In which I am disappointed.

In a recent comment I indulged in a little hand-wringing over the state of academic ethics in higher education today. I remarked that my strategy for dealing with plagiarized papers was to try to avoid assigning papers at all. (Thankfully, that's pretty easy to do when most of one's teaching assignments are large statistics lectures.)

However, in the not-very-distant past, I did allow my Critical Thinking students to hand in a term paper for extra credit. The guidelines were simple: choose a paranormal phenomenon or a pseudoscientific topic, discuss it with me for approval, then present the arguments for and against the phenomenon and come to a conclusion.

One particular hopeless student really didn't get the whole idea of the course and what she was supposed to learn from it. She called me to arrange the details of her paper. The phone call was pretty brief and went something like this:

Hopeless Case: "Angry Professor, I want to discuss the topic of my term paper with you and make sure it's okay."

Angry Professor: "OK, go ahead."

Hopeless Case: "I want to write my paper on dinosaurs."

Angry Professor: "Uh... but what is it about dinosaurs that is paranormal or pseudoscientific?"

Hopeless Case: "Well, I don't believe in them."

Angry Professor: "You don't believe in them? But what about all those big old bones?"

Hopeless Case: "I don't know anything about that. I only know that there's no room for them in the Bible."

At this point, Angry Professor has a coughing fit that prevents her from responding immediately.

After taking a few minutes to compose myself, and to think about this extraordinary statement, I decided in fact that this would be a good topic for her term paper. Assuming that she did it well, she would be forced to confront the wackiest ideas of the Young Earth Creationists and critique them. Unfortunately for her, even the Young Earth Creationists concede that there really were dinosaurs.

I gave Hopeless Case my blessing, emphasized again that both sides of the issue of whether or not dinosaurs actually existed would have to be presented in her paper, and hung up. Then I cursed myself, realizing that I didn't ask her about whether or not she believed in toasters, automobiles, airplanes, toilets, or professional football, seeing as the Lord had not seen fit to include them in the Bible either.

This story would have a great ending if Hopeless Case had followed through on this paper but she didn't. She never handed one in. And I was so looking forward to grading it, too...

Christmas comes early for Angry Professor.

I'm so sick of plagiarized papers. I suspect that only 50%, at most, of the papers my students turn in are not plagiarized.

Bravo, Nate!

Confirmation bias and denial.

Now that the Terri Sciavo debacle is all but over, perhaps it's time for me to weigh in. (Or not - please continue on to the next blog on your list.)

I've been fascinated by this case, because I am a parent and also a psychologist, and the case is a witches' brew of ethics, neuroscience, politics, devotion, and (above all, in my opinion) critical reasoning and decision making. Yesterday I was revising a chapter on human reasoning and decision making, specifically, a section dealing with the Wason four-card task.

In this task, people are shown a deck of cards. Each card has a letter printed on one side and a numeral on the other. The task is to decide whether rule like "If a card has a vowel on one side, the number on the other side is even," is true. Four cards are dealt such that one consonant, one vowel, one even number and one odd number are showing. The person trying to test the rule is allowed to turn over two cards.

Almost always, the person will choose to turn over the vowel (E, to see if the number on the back is even) and the even number (4, to see if the letter on the back is a vowel; Wason, 1969). The first choice is correct, and consistent with the logical rule modus ponens, or "mode of affirmation." The second choice is incorrect, and represents the logical error of "affirming the consequent." Why is choosing the 4 an error? It is because the rule says nothing about what should be on the back of consonants, so either a vowel or a consonant could appear on the back of the even number and the rule could still be true. The card that should be selected is the odd number, because if a vowel appears on the back then the rule is disconfirmed. This represents the use of the rule modus tollens, or "mode of disconfirmation."

Why is it so hard for people to see that turning over the odd number is the appropriate choice? It is because this choice embodies a search for information that disconfirms the rule. Looking for disconfirming evidence is something that we (human reasoners) are not very good at. Our tendency to see only the evidence that confirms our beliefs is called confirmation bias. Some have speculated that confirmation bias is the basis for almost all of our most spectacular decision-making failures (Silverman, 1992), such as the downing of Iran Air Flight 655, or the tragedy of the Japanese fishing vessel Ehime Maru.

