulated by both convicted rapists and lads’ mags are similar enough that subjects couldn’t reliably discern their source, and that these views were ranked as more derogatory than not. They also note that when a quote was identified as from a lads’ mag (no matter what its actual source), subjects were more likely to say that they identified with the view it expressed than if the same quote was identified as coming from a rapist. This in itself is not especially surprising; who wants to sound like a rapist? However, it is a finding that seems at odds with the subjects’ own view that “a boundary can be detected between the overlapping discourse of lads’ mags and convicted rapists, such that the former is ‘normal’ and the latter is ‘extreme’.”

Here, the researchers double back to the disavowals made by editors of lads’ mags, that their contents are ironic and that their readers are in on the joke. They write:

While magazine editors deny their publications are a source of social influence, our studies suggest that the ‘mainstream’ status of such magazines allows them to legitimize views about women that young men might otherwise consider unacceptable. In other words, the status of lads’ mags as legitimate mainstream publications may lend their contents performative force (Butler, 1997) to bring about change in the range of sexist opinions with which young men will identify. People are sometimes threatened when their views overlap with those of groups they dislike (Pool, Wood, & Leck, 1998). Here, young people struggled to correctly attribute the sources of the quotes (Study 2) and young men identified more with the quotes when they were attributed to lads’ mags (Study 1). Jointly, these two findings suggest that sexist talk about women in lads’ mags may be something more than ineffectual harmless ironic fun; these magazines’ very status as ‘mainstream’ publications may afford them the power to normalize very egregious sexist beliefs about women.

The research here suggests that views with which a young man might not identify just on the basis of their content could secure strengthened identification by virtue of appearing in a lads’ mag. These magazines, in other words, confer a certain amount of cultural credibility on the views they present. This effect seems even more likely among young people looking to such magazines to educate them about sex, relationships, and appropriate gender roles. And, it seems possible that the presentation of views that are extreme en face in a context that is presumed by its consumers to be mainstream could shift perceptions of what kinds of attitudes are normal.

Who exactly is the audience for the lads’ mags? Is it the young men who already have strongly sexist views (as did the subjects in Study 1 who identified most strongly with the quotes extracted from the lads’ mags)? If so, this seems to argue against the editors’ claims that their articles and editorials are intended to be ironic. The people identifying with the views expressed in the quotes are taking them literally.

If the intended audience is instead young men who are not identifying literally with the quotes — and if these young men are looking to lads’ mags for guidance about how to interact with women — then how exactly do the pieces from which these quotes were extracted work? Do the articles and editorials actually shift the readers to a stronger identification with the claims? Since such identification is correlated with higher levels of sexism, achieving this kind of shift would undercut the claim that these magazines are offering harmless fun. Or, are there unmistakeable signals in the lads’ mags that the views they present of women, as literally expressed, are to be rejected?

At the very least, there is nothing in the quotes taken from the lads’ mags in this research that marked them as “ironic” for study participants. This suggests that regardless of authorial intent, it’s possibilite that some significant portion of these magazines’ readerships don’t see them as ironic, either.

In which the faculty member glimpses her future.

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One of the facts that seems sometimes to escape the notice of university faculty (especially early-career faculty) is that a sizable proportion of university administrators used to be regular faculty members. Fortuitously, my early encounters with administrators kept underlining this fact for me.

When I started my appointment at my university, the Associate Dean of my college was a member of the Philosophy Department. He wasn’t teaching any courses for the department then (because Associate Dean-ing was a full-time gig), but he was very much connected to the culture of the department. And, the fact that he ran the weekly meetings of the College Curriculum Committee (on which I was the representative for my department) meant I got to see first-hand how, as an administrator, he helped facilitate something like a culture of the college from the different departmental cultures that informed the committee members as they dealt with matters curricular. Getting those different interests to play well with each other, for the most part, would have been a much harder job for someone without experience living in a department and trying to get the daily work of that department done.

