Triple stats practical

Every year, we run a statistics practical for the dissertation students. It used to be run by a lady from the Study Skills team, but she left, and there wasn’t anybody else in that unit who could take over. Fortunately, I managed to rope my colleague Marianna in. 

She was immediately in for a heavy ride: the cohort was so big that not only didn’t it fit in one computer room; it didn’t even half fit in. We had to run the session three times. Three times three hours! And attendance isn’t great. It would have fit in two sessions. But we have to timetable for all the students; not just those who show up. 

Towards the end, when many had already left

She had kept the essence of the practical the same. And it went as well as could be expected! Some students were not keen to engage, some didn’t really need it and could just use the time to get on with their projects.but then there were some in between that benefited from us being there. 

It’s done now for the year. And let’s see if we’ll make the next year! 

Windy Parys

It was such lovely weather the first days of the week we were going to do the Parys Mountain trip! Unfortunately, the forecast said it wouldn't last. That day we were scheduled to go was going to be the worst of the whole week.

When the day approached the weather forecast got worse, and acquired a weather warning for wind, with gusts over 60 mph. Oh dear! Parys Mountain stands proud of Anglesey, and if it gets gusty, being on top of it makes you feel the full force of the wind. What should we do?

I briefly discussed with Dei. Postpone or shorten? The weather would be the worst in the morning, and would improve during the day. If we would go at lunchtime we would avoid the worst of it. And that was what we decided to do.

I was the first one to get out of the vehicle when we got there, and I immediately felt the brunt of the strong wind. Earlier that day it must've been awful up there. But we all zipped up our jackets and went for went to the viewing platform. Quite many of the students hadn't been there before, and they looked like they thought it was worth it. It is, after all, an amazing place.

We didn't linger as we figured it would be more sheltered in the pit, so that was where we went next. And we admired the view on the fold, and the Central Boss, and the remains of the black smoker. When we were at the Central Boss we did get rained on, but fortunately only briefly. Later the sun even came out!

When we were done with the geology there was a little bit of time left for history, which Dei took care of. And then we went back to the vehicle.

It was a bit touch and go this year, but I think we pulled it off! Let's hope that our next trip will have nicer weather…

Appeal not upheld

Last month I mentioned that a student had appealed against their grade in three of our assignments. And I said I would keep this blog posted on how that would turn out. And the results are in: the appeal was not upheld. The student has accepted our responses, and that is that. So now nothing happens, which doesn't sound spectacular, but which does mean that nothing bad happens. I think that a storm surge of unpleasantness would have come down on us if these appeals would have been upheld. Because that would mean that there was something fundamentally wrong with either our assignments, or our treatment of this particular student, or both. Imagine! So that has been averted. And we all can go back to normal…

Term starts

The exam period is over now! Lecturing has started again. The marking is still ongoing, but that’s normal. It started easy for me; the first day I only had to do two introductory lectures, in which I explained how the module in question would run. But it’s all going until late spring now. Wish me luck! 

From coursework marking to exam marking

A change is as good as a rest, they say! I’m sure it’s sometimes true. Maybe not so much in this instance. 

On the day of the exam in my module I finished marking the coursework from last term. Great! Or maybe I should say: just in time. The week before, the exam from another module, which I am not leading but in which I have several exam questions, had taken place. So there was already a new pile of marking waiting for me. And now there were two. But at least not three.

I won't manage to have everything marked before the teaching starts again! It will just be another case of juggling everything. But I've been doing this for 10 years. It'll work out again!

Dealing with an appeal

I've been in this current job for some 10 years, but new things still happen. Recently, I had to deal with a student appeal for the first time. If students think that something was really wrong with an assignment, or with the grade they got, they can appeal. Maybe they think the grade wasn't correctly calculated from the constituent parts, or maybe they think the instructions were wrong, or any such thing. They can't appeal the academic judgement of the marker. But in practice, appeals never happen. Students might directly contact you if they're not happy,  or tell the course reps so the staff- student liaison officer tells you, and then you can talk about it. In the olden days, when exams were on paper, there would be special feedback sessions. I do remember that it had come up that a grade wasn't correctly calculated, but nowadays computers do all that, and they are very good at that sort of thing. And sometimes a student complains through the module evaluations, but what you can do with that is limited. But it had never happened that a student took the formal route. Until now! And the student appealed against their grades in three different assignments in one go, and one of them was mine.

The procedure is that the student fills out a form in which they set out their complaint, and send it to the Quality Enhancement Unit. They send it on to the School involved. Then the person(s) responsible for the assignment(s) in question write(s) a response. I had to look up what happens next! Luckily, the procedure is explained on the University website. The whole pile of documents goes, via the Head of School, back to the Quality Enhancement Unit, and they report back to the student.

