Category Archives: Education
Who's Got the Sheepskin?
Doctor Obvious Goes to a Frat Party
Uncertain Principles: One in Three College Students Is Coasting. This Is News?
So, for all the splashy headlines, I really don’t see a lot here to be distressed about. A third of our students are coasting, but a third of our students have always been coasting, and will always be coasting. And if you think about it, around a third of all the people we interact with are probably coasting. That’s the way the world works, and academia is not exempt.
Doctor Obvious Goes to College
College students lack scientific literacy, study finds
Students trying to explain weight loss, for example, could not trace matter once it leaves the body; instead they used informal reasoning based on their personal experiences (such as the fat “melted away” or was “burned off”). In reality, the atoms in fat molecules leave the body (mostly through breathing) and enter the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and water.
Rough calculation: Assume you breathe in around a liter each time at 20 breaths per second minute. To make the math a little easier, let’s make that 22.4 L of an ideal gas per minute, which is one mole. Increase the CO2 by 1.5% in each cycle, which takes a Carbon atom out of your body. That’s 0.015*12g*60*24 = 260 g. You lose more than half a pound just breathing each day.
Most students also incorrectly believe plants obtain their mass from the soil rather than primarily from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. “When you see a tree growing,” Anderson said, “it’s a lot easier to believe that tree is somehow coming out of the soil rather than the scientific reality that it’s coming out of the air.”
College upperclassmen still fail at scientific reasoning
Related to/based on the first article; it adds a few other points.
Overheard at Lunch of the Day
We said farewell to a colleague earlier this week, a physicist who has decided to go to grad school. His boss was sorry to see him go, and not just because filling out the paperwork to hire someone new is a pain.
Anyway, the two physics PhD’s in attendance gave him some grad school advice: even if you desire to do experiments, don’t stop studying theory.
It’s common to divide physicists into two groups: theorists and experimentalists. But that’s not really true. The reality of physics research is that there are physicists who do theory, and physicists who do experiment and theory. Learning theory is unavoidable if you want to do experiments, because you have to understand what the experiment means and evaluate the data in terms of some model. I think the physicists who do experiments declare themselves as experimentalists because that’s what distinguishes them form someone who works solely on theory (and, to be fair, theory work by the theorists can go into more far depth with really hairy math and get just plain weird, as long as they don’t have to worry about how to come up with a test for it). The misconception the new student might have, that if s/he’s going to work in a lab then theory can be ignored, is a setup for difficulties down the road.
It's Not All Glamour
[S]top trying to make a bong out of a damn Pert Plus bottle and pay attention you undergrad noobs, I’m about to drop some grad school economics on you.
Alternate version, via an MIT professor: Girlfriend, car, hobby. Pick one.
I bit the bullet and shared a house with two other grad students for four of the six years I was in school. Rode my bike or walked to school on weekdays when parking permits were required. Tutored for beer money.
Perhaps Someone Should Base a Thesis on This
The disposable academic. (Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time)
I think the article suffers from several flaws — the premise is based on the contention that the only legitimate reason to obtain a PhD is to get an academic position and/or to earn a lot of money.
There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings. Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things.
The notion that a doctorate is training for academia is contradicted by the various stories I hear about how graduate school never trains you how to teach. In science, at least, the main thrust of graduate school is to teach you how to do research.
Also, the author contradicts his own idea, because if the only reason for a PhD is to get a position in academia, why should the wants and desires of the business world matter? I suspect that the skills the business world wants is as a lab technician, with the capabilities of someone who can do research but without the financial burden of paying someone who has a doctorate. Someone with the capabilities of a PhD but without the ambition to get the degree..
In some subjects the premium for a PhD vanishes entirely. PhDs in maths and computing, social sciences and languages earn no more than those with master’s degrees. The premium for a PhD is actually smaller than for a master’s degree in engineering and technology, architecture and education. Only in medicine, other sciences, and business and financial studies is it high enough to be worthwhile. Over all subjects, a PhD commands only a 3% premium over a master’s degree.
What this fails to note is that there is some work that you will only be able to do is you have a PhD. While you might not get paid more, there’s the chance that it will be more interesting and/or fulfilling. There are people who do what they do because they like doing it.
Proponents of the PhD argue that it is worthwhile even if it does not lead to permanent academic employment. Not every student embarks on a PhD wanting a university career and many move successfully into private-sector jobs in, for instance, industrial research. That is true; but drop-out rates suggest that many students become dispirited. In America only 57% of doctoral students will have a PhD ten years after their first date of enrolment. In the humanities, where most students pay for their own PhDs, the figure is 49%.