As an aside, I suspect that some readers will react with horror to the idea of a first-year faculty member being assigned committee work, especially on a college level committee, rather than being left to get the teaching assignment and research activities under control. My department has a policy of assigning committee work to all regular faculty, partly because there is a large amount of important committee work to be done (i.e., impacting on the well-being of our students and faculty, and on the resources on which we depend) relative to the number of regular faculty members. And, spreading the committee work around as we do is part of how we get a three-course load (while the university’s standard per semester is four). Practically, serving on this college-level committee in my very first semester on the ground helped me understand the culture beyond my own department — and a lot of the nuts and bolts of getting things done at this particular university — much faster. That was a help. It also helped me make friends in other departments, which often comes in handy.

Anyway, as events unfolded during my first few years here, I was in a position to notice faculty members rising through the ranks of administration. When we got a new university president, my college’s dean became the university’s provost. The faculty member who chaired the chemistry department when I was hired became Associate Vice President of Graduate Studies and Research for the university. Other chemistry professors of my acquaintance (what is it with the chemists) became associate deans in undergraduate studies and student support units. (What is it with the chemists and administration, I wonder?)

One of the things I learned is that it is really, really helpful to have people who understand the challenges of teaching and conducting research, especially in times when resources are scarce, involved in making the plans that will shape how teaching and research go forward. The administrators who have been faculty members are committed to actively involving people who have a stake in the decisions in the decision-making. Sometimes this means the decision-making takes more time and effort, but it also seems to result in policies that actually work. That is a good thing.

A danger, though, in working closely with administrators (something I, for one, might have done less of were they not people to whom I could relate because of their origins in the faculty) is that you start seeing how important the administrative work is in supporting the core missions of teaching and research. More than this, you start imagining strategies that could effectively address the persistent problems you’ve started to notice in achieving some particular goal you care about. You develop insight into how to fix things, and also, if you’ve been blessed to watch effective administrators at work, insight into how to get people with distinct interests to work together effectively to pursue common goals.

At first, you freak the hell out when your dean uses phrases like “untapped administrative potential” to describe you. After a while, you stop freaking out and start making peace with the idea that at some point, you will probably step up and try to do what needs to be done. And, you will do it not because it is your ambition to be an administrator, but instead because you care about your department, your college, your university, your colleagues, your students — because you are part of the community and you want to help it be as good as it can be.

That’s how they get you.

I think I have some time, though. I have a book to finish writing. I have kids’ soccer to coach, something that doesn’t lend itself to the long official business hours administrators seem to work. And, I would need to work out how to dress like a responsible adult rather than a graduate student trying to look like a grown-up.

But my sense is that my future may hold more business hours and more grown-up clothes. And, because this university community and what we do matters to me, I’m okay with that.

A question for the hivemind: delivering something good for you in a way that might be bad for you.

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Despite the dawning of the End Times (at least as far as our semester is concerned), I was able to find time for a chat with a colleague yesterday about a currently amorphous project that is staring to take shape. It’s a project that’s being spearheaded by other interests, but my colleague has been approached to take on what may be a significant role in it, and he’s thinking it over. So, much of our chat had to do with the potential of the project along various trajectories it might take — lots of “what if” since, as mentioned above, it’s pretty amorphous right now.

Anyhow, one of the tentative aims is to improve kids’ skills in and engagement with a particular broad subject area where the general perception is that kids need better skills and engagement. The tool to achieve this would be games that the kids would play on their own time (so it wouldn’t gobble up valuable class time; I guess you need that to get kids ready for the high-stakes standardized tests and stuff). And, the research driving this strategy has, apparently, focused a lot on the neurophysiology of how kids interact with games to identify the features a game ought to have to get kids addicted to it.

For both of us, this seems like a red flag.

So, the question: Do you think it’s a good idea (where “good” equals ethical or some other relevant value; feel free to specify it in your answer) to build kids’ skills and/or competencies by means of a delivery device that is explicitly designed to be addictive? (In case it matters, we’re talking about children younger than 13 years old.)

Does it matter what the actual skills and/or competencies are?