I wrote my response. It took a fair amount of time. The student had listed a whole array of things they said were wrong with my assignment, and how I had dealt with it. My response boiled down to that there wasn't anything actually wrong with any of that. I have seen one more response; the third one might take a bit longer, as the lecturing staff in question has since retired, so the response will have to be written by someone who was not directly involved in the assignment.

We were given 10 days to respond, so I suppose the documentation will go to main campus, and from there to the student, soon. If they don't agree with our response they can request a review, and they have to do that within 10 days as well. So I suppose by the end of the month we will know how this panned out.

I think it's good that there is an appeal procedure, but I do hope that it doesn't become all too popular. We really genuinely do our best to do a good job! And literally every assignment we set is also scrutinised by the external examiners. And student satisfaction is deemed very important, so messing up instructions is quite bad for your career. So the chance a bad grade is not due to the student, but to the assignment itself, is not high. And it can be a lot of work to respond to these appeals. But we'll see! Let's first find out if this student is successful.  Stay tuned!

Fake references

Fake references shouldn't be a thing! Unfortunately, they are. I've had to call people in before, because they had non-existent references in their reference list. And generally, it turns out that the student in question had had an attack of bad time management, and basically panicked. And involved AI. Not a good idea! And given that it is marking time again, this is the time when that sort of thing might happen again. And it did.

In this case, I had to call two students in, and in both cases I had detected the issue myself. One student only had three references, and they were incomplete. And if it is just three, you might as well check. Especially as one of the references looked like something I should know about. But looking them up didn't work. And if it's a full reference, with journal, volume, issue, and page numbers, you can just look them up precisely where the student claims they are. But with just title, authors, year and journal, you can’t. I asked that student to send me the PDFs of the articles, in case they existed. Unfortunately I did not receive such PDFs.

In the other case, I just spotted a reference that surprised me. I know the author, and I thought the year was a bit early. Was he really already publishing about this topic in that year? So I had a Google. And nothing came up. They also were two articles by an author combination I hadn't seen before. I looked these up as well. Nothing. One of them was a complete reference, and then you can check these very page numbers in that very issue. And if it doesn’t match, you have conclusive proof that the reference is fake. I checked all the other references; the student had a lot more, and the majority fortunately existed. Four didn't.

I have no idea how often things like this slip under the radar! You can't possibly check all the references of all the assignments you mark. But we would normally mark assignments in our own field. And then you get this sort of things I had. An unusual year, an unusual combination of authors, an unusual topic, might all raise suspicion. I know I'm not the only one; I remember a colleague who had noticed that there was a reference to a paper of an author writing about a particular species of fish, and my colleague knew that this person did not actually study this fish. So I think we pick up quite a lot of this kind of things. But I will never know!

Well I never know? Well, I could of course do a test, and select a large number of assignments at random to check if all the references exist. If you check enough of them, you will get a statistically robust result. But this sounds like so much work! The idea is interesting, though. And it will be interesting to see if there is any pattern in what goes undetected. Hm! I might be onto something. I wish I felt I had the time to do this sort of thing. Because it is genuinely interesting to get an idea of the scale of this problem. And get a few clues on what we could do about it…

Last big teaching day of 2024

In one of my modules, we do student presentations. And that has to happen at the tail end of term. So quite often, it’s the last big thing. And big it got! There have been years with fewer than 20 students, and then it’s quite doable. This year we had loads. And then it’s such a long day! I had had to make the individual presentations shorter to fit it all in one day. 

The students uploaded their slides the Friday before. I just had time to make a schedule before I had to head for Main Campus. The presentations were on Monday!

It fit, especially given that I suspected there would be no-shows. There were quite some non-submitters. And there were two students who were allowed to record, and one who was not available on the Monday and presented the week before. 

There also tends to be an issue with the room. I remember one stone cold room, and last year a room with fine temperature but only wooden benches. This year we had a cold windowless room. Will we ever be comfortable? 

This year it went well. The level of the presentations was high, time keeping was generally very good too, and the students asked loads of questions. The students only had 7 mins each, but some had teamed up in twos and threes so they had 14 or 21 minutes for their group, and could go a bit more into depth. We had 26 students presenting overall. 

The non-submitters all failed to show up. But I later noticed that most of those were inconsistently registered. There is the module website where they submit their assignments, and the overall website with the module overviews, and they didn’t agree. So that’s a relief! A bit confusing that I now don’t know who is in my module, but probably, most of these absent people were absent because they were not actually on the module. A good reason! 