Here the author fails to note that the graduation rate of undergraduate degrees is about the same — in 2008, 57.2% of college students had completed their degree within six years of enrolling. If completion is the metric for worthiness, then a bachelor’s degree is just as worthless.
The decision to get a PhD should be made based on knowing the facts. If you want to go on to be a professor and do research at a major university, you should know that the odds are against you, and shame on anyone who tries and misrepresent those job prospects. You should know whether you stand to make more money with the degree. But it’s just irresponsible to pretend that there are no other reasons to choose such a career path.
I Know What You Did Last Friday
200 students admit cheating after professor’s online rant
“I don’t want to have to explain to your parents why you didn’t graduate, so I went to the Dean and I made a deal. The deal is you can either wait it out and hope that we don’t identify you, or you can identify yourself to your lab instructor and you can complete the rest of the course and the grade you get in the course is the grade you earned in the course.”
…
So far more than 200 students have admitted to cheating.
UCF cheating scandal makes national news, on ‘Good Morning America’
It’s a 15-minute video, so the short version: the professor noticed a bimodal score distribution (rather than the expected normal distribution), with the average a grade and a half higher than usual. And then an anonymous student dropped off a copy of the entire exam bank, saying that it was in wide distribution.
I think the professor bluffed a bit when he told the students that he could hand in a list with 95% probability that all the cheaters were on it, which is probably true, and would shortly be able to hand in a list that only contained the cheaters, which is probably false. The list with all the cheaters would just be a list with all the high grades, which deviated from a normal distribution — the high-end part of the bimodal distribution. (You might not incorporate a few at the low end, but I’m guessing there isn’t much of a worry about a student who couldn’t pull better than a “C” while having the test questions ahead of time.) The problem is in identifying the cheaters with no false positives. That means not including anyone who legitimately got a high grade, and I don’t see how you can conclusively do that. But tossing the test makes a lot of that moot, since nobody gains an advantage from the cheating.
An interesting and scary scenario is what happens if the university decides someone who didn’t come forward is a cheater. What do you do if you’re that student, and you didn’t cheat?
The part about the incident not appearing on the transcript might have been a smokescreen as well. Would you hire a business grad from UCF who took this class in Fall 2010 and also had the four-hour ethics class on their transcript?
However, some information is missing, and I’m not entirely convinced this is cheating. It’s an advantage to know what questions might be asked, but whether that’s an unfair advantage (i.e cheating) depends on how you came across that information. The course had been given for several years and presumably at other institutions, so it’s possible questions were re-used. How many of them were “in the wild?”. Gathering up old exams to be used as a study guide is perfectly legitimate as far as I’m concerned; professors have to be profoundly naive to think that wouldn’t happen (and is why exams were treated as restricted material when I was teaching in the navy). The real issue here is how the students came to have the bank of exam questions and where you draw the line of coming by that information legitimately.
It's Like Building a Bridge
Uncertain Principles: Physics Is All About Analogies
I’ve got a little speech about this that I give when I talk about simple harmonic oscillators in the intro mechanics class, that I started giving because I got sick of the students giving me pitying looks when I went on about masses on springs. Because, really, who gives a damn about masses on springs?
Of course, any physicist knows that the reason we spend time talking about masses on springs is not because masses on springs are inherently fascinating, but because so many systems that are interesting can be made to look like masses on springs. That is, there is an analogy to be made between the behavior of a really simple system that we can solve exactly (the mass-on-a-spring problem) and much more complicated systems that we would really like to be able to solve exactly.
This goes along with Every Problem Looks Like a Nail, my link to brief comment on an xkcd cartoon: To first order, everything is an harmonic oscillator.
In science, we build models. Analogies are pre-fab models, based on an already-existing floor plan. Or, in the Feynman context of discussing magnets
I really can’t do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else that you’re more familiar with, because I don’t understand it in terms of anything else you’re more familiar with.
to put a concept in terms of concepts you do understand, and to use another analogy, it’s a bridge to a concept you understand.
Pet Peeve of the Day
The wave of pedantry continues.
How is it possible to have two midterms in one class? This bugged me when physics professors for whom I was TA-ing would do it, and I’ve seen a couple of references more recently. A MIDTERM happens in or near the MIDdle of the TERM. It’s right there in the word. As the so-called immortals of Highlander would say, “There can be only one!” If it doesn’t happen then, it’s just a regular ol’ EXAM or a TEST. At least having more than one final exam hasn’t caught on yet, as far as I’m aware.