Does it matter whether the designed-to-be-addictive delivery method might itself be more attractive to the kids (and the adults they eventually become) than the various real-world venues in which the application of these skills and/or competencies are taken to be important?

Lay it on me.

The Thanksgiving feast and sleepiness: let’s crowdsource some data!

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A few years ago, we talked about the role turkey consumption might (or might not) play in post-Thanksgiving-feast fatigue. The oft-heard hypothesis is that the tryptophan in turkey gives you the yawns, but there was the suggestion that carbohydrates from starchy and sweet side dishes were an accomplice — and that eating additional protein might counteract the tryptophan’s soporific effects. Also, the amount you eat may be involved in how your body prioritizes consciousness relative to digestion.

It gets complicated pretty fast when we don’t eat standardized lab chow.

Also, in passing, let me note that for all its association with tryptophan, turkey doesn’t even crack the top 50 in this list of tryptophan-rich foods. (Number one: stellar sea lion kidney.)

Bora has a nice discussion of what tryptophan is up to in your body. Myself, I’m interested in working out observable patterns in Thanksgiving dining-and-yawning experience. Once we know what the patterns are, then we know what we need to explain with a biochemical mechanism.

To this ends, let’s conduct some citizen science (and, come Friday, to collect some reports from the field).

Here is a form for data collection (*.doc format).

Ideally, we’d all want to sit down to the same Thanksgiving meal together (having all gotten a good night’s sleep the day before, etc., etc.). Sadly, that’s not going to happen. However, maybe you can rope those with whom you are dining on Thursday into participating.

Depending on the vibe at your Thanksgiving table, you can either ask the diners to keep track of what kinds of foods they eat, or you can assign your guests particular consumption objectives. Then, before dessert, have everyone do a quick assessment of his or her energy level.

With luck, we’ll get data for the following variations:

  • High-tryptophan food (like turkey), high carbohydrate intake. (Prediction: sleepy)
  • High-tryptophan food, low carbohydrate intake. (Prediction: not sleepy)
  • Skip the high-tryptophan food, high carbohydrate intake. (Prediction: sleepy)
  • Skip the high-tryptophan food, low carbohydrate intake. (Prediction: not sleepy)
  • High-tryptophan food, high carbohydrate intake, extra protein. (Prediction: not sleepy)
  • High-tryptophan food, low carbohydrate intake, extra protein. (Prediction: energetic)
  • Skip the high-tryptophan food, high carbohydrate intake, extra protein. (Prediction: not sleepy)
  • Skip the high-tryptophan food, low carbohydrate intake, extra protein. (Prediction: frighteningly energetic)

Of course, if you track participant input a bit more precisely, maybe we’ll stumble upon some other factor that turns out to be important, like vitamin A or sage.

If you use my form, you can return your results to me (as a *.doc or scanned into a PDF) by email: dr – dot – freeride – at – gmail – dot – com. I’ll compile the responses and we’ll see if we can make sense of the data.

See you back here on Friday morning with your results!

Desperately seeking session chairs for Pacific APA.

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Hey you professional philosophers (including graduate students):

I’m on the program committee for the Pacific division of the American Philosophical Association, and we are working hard to finalize our program for the upcoming meeting in Seattle (April 4-7, 2012).

For some reason, there was a larger-than-usual pool of submissions this year, and apparently we were not sufficiently draconian in our refereeing (lesson learned!), because there are still a bunch of sessions where we’re trying to find session chairs.

The primary duty of the chair is to introduce the session’s speakers (briefly) and enforce time limits.

A caveat: you can’t chair if you are already on the program in some other capacity (since there’s a rule that one may only appear on the program once).

I am looking for a chair for a metaphysics/philosophy of science session, one for a philosophy of biology session, and one for a biomedical ethics session. If you are interested and able to chair one of these sessions, please email me ASAP! (dr – dot – freeride – at – gmail – dot – com)

If you are a philosophical type who is already planning to attend the Pacific APA this coming April, is not on the program already, and would be willing to chair some other session, email me your information (name, email address, institutional affiliation) and I’ll pass it on to our program committee chair so we can call on your services as needed.