The only teaching I now still have is the presentations of my freshers! And then it’s done for 2024…

A transatlantic cable on the US shore in 1925; there were quite many talks about submarine cables

 

Third batch done

I finished the second of the three big piles of marking on a Sunday morning. And after breakfast, I just started on the third. It had crept close to the marking deadline, so I had better get going. And it was a large cohort. 

The assessment was quite straightforward. I had given the students a pile of data, and the idea was that they select some of that data, plot it up, use these plots for answering the research question, explain why they came to that answer, and then compare that answer to other answers out there in published literature. And marking the plots is very quick. And the rest took more time, but still less than the other assignments I had marked. 

Sunset over the North Sea; the setting for this assignment

 

I basically marked all day Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, only taking off the Monday evening for the dinner in Llanberis, and 7-9 pm on Tuesday for Welsh class. And then I was done on Tuesday 11pm. I was so relieved. But also dead tired and with sore arms. 

I can now finally do other things again! Not a moment too soon. I have student meetings coming up, and student presentation sessions to organise and attend, and an exam preparation sessions, and a list of academic integrity cases to deal with, and loads more. And more marking, but not such big piles anymore this semester. I feel a whole lot better now that this is behind me…

Second batch done!

When storm Darragh kept me at home, I took advantage of that by making progress on my enormous marking load. And it worked! By the evening I had done the marking, although I had not yet put the grades and feedback on the assignments. I figured I could do that the day after. 

Is that reasonable? One could argue not. What about taking the Sunday off? But what I had done after finishing that batch was check when the next pile was due. And the answer was: pretty much immediately afterwards. So I had to keep going.

That happened sooner than I intended. When I went to the kitchen to give the cat her last meal of the day, I was reminded of the fact that I had started defrosting the fridge. And it was mostly done! Just not entirely. And I didn't want to leave the fridge defrosting overnight. It would leak water everywhere. So I figured I couldn't really go to bed yet. What do you do if you can't go to bed? You go back to your marking! So I put some of the grades and feedback where it needed to go. But then I finished the defrosting I went to bed. And the next morning, before breakfast, I finished it off.

I then still had to look at the few academic integrity cases resulting from that assignment. I didn't want to give the students their grades and only afterwards raise the possibility that not all these grades were definitive. So I wanted to at least tell the people involved what was hanging over them. But when I had that ready I could ask my moderator on Monday morning to do the moderation. He had been warned it was coming! And as soon as moderation is done, it can be released to the students. And then it's properly sorted…

Picture from the field trip in October; the marking had been the field trip report

Academic integrity back on the scene

When I am spending my time frantically marking, it is likely that the same holds for my colleagues. And with marking comes checking for issues with academic integrity. So now that first semester marking has properly kicked off, the emails have started coming in with request to check various submissions.

So far it hasn't gotten out of hand, but that might just be the calm before the storm. I could imagine that I might get inundated a bit closer to the marking deadline. For now I have checked my own assignments (which had very few issues), and have been alerted to three other assignments. And one of these had only one case, and I figured we could just let that rest. Yes the suspicious paragraph was a bit weird, but not in a way I figured breached academic integrity regulations. And the other two assignments just had some students who had stayed a bit too close to the source texts they had used. Standard stuff! But I am braced for more to come. In a way it helps that I have all my marking coming at the same time; I should be close to being finished by the time the suspected tsunami arrives…

Anonymised snapshot of some student submissions; all of them looking impeccable

First marking batch done

Having three big batches of marking on your plate is quite exhausting! But I just ploughed on and now the first batch is done. And that feels good. It has been done OK. There is always a bit of spread in the grades, but I’m satisfied with how it went. 

I am a bit worried about my arms now. The software we use is not very compatible with my voice recognition software. So I can’t really not use my arms. And I can feel that. And I still have two big batches to go! 

I’ve already started on the second batch. That is fortunately quicker. I hope I can get that out of the way soon, and then onto the last batch. And then hopefully tired but satisfied into the Christmas break! 

 

Example age vs depth plot from Miao et al., Mar Geol 2017. Making a similar age-depth plot was part of the assignment I just finished marking. 

 

Research on marking initiative

Once upon a time, we had a PhD student called Tom, who also worked for a while as a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) in our School. He left years ago. But suddenly his name popped up again. He had got in touch because he had a thought for some pedagogical research, and figured we might be willing to team up with him.

What was his idea? He had been wondering about full marks. Here in Britain, you mark out of 100. But what does it take for someone to award the full 100%? And the answer, of course, is "it depends". We have some physical oceanographers here, who sometimes set mathematical assignments, and if the mathematics are correct I assume they award full marks. It's a completely different kettle of fish with something like an essay.

