Interesting Links for 31-05-2022

[andrewducker]

1. "My students cheated... A lot"

(tags:cheating university teaching viaSwampers )

2. Do the studios care about fandom?

(tags:fandom TV neilgaiman )

3. Scotland outstrips Europe and UK on inward investment

(tags:Scotland investment GoodNews )

4. FactCheck: does gun control work?

(tags:guns regulation usa )

5. Some lovely things that The Queen has done

(tags:UK monarchy OhForFucksSake corruption )

6. Wil Wheaton: Yes, i was forced to be a child star. it was never my dream or my idea.

(tags:wilwheaton acting children abuse )

7. Long Covid: Why women could be twice as likely to suffer as men

(tags:pandemic women health )

8. The Death of the Sit-Up

(tags:exercise history )

9. Abolish the monarchy!

(tags:politics monarchy uk )

Comments

[ninetydegrees]

#1 tl;dr Who recycles their quiz questions and not expect students to ask fellow students for answers? (which isn't cheating in my book btw)

#4 interesting but I think a better comparison would be with countries with tougher or loser gun control laws and what other differences exist to make tougher or loser gun control laws lead to fewer deaths (let's say Japan and Switzerland for example). Like ties between politicians and pro-gun organizations and weapon industries, the presence of a heavily armed police which kills citizens with impunity, the existence of several armed militia-type groups, the overwhelming production of media where weapons, violence and idolized law-breaking vigilantes are often prominently featured, the refusal to redefine an outdated constitution, etc. The US have a long road ahead of them if they want to change things.

[andrewducker]

Of course getting the answers to a quiz is cheating!
The point of the quiz is to prove your understanding, not to copy answers from someone else!

[ninetydegrees]

Nope, that's being smart, just in a different way. None of my fellow teachers would grade students this way and expect them not to help each other. It's like giving the exact same test to different classes on different days and not expect the second class to ask the first one what the questions on the test and were and learn all the answers by heart. If you really want to see if the students have read and understood the material, simple quizzes with recycled questions aren't the way to go. It's lazy testing and, in my country, a mistake only something some very inexperienced teachers would do.

[andrewducker]

Expecting them to cheat is fair enough. But on a test that they've been explicitly told is about individual knowledge working together is cheating.

[ninetydegrees]

You can't be a teacher and only count on good faith. This isn't how it works. It's your job to make sure that the way you're grading your students is going to evaluate exactly what you want to evaluate. This guy was being very naive but he'll know better now and do things differently, hopefully.

[qilora]

"8. The Death of the Sit-Up"

you will laugh at me but my favorite exercise is when i pace my master's bedroom (power-pacing) for about 45 min a night..

[andrewducker]

Oh yeah, I agree that he was naive. And frankly the university should have been giving better guidance (and possibly auditing to ensure that it wasn't so easy for the students to cooperate!)

[andrewducker]

Master's bedroom?

And I'd get very bored with that, but whatever works for you

[qilora]

a faux-pas, i meant to type "master"

and as for the pacing, it is a bit dull, but i have a neuromuscular disease and need to make sure that i am arm's reach in front of the dresser drawers when i walk...

[andrewducker]

Needs must! I'm glad you've found something that works for you.

[adrian_turtle]

This was an open-book/open-note quiz. The distinction between that and a quiz where you're allowed to look stuff up on the internet can be unclear.

[fub]

A very high number of professional certification exams do exactly this. There is a pool of questions, and your exam consists of a (sometimes personalized) 'random' set of questions from this pool. There are often mock exams freely available that either draw from (a subset of) the same pool, or a pool of similar questions.

[ninetydegrees]

This is different in my country, but it's not a problem if you don't expect people not to learn answers by heart beforehand in any way they want. Just don't complain that it's cheating afterwards.

[qilora]

some happies are happening for me during this past year... i came across talk online about experiments with "amino acid" therapy for folks with CMT, and found talk about how our main problems is that we are deficient in particular amino acids because we have a problem having enough enzymes...

i can't remember ANY of the names they mentioned, but as soon as they said "amino acids" and "enzymes" the FIRST thing i thought of was "sprouts"! haha

so now i eat an *insane* amount of sprouts every day (about 2 cups of)... 1 cup with lunch and 1 cup with dinner... its like i am eating 2 salads that are NOTHING but sprouts.. it sounds insane but for at least 3 decades i have been slowly losing feeling and mobility in my body and during the past year that loss (at first) stopped.. and for the past 6 months (at least) i have been getting the feeling back in my hands and feet...

i have no idea how far this will go, but to just STOP all of the feeling loss, and being able to stay "awake" all day long, is a freakin' miracle to me. <3 bs"d!

[andrewducker]

That's amazing! Hopefully at some point they'll have better information and you can eat a wider range of things, or take a pill, or they'll find a cure. But for now, that's a hell of a lot better than nothing!

[qilora]

i just took these pics so you can see what i am doing... the bin that is sitting on the kitchen table, will be there for a couple hours to "green" itself and then i put the sprouts in a baggie in the fridge... i eat one half in the afternoon and the other half at night (i guessed it was 1 cup per)...

the bins stacked up next to the sink, every day i put a new bin of seeds at