Thanks!

Some ethical decisions are not that hard: thoughts on Joe Paterno.

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Ethical decision-making involves more than having the right gut-feeling and acting on it. Rather, when done right, it involves moving past your gut-feeling to see who else has a stake in what you do (or don’t do); what consequences, good or bad, might flow from the various courses of action available to you; to whom you have obligations that will be satisfied or ignored by your action; and how the relevant obligations and interests pull you in different directions as you try to make the best decision. Sometimes it’s helpful to think of the competing obligations and interests as vectors, since they come with both directions and magnitudes — which is to say, in some cases where they may be pulling you in opposite directions, it’s still obvious which way you should go because the magnitude of one of the obligations is so much bigger than of the others.

The ethical decision-making strategy I teach my students (drawn from Muriel J. Bebeau, “Developing a Well-Reasoned Response to a Moral Problem in Scientific Research”) is one I find useful in all sorts of real situations (which is pretty much the point of an ethical decision-making strategy). Occasionally, this means applying it to evaluate whether a decision which someone else describes as “really tough” actually is.

For example, on the downfall of Joe Paterno, I encountered comments on the ethical decision he had to make (and on how well or badly he did with that) like this:

If this guy met his “legal obligations” by reporting the report, not something he saw himself even, then why isn’t that enough? He likely would have preferred to do even less. And he’s not the police, he isn’t charged with investigating and finding out the facts.

and this:

We all have to balance competing ethical obligations all the time, let’s at least do each other the courtesy of admitting that it’s difficult.

Is it difficult?

If you would rather not think about a situation where a responsible adult had to figure out what to do when child rape was reported to him, you probably don’t want to read the rest of this post. I don’t blame you. However, if you should find yourself in a relevantly similar position as the responsible adult, whether you want to think of it or not, you’ll be on the hook to do good ethical decision-making of your own.

Let’s have a look at the bare-bones of the JoePa case: A graduate assistant tells the head coach that he has witnessed an emeritus member of the coaching staff in the team’s shower facilities performing a sex act on a 10-year-old. The head coach need to figure out what to do.

Who are the interested parties here?

  • The head coach, who needs to make the decision about what to do.
  • The child who was abused, who has an interest in being protected from future abuse.
  • The graduate assistant, who has an interest in being an effective member of the football program, as well as in not being punished for being a whistleblower.
  • The emeritus member of the coaching staff. He has an interest in maintaining his reputation and relationship with the football program, and in being treated fairly. If he didn’t actually abuse the child, being treated fairly may amount to something different than if he did commit the abuse.
  • Law enforcement agencies have an interest in getting information about criminal acts so they can investigate them, establish the evidence for a prosecution, and stop criminal acts that are ongoing.
  • The football program, the university, the university community, and the larger society. These communities have a bunch of interests, including continuing a successful football program that lots of people enjoy, keep kids in the community safe from abuse, and upholding the values off the institutions and communities.

The head coach is (I hope) thinking through possible courses of action that include taking the matter to the police or taking the matter to the university’s athletic director. He might also be considering what would happen in the case that he does nothing. What are the possible consequences of these various courses of action?

If he takes the matter to the police:

  • The police may act to stop the emeritus matter of the coaching staff from committing further abuse.
  • The police will likely launch an investigation of the allegations to determine whether they are grounded. The police investigation will also collect evidence that may be used in a prosecution.
  • The head coach’s relationship with the emeritus matter of the coaching staff may be damaged.
  • The reputation of the emeritus matter of the coaching staff will likely be damaged.
  • The administration of the athletic department and the university might be upset at the unfavorable light cast on them by the incident, if the allegations become public.
  • The reputation of the football program with the university community and the broader community may be tarnished by news of the incident.
  • It may take a bunch of time to cooperate with the police investigation.