There probably is more to it though. For instance, we have an American colleague, and she was wondering about how we mark. She said that Americans do have a habit of giving marks all the way up to 100%, while here, basically anything above 85% is unusual. So it was said that if you give a British student an 85%, they are crying with happiness, but an American student would be crying with disappointment. So there is more to it than just assessment type. 

This guy, who now works for what I suppose I could explain to a British audience as the Dutch equivalent of a polytechnic in Frisia, had been wondering if there was any literature about this topic. And he found there wasn't. And that gave him the idea that someone should create it. And if not him, then who? But this didn’t sound like a one person job so he reached out to us. 

We are now regularly meeting up (online) to discuss how we will go about this. It’s all still in an early phase. I hope we’ll pull this off! But at least it’s good to think about these things! 

Dissertation allocation: debacle

‘I tend to release it to the staff first. And if they are ok with it, I release it to the students.’ I was so casual about it! I didn't expect any problems. I was wrong.

When I didn't expect it anymore, an email came in from a disgruntled colleague. He wasn't happy that there were some colleagues who didn't have their full load of students. And that's not the first time! These are people in the physics corner of the school. Most students are in the biology corner. And I do ask all staff to volunteer for supervising other people’s topics, because some topics are just very popular and we need all hands on deck with these, but the problem with these physics-focussed people is that they would be inclined to volunteer for other physical projects, and these never attract much attention. And then they end up with fewer students than most.

I totally understood his frustration, but I in turn was frustrated that he brought this up after I had already completed the allocation. Sort that out beforehand! And a bit of an email battle ensued through the weekend. It ended with the Head of School inviting me and Dei (as he is the Director of Teaching and Learning) for a chat on Monday. The disgruntled colleague wasn't available as he was teaching.

The outcome was: for this year we leave things as is, but next year I get the power to force everyone to take up their full load of students. So if they don't volunteer for biological projects, I will give them biological projects. I look forward to that! It will be nice to spread the load evenly. And there absolutely are biological projects I would not be comfortable with teaching, so of which I could imagine they wouldn't be either, but there is so much choice that I am sure they will find topics they will actually do quite well on. 

First things first; let's first deal with this year. But I do think this is an improvement in the long term!

The Great Marking starts

This wasn't the first marking of the year, of course! Thanks to our very early field trip, my marking starts in September. But then there is a big pause. And then in November, it all kicks off again.

This year I had two assignments coming in in a week in the middle of November. One on Wednesday and one on Friday. The one on the Wednesday has about 100 students. It is not a big assignment, but it's just such a big cohort! And the assignment that came in on Friday had only 35 students, but the assignment is a lot bigger.

That is really quite some work. I have to still prepare my lectures and tutorials, of course, but otherwise I will basically be spending every working minute marking. I hope I will make good progress. It will feel really good to get these enormous batches out of the way! Especially as the week after, the third batch would come in. A sizable assignment with some 45 students. But then, luckily, the bulk is done. Maybe that will help in not being exhausted by the time the University closes for Christmas! I have a bit of a habit of falling ill then. Hopefully, I can avoid that this year. And hopefully I won't come down with something before I even get to December, like last year. Wish me luck!

 

An algal bloom, related to the big pile of marking. Pic by NASA

 

Foram confusion

I tend to slightly dread the foram practical associated with our September fieldwork. So many forams, and so few staff to check their identifications. But this year, another complication arose. The students are asked to send me their data after the practical, and I assumed I would just collate all their data in one spreadsheet and then they could go and interpret it.

It didn't quite work out that way. I thought I had been hammering the point to the students that a sample of which you don't know the provenance is worthless. But I got loads of counts sent to me that didn't specify which sample they represented. That's not helping! And I collect the actual samples as well, so I can check, but these weren't very well labelled either. So I just had a spreadsheet with the samples I could match up; some of them were impeccable, with detailed and matching sample information on both document and microslide. But of some I just didn't know where they belonged. I hope the students can look at their notes, recognise their handwriting on the microslides, et cetera, and work out which sample is which. Because this data set is pretty rubbish! Next year I will have to personally check every single microslide to make sure it is obvious which sample is which…

Fine forams, but which sample are they from? 

Dissertation topics allocated

It is done! I managed to allocate every single one of the 193 students a topic and supervisor. It was a bit of a chore but it is done. There are so many students this year! And we did have more teaching staff to distribute them over, but the problem is that it still is a very limited number of members of staff whose topics are popular. I had SO many students who had picked topics from the same five popular people. And you can't give these people infinite numbers of students. So then you have to check who else is willing to supervise the topics of the popular people, and keep shuffling people around until in the end you make it fit.