Confirmation bias is everywhere. Even trained, skeptical scientists exhibit confirmation bias when the belief under question is a pet theory. It is one of the strongest factors involved in maintaining belief in the paranormal, particularly clairvoyance. A psychic predicts a devastating earthquake in India sometime in the summer of 2004. More or less on schedule, in more or less the right geographic area, the earthquake occurs, reinforcing the credulous belief in his extraordinary psychic abilities. The dozens, or hundreds, of other failed predictions made by the same psychic are ignored, or rather, they aren't even remembered, because they are inconsistent with the belief.

As a more personal example, I might have a dream that my daughter is ill, wake up, and call her to make sure she's okay. Sure enough, she has the flu. This reinforces my belief that my daughter and I have a strong psychic bond that transcends geographical distance. I don't remember all the other nights I had the same dream, and I called her only to find out she was just fine (and annoyed that I called her so early in the morning). Confirmation rules the day.

What the heck does this have to do with Terri Schiavo? I have seen Terri Schiavo's CAT scan, and as I have some neuroscience training, I can claim some expertise in evaluating it, although I am not a physician, or a neurologist, and there are a lot of people better qualified than I am that you should pay attention to. I also found an unsubstantiated online reference suggesting that Terri Schiavo's EEG is flat, indicating no significant cognitive activity. With this evidence in hand I state my belief that the person of Terri Schiavo no longer exists, and that what remains is about as human as the cushions on my sofa. There is no chance that her condition will improve with therapy; there is no brain tissue left to be affected by therapy. This is my belief as a professional.

But I am also a mother. If my daughter were in a similar condition, CAT scan or EEG evidence would not enter into my belief that she could improve with therapy. Every time she reflexively smiled at me would confirm my belief that she was still in that shell of a body, waiting for me to help her emerge. And I wouldn't be able to see that those reflexive smiles were made at random times and focused on the lamp, now the ceiling, then a point about two feet to my left. Even if it happen only one time in a thousand, each smile that landed at random on me, each time her eyes purely by chance looked into mine would be proof that she still lived and still needed me, and I would treasure each and every one. Those other smiles? Those other failures to respond to stimulation? No matter: I will only remember the ones that confirm my desperately-held belief that my daughter still lives.

Are the Schindlers in denial? Absolutely, sustained and maintained by a strong confirmation bias. I grieve for both the Schindlers and Michael Schiavo. Mr. Schiavo is stronger than I could ever be. Honey, be sure to ask your dad, not me, to carry out your advance directives.

Not Angry This Week.

How I love spring break! It's like a tomb around here. It doesn't get any better than this.

View from Office Window

Kudos to The Two Percent Company.

After 10 years of talking about it, last year a colleague and I finally put together a course on critical thinking. (For marketing reasons we call it something else.) We cover the scientific method, pseudoscience, fraud, self-deception, and so forth. Each topic is presented in the context of something fun, like ESP, talking to the dead, quackery, or alien abductions. It is a great course, and the most fun I've ever had standing in front of a classroom.

One reason I felt strongly enough about this material to spend a full summer putting the course together is the crap I see on television every night. (I watch a lot of television, and therefore I am a connoisseur of crap.) Channels that implicitly endorse an educational mission, like The Learning Channel (ha!) or the History Channel, routinely broadcast crap programs like Pet Psychic or In Search of History: Ancient Aliens. My undergraduates are justifiably confused about the distinction between real, pseudo and junk science; the television bombards them with vast quantities of crap ``information" and leaves them to sort fact from crap fiction. This confusion shows up in my statistics classes too.

The first day of Critical Thinking is devoted to remedial reality checks. No, there is no scientific evidence that ESP exists. No, the lie detector does not reliably distinguish between liars and truth-tellers. My students are always astonished at these revelations, and many of them don't believe me, at least at first.

I am thoroughly disgusted by NBC's Medium. Not wanting to make the effort of writing NBC to complain, I instead affirm how stupid the program is to large groups of undergraduates at every opportunity. Will this be as effective in getting it off the air as writing angry letters to NBC executives would be? I don't know. But I feel much better now that the folks at The Two Percent Company have picked up some of my slack with their Allison DuBois week. Well done, folks, and thank you. I plan to make this rant required reading for my students.

And for those of you who think there's nothing wrong with a little light entertainment, imagine that you could be the defendant in this case, or a passenger on this flight, and then get back to me.

Woo-hoo!

Grades are done, grades are in!

Not so fast...