If he takes the matter to the university’s athletic director:

  • The head coach’s relationship with the emeritus matter of the coaching staff may be damaged.
  • The reputation of the emeritus matter of the coaching staff will likely be damaged.
  • The administration of the athletic department and the university might be upset at the unfavorable light cast on them by the incident, if the allegations become public.
  • The reputation of the football program with the university community and the broader community may be tarnished by news of the incident.
  • It may take a bunch of time to cooperate with the police investigation — if the university’s athletic director passes the matter onto the police.
  • The abuse may stop — if the athletic director passes the matter onto the police.
  • If the athletic director doesn’t pass the matter onto the police, the head coach may have to involve the police himself, which may anger the athletic director.
  • Or, if the athletic director doesn’t pass the matter onto the police, the head coach may have to spend a lot of time trying to convince him to involve the police. This may anger the athletic director and be emotionally draining to the head coach.
  • If the athletic director doesn’t pass the matter onto the police, the head coach may feel guilty that he didn’t do more to stop the abuse.

If the head coach decides to do nothing:

  • The abuse may continue, and more kids may be abused.
  • The reputation of the football program and the university may remain intact.
  • In the event that the situation becomes public later, the reputation of the football program and the university may be badly damaged — as might the reputation of the head coach.
  • The head coach’s relationship with the emeritus member of the coaching staff may remain intact. Or, it might not.
  • The head coach’s relationship with the graduate assistant may suffer.
  • The reputation of the emeritus member of the coaching staff may remain intact.
  • The head coach’s conscience may be troubled.

What are the head coach’s obligations here?

  • To protect those who cannot protect themselves.
  • To protect his team.
  • To uphold the values of the athletics program, the university, and the larger community.
  • To protect the reputation of the athletics program, the university, and the larger community.
  • To protect colleagues from unfair treatment (but not from just consequences)
  • To provide the information he has about the child abuse to law enforcement so they can investigate the allegations to determine whether there is evidence to support them.
  • To maintain his own integrity and good conscience

I take it there is no ethical obligation to avoid headaches or awkward moments with one’s colleagues.

Looking at these obligations, nearly all seem to pull in the direction of the head coach doing something, rather than doing nothing. Indeed, they strike me as all pulling in the direction of doing something effective, rather than passing the buck to a higher-up and being done with it.

Some might argue that there’s a conflict between the obligation to protect those who cannot protect themselves and the obligation to protect colleagues from unfair treatment. However, it seems like the head coach should be able to uphold his obligation to protect colleagues from unfair treatment without having to cover up what was reported to him (and without that allegation being buried by an administrator higher up in the hierarchy). Indeed, as a grown-up, the emeritus member of the coaching staff has far more resources to secure fair treatment than does the 10-year-old child.

How people make decisions tells us something about what obligations and interests they take most seriously. Do they care more about the values of their organization or its reputation? Do they care more about vulnerable people or about people they know personally who might be hurting those vulnerable people? Do they choose blissful ignorance over the involvement that might be required to obtain accurate information, or to pass on the information they have (no matter how uncertain it might seem to them) to the people whose job it is to conduct investigations in these sorts of cases?

(I’m not claiming here that police investigations of allegations of child rape are perfect. However, they seem likely to do better by the potential victims and other vulnerable members of the community than not investigating such allegations at all.)

Some ethical decision-making is hard. There are cases where we are bound by strong obligations that pull us in different directions.

But this particular case really isn’t that hard. It may require effort to do the right thing, but figuring out what the right thing to do is here is not rocket science.

Scientific authorship: guests, courtesy, contributions, and harms.

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DrugMonkey asks, where’s the harm in adding a “courtesy author” (also known as a “guest author”) to the author line of a scientific paper?

I think this question has interesting ethical dimensions, but before we get into those, we need to say a little bit about what’s going on with authorship of scientific papers.

I suppose there are possible worlds in which who is responsible for what in a scientific paper might not matter. In the world we live in now, however, it’s useful to know who designed the experimental apparatus and got the reaction to work (so you can email that person your questions when you want to set up a similar system), who did the data analysis (so you can share your concerns about the methodology), who made the figures (so you can raise concerns about digital fudging of the images), etc. Part of the reason people put their names on scientific papers is so we know who stands behind the research — who is willing to stake their reputation on it.