I really wanted to get it done before the marking would hit. And I didn't quite manage, but it was close! On the afternoon of the day when I could have gone into the field with Dei and Jaco but wasn't really necessary, so opted to stay in the office and get this done, I did indeed get it done. That felt good! But then I had to do a check whether everything was ok. Generally, a few mistakes creep in. And they had. There was one student, for instance, whom I had given a supervisor twice. That sort of thing. But when that was done I made a tidy list and published it to the staff.

I tend to release it to the staff first. And if they are ok with it, I release it to the students. And in the meantime, I can turn to my marking…

 

A deep sea fish; star of a very popular topic. Pic by Theodore W. Pietsch, University of Washington

 

Student saves the R day

I am on a modernising spree! I had worked out how to, in theory, plot up the sort of data we gather during our annual glaciological field trip, in RStudio. The one thing I was struggling with is getting the data into the software. When our students are taught R, they are advised to work online, rather than in the desktop app. And I could make the scripts work, but I didn't know how to get an input file in there. So far I had basically got around that by just copying my data straight into R and saving it as a file. And that is fine for a proof of concept, but if you have a file with the data gathered by 15 groups of students, that becomes impractical. It was time I would learn how to do this the proper way.

RStudio has this button that says "import data", but it then only allows you to import it from a directory of which my computer doesn't know where it is. And if my computer doesn't know, I don't know. I decided I really needed to find out, and I asked the lady who had helped me before if she could help me again. And we had a look together. She had no clue either! And she needed to know this as well.

By chance, she was just about to see her master student. When the student saw me she wanted to go away; clearly my colleague was already engaged in something. But we waved her in. And I just asked her if she knew the answer. She did!

It turns out that there is another button that says "upload", And if you click that, you do actually get access to all your file space. And once you have uploaded your file onto the mystery directory, you can "import" it from there. It was that simple! But as far as I am concerned, not intuitive at all. But that was all I needed to know. I thanked her and went back to my office. And no time later I had all my data imported, and a whole new set of graphs produced. Success!

 

Fast graphs! 

 

High speed lecture updates

I had felt my glaciology lecture series needed an update for a while. And there even had been mention of that in the student evaluations. So it was time to get my skates on! The time to do that is in summer. 

Summer came and went and I didn’t get around to it. So then it had to be done during term itself. But term got completely swamped by dissertation topic proposals. It started to get tight! 

It is fun to do. One of the things I do is illustrating concepts with recent literature. And there is so much interesting stuff out there! But I had to hurry up. I spent some evenings in my home office. And I got quite knackered. 

Now it will be Reading Week soon, in which we don’t teach. I will make sure to dedicate a fair amount of time to making some good progress on that!

The Aletsch glacier, which features in the lectures

No more proposals for dissertation topics

The deadline has been, the students can't propose their own dissertation topics anymore! What a relief. I do like the concept of the students doing that, but it is so much work. It is so much that I will have to change the procedure next year. This just consumed all my time.

There are some students who have a clear idea, and then it's not much of a burden. Occasionally, a student gets their proposal approved in one go. Sometimes you have to ask a few clarifications and then they're good to go. But there are also students who just haven't quite grasped what is needed. And some of them then start using the scattergun approach. And if they don't quite know what they want to do, they often use an awful amount of text to communicate it. Not because they have a concerted attempt at shrouding their lack of data with which to answer a clear research question in a fog of prose, but that sort of is the effect of it. 

Some students in fact just want to do a literature study, and then they might just dig out some data and say they will do statistical analysis on it in order to make it look more thorough. But if the data and the analysis are not connected to the research question, I won't give it my OK. Sometimes you can also tell that they're bluffing; sometimes the statistical analysis they claim they want to do is fundamentally impossible to perform on the data they offer.

In the end there were 35 students who sent me at least one attempt. 15 of these got their proposal approved. I'm still not entirely sure how many students I have in the cohort; the last count was 191. So 18% had a go, and 8% pulled it off. And the topics were very varied.

Next year I will put some limitations in place. I might set a maximum number of iterations students can submit. That will get rid of the scattergun approach. And I want to make sure that you can get a standard response. So far I always reply with a personalised message, but I think I will have to tell the students they might just get a standard response that says things such as "exact nature of data insufficiently specified" or "data provided insufficient to answer research question". It will be so much quicker! And I can provide an explanation on the module website of what the various responses can mean in detail.

For this year, the burden has now gone from dealing with the proposals of the own topics, to allocating everybody else at topic from the list. That is a big job as well! I hope it will be OK this year…

A sea urchin, the main character in one of the proposals. Pic by Frédéric Ducarme