Not 30 minutes after I posted the grades, a student emailed to complain that he had received an A- rather than an A. I then wasted 15 precious minutes of my spring break looking up his scores, recomputing his grade, to confirm that he had actually earned a B+, and I had already generously bumped him up to an A-.

I'll never get those 15 minutes back, either.

A Sample Quiz.

I gave a quiz a while back. Here is one of the papers that was turned in:

Hey,

I did not receive the email containing the specifics of the term paper. I would like to do the term paper to bring up my grade in this class. Also I had a death in my family the other week and I have not been up on reading nor class. So I would like to take the quiz at a later date.

Thank you,
[Name Withheld]

How I wish I had responded:

Hey,

Who are you? Are you sure you're in the right class? Do you know who your instructor is? Did you read the syllabus for this course?

This is a joke, right?

Thank you,
Angry Professor

Why I still teach.

Yesterday my students filled out their instructor evaluation forms. I explained how I would only get statistics back from them, and that any specific comments they had for me would never reach me. I encouraged them to write out their constructive criticisms and drop them in my mailbox. I left the lecture hall feeling like I needed to take a shower, certain that whatever criticisms I got would be self-serving and mean-spirited.

I found this in my mailbox this morning:

"[Angry Professor] is the best professor I have ever had. She taught very well while making the class interesting. I wish all my instructors were like [Angry Professor]."

Thank you, thank you, thank you. And please, anonymous lovely student, accept my apologies for my tendency to lump all of you great students in with the mediocre ones. You make my job worth doing; you make me look forward to coming to class. May you be a tremendous success in whatever profession you have chosen.

Quiz days.

I give three in-class quizzes, each worth 5% of their grade. I tell them at the beginning of the quarter that the purpose of the quizzes is to make sure that most of them come to class at least three times during the quarter. Everyone gets one point just for putting their name on their quiz paper. If they actually know the material, more points follow.

I gave the last quiz of the quarter last week. As usual, attendence was noticeably better than for any other day of the quarter. However, after I collected the quiz papers, a handful of people got up and walked out. Like I wouldn't notice that they were leaving. They are invisible.

Moments like these make me crazy. After spending so much time putting these lectures together, drawing pictures, finding data sets, developing the overheads... What more can I do, except teach something else? I try to tell myself that it wouldn't matter, that no matter how good/exciting/engaging/dynamic their instructor was, they would still get up and walk out of a statistics lecture.

After the humiliation, I have to smile, thinking about what they'll suffer when they get a really bad statistics instructor. And it will happen, for all of them that go on to graduate school. I just wish I could be there to see it.

Ya, right.

I have a pretty generous policy on missing exams and makeups. All I need is written documentation of why a student was unable to make it to an exam, and then I give a makeup. I state, all in caps, in the syllabus that makeup exams must be made up within three days of the originally scheduled exam (barring unforeseen circumstances like extended hospital stays and so forth).

So one of my students, call him Mr. Less, calls me the morning of the last exam from the emergency room. "Don't worry," I say, paternally, "Just bring me a note from the attending physician and I'll schedule a makeup exam for you. I hope you feel better soon." Mr. Less hangs up, and disappears from my life.

Last week I found a message in my mailbox, with an attached physician's note, from Mr. Less. "Dear Angry Professor," it states, "I have been trying to reach you to schedule my makeup exam but you aren't in your office when I come by. I will be available to make up the exam on [list of dates] at [list of times]." I ignore this letter and file away the physician's note. After all, is it my job to chase down Mr. Less to schedule this thing?

Here it is a week later and apparently Mr. Less is starting to get nervous. It is now two weeks after the exam. An email from him appeared, reiterating the contents of last week's letter. Email is easy, so I respond.

"You say you have been trying to get in touch with me for two weeks now. But you know exactly where I am on two afternoons every week: lecturing to your class. Have you not been there? If not, why?"

And why should I now provide a makeup exam? If he didn't care about it, why should I care? I eagerly await his excuses. I can't wait to see how interesting they'll be.

Update: I am so lame. Sometimes I hate myself. So Mr. Less comes to class today, and hangs around, waiting out the post-class cocktail party of questions everyone was too bashful to ask during the lecture. Sure enough, he has a huge sob story. And do I say, "Gee, that's too bad. I guess I'll see you next quarter?" No, I say, "Gee, that's too bad. Let's make your final count double to cover your missed exam."

I'm such a patsy. If it weren't for the stupid student evaluations, I could be such an asshole. I wish I could be an asshole.