The other reason people put their names on scientific papers is to claim credit for their hard work and their insights, their contribution to the larger project of scientific knowledge-building. If you made a contribution, the scientific community ought to know about it so they can give you props (and funding, and tenure, and the occasional Nobel Prize).

But, we aren’t in a possition to make accurate assignments of credit or responsibility if we have no good information about what an author’s actual involvement in the project may have been. We don’t know who’s really in a position to vouch for the data, or who really did heavy intellectual lifting in bringing the project to fruition. We may understand, literally, the claim, “Joe Schmoe is second author of this paper,” but we don’t know what that means, exactly.

I should note that there is not one universally recognized authorship standard for all of the Tribe of Science. Rather, different scientific disciplines (and subdisciplines) have different practices as far as what kind of contribution is recognized as worthy of inclusion as an author on a paper, and as far as what the order in which the authors are listed is supposed to communicate about the magnitude of each contribution. In some fields, authors are always listed alphabetically, no matter what they contributed. In others, being first in the list means you made the biggest contribution, followed by the second author (who made the second-biggest contribution), and so forth. It is usually the case that the principal investigator (PI) is identified as the “corresponding author” (i.e., the person to whom questions about the work should be directed), and often (but not always) the PI takes the last slot in the author line. Sometimes this is an acknowledgement that while the PI is the brains of the lab’s scientific empire, particular underlings made more immediately important intellectual contributions to the particular piece of research the paper is communicating. But authorship practices can be surprisingly local. Not only do different fields do it differently, but different research groups in the same field — at the same university — do it differently. What this means is it’s not obvious at all, from the fact that your name appears as one of the authors of a paper, what your contribution to the project was.

There have been attempts to nail down explicit standards for what kinds of contributions should count for authorship, with the ICMJE definition of authorship being one widely cited effort in this direction. Not everyone in the Tribe of Science, or even in the subset of the tribe that publishes in biomedical journals, thinks this definition draws the lines in the right places, but the fact that journal editors grapple with formulating such standards suggests at least the perception that scientists need a clear way to figure out who is responsible for the scientific work in the literature. We can have a discussion about how to make that clearer, but we have to acknowledge that at the present moment, just noting that someone is an author without some definition of what that entails doesn’t do the job.

Here’s where the issue of “guest authorship” comes up. A “guest author” is someone whose name appears in a scientific paper’s author line even though she has not made a contribution that is enough (under whatever set of standards one recognizes for proper authorship) to qualify her as an author of the paper.

A guest is someone who is visiting. She doesn’t really live here, but stays because of the courtesy and forebearance of the host. She eats your food, sleeps under your roof, uses your hot water, watches your TV — in short, she avails herself of the amenities the host provides. She doesn’t pay the rent or the water bill, though; that would transform her from a guest to a tenant.

To my way of thinking, a guest author is someone who is “just visiting” the project being written up. Rather than doing the heavy lifting in that project, she is availing herself of the amenities offered by association (in print) with that project, and doing so because of the courtesy and forebearance of the “host” author.

The people who are actually a part of the project will generally be able to recognize the guest author as a “guest” (as opposed to an actual participant). The people receiving the manuscript will not. In other words, the main amenity the guest author partakes in is credit for the labors of the actual participants. Even if all the participants agreed to this (and didn’t feel the least bit put out at the free-rider whose “authorship” might be diluting his or her own share of credit), this makes it impossible for those outside the group to determine what the guest author’s actual contribution was (or, in this case, was not). Indeed, if people outside the arrangement could tell that the guest author was a free-rider, there wouldn’t be any point in guest authorship.

Science strives to be a fact-based enterprise. Truthful communication is essential, and the ability to connect bits of knowledge to the people who contributed is part of how the community does quality control on that knowledge base. Ambiguity about who made the knowledge may lead to ambiguity about what we know. Also, developing too casual a relationship with the truth seems like a dangerous habit for a scientist to get into.

Coming back to DrugMonkey’s question about whether courtesy authorship is a problem, it looks to me like maybe we can draw a line between two kinds of “guests,” one that contributes nothing at all to the actual design, execution, evaluation, or communication of the research, and one who contributes something here, just less than what the conventions require for proper authorship. If these characters were listed as authors on a paper, I’d be inclined to call the first one a “guest author” and the second a “courtesy author” in an attempt to keep them straight; the cases with which DrugMonkey seems most concerned are the “courtesy authors” in my taxonomy. In actual usage, however, the two labels seem to be more or less interchangeable. Naturally, this makes it harder to distinguish who actually did what — but it strikes me that this is just the kind of ambiguity people are counting on when they include a “guest author” or “courtesy author” in the first place.

What’s the harm?

Consider a case where the PI of a research group insists on giving authorship of a paper to a postdoc who hasn’t gotten his experimental system to work at all and is almost out of funding. The PI gives the justification that “He needs some first-author papers or his time here will have been a total waste.” As it happens, giving this postdoc authorship bumps the graduate student who did all the experimental work (and the conceptual work, and data analysis, and drafting of the manuscript) out of first author slot — maybe even off the paper entirely.

There is real harm here, to multiple parties. In this case, someone got robbed of appropriate credit, and the person identified as most responsible for the published work will be a not-very-useful person to contact with deeper questions about the work (since he didn’t do any of it or at best participated on the periphery of the project).

Consider another kind of case, where authorship is given to a well-known scientist with a lot of credibility in his field, but who didn’t make a significant intellectual contribution to work (at least, not one that rises to the level of meriting authorship under the recognized standards). This is the kind of courtesy authorship that was extended to Gerald Schatten in a 2005 paper in Science another of whose authors was Hwang Woo Suk. This paper had 25 authors listed, with Schatten identified as the senior author. Ultimately, the paper was revealed to be fraudulent, at which point Schatten claimed mostly to have participated in writing the paper in good English — a contribution recognized as less than what one would expect from an author (especially the senior author).

Here, including Schatten as an author seemed calculated to give the appearance (to the journal editors while considering the manuscript, and to the larger scientific community consuming the published work)that the work was more important and/or credible, because of the big name associated with it. But this would only work because listing that big name in the author line amounts to claiming the big name was actually involved in the work. When the paper fell apart, Schatten swiftly disavowed responsibility — but such a disavowal was only necessary because of what was communicated by the author line, and I think it’s naïve to imagine that this “ambiguity” or “miscommunication” was accidental.

In cases like this, I think it’s fair to say courtesy authorship does harm, undermining the baseline of trust in the scientific community. It’s hard to engage in efficient knowledge-building with people you think are trying to put one over on you.

The cases where DrugMonkey suggests courtesy authorship might be innocuous strike me as interestingly different. They are cases where someone has actually made a real contribution of some sort to the work, but where that contribution may be judged (under whatever you take to be the accepted standards of your scientific discipline) as not quite rising to the level of authorship. Here, courtesy authorship could be viewed as inflating the value of the actual contribution (by listing the person who made it in the author line, rather than the acknowledgements), or alternatively as challenging where the accepted standards of your discipline draw the line between a contribution that qualifies you as an author and one that does not. For example, DrugMonkey writes:

First, the exclusion of those who “merely” collect data is stupid to me. I’m not going to go into the chapter and verse but in my lab, anyway, there is a LOT of ongoing trouble shooting and refining of the methods in any study. It is very rare that I would have a paper’s worth of data generated by my techs or trainees and that they would have zero intellectual contribution. Given this, the asymmetry in the BMJ position is unfair. In essence it permits a lab head to be an author using data which s/he did not collect and maybe could not collect but excludes the technician who didn’t happen to contribute to the drafting of the manuscript. That doesn’t make sense to me. The paper wouldn’t have happened without both of the contributions.

I agree with DrugMonkey that there’s often a serious intellectual contribution involved in conducting the experiments, not just in designing them (and that without the data, all we have are interesting hunches, not actual scientific knowledge, to report). Existing authorship standards like those from ICMJE or BMJ can unfairly exclude those who do the experimental labor from authorship by failing to recognize this as an intellectual contribution. Pushing to have these real contributions recognized with appropriate career credit is important. As well, being explicit about who made these contributions to the research being reported in the paper makes it much easier for other scientists following up on the published work (e.g., comparing it to their own results in related experiments, or trying to use some of the techniques described in the paper to set up new experiments) to actually get in touch with the people most likely to be able to answer their questions.

Changing how might weight experimental prowess is given in the career scorekeeping may be an uphill battle, especially when the folks distributing the rewards for the top scores are administrators (focused on the money the people they’re scoring can bring to an institution) and PIs (who frequently have more working hours devoted to conception and design of project for their underlings rather than to the intellectual labor of making those projects work, and to writing the proposals that bring in the grant money and the manuscripts that report the happy conclusion of the projects funded by such grants). That doesn’t mean it’s not a fight worth having.

But, I worry that using courtesy authorship as a way around this unfair setting of the authorship bar actually amounts to avoiding the fight rather than addressing these issues and changing accepted practices.

DrugMonkey also writes:

Assuming that we are not talking about pushing someone else meaningfully* out of deserved credit, where lies the harm even if it is a total gift?

Who is hurt? How are they damaged?
__
*by pushing them off the paper entirely or out of first-author or last-author position. Adding a 7th in the middle of the authorship list doesn’t affect jack squat folks.

Here, I wonder: if dropping in a courtesy author as the seventh author of a paper can’t hurt, how either can we expect it to help the person to whom this “courtesy” is extended?

Is it the case that no one actually expects that the seventh author made anything like a significant contribution, so no one is being misled in judging the guest in the number seven slot as having made a comparable contribution to the scientist who earned her seventh-author position in another paper? If listing your seventh-author paper on your CV is automatically viewed as not contributing any points in your career scorekeeping, why even list it? And why doesn’t it count for anything? Is it because the seventh author never makes a contribution worth career points … or is it because, for all we know, the seventh author may be a courtesy author, there for other reasons entirely?

If a seventh-author paper is actually meaningless for career credit, wouldn’t it be more help to the person to whom you might extend such a “courtesy” if you actually engaged her in the project in such a way that she could make an intellectual contribution recognized as worthy of career credit?

In other words, maybe the real problem with such courtesy authorship is that it gives the appearance of help without actually being helpful.

(Cross-posted at Doing Good Science)

From the cave of grading remote base: apparently stable patterns.

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I’m one of those people who is rather less confident about the existence of universal regularities in our world (and this has at least as much to do with the research component of my misspent scientific youth as it does with Hume and Popper and the whole problem of induction).

Nonetheless, if I had to bet money on certain patterns being stable features of my world, here’s where I’d lay my chips:

  • Not coming to lecture more than three times in the part of the semester preceding the midterm will be highly correlated with not doing well on the midterm. (My lectures seem to add value; who knew?!)
  • Not actually address the question that has been asked will be highly correlated with earning very few of the available points.
  • Using many, many words in the space available to answer the question (especially if they don’t engage with the question) is less likely to earn points than using fewer words that present a clear answer.
  • The ability to use a sanctioned cheat-sheet on the midterm means I’ll see a sizable proportion of papers (maybe 33%) where students have simply recopied on to their test papers every single thing they put on their cheat-sheet about philosopher X, regardless of what a question is asking them about philosopher X. This strategy seems to make it hard for the students using it to notice when they have “lost the plot” in their answers.
  • In at least 10% of the papers, I will encounter the phrase “solve science” and will need to pause for a facepalm or a headdesk.
  • That rascal DrugMonkey will put up a post to which I want to respond before the end to my grading is anywhere in sight. (Seriously, am I the only blogger with grading who has an angel on one shoulder and DrugMonkey on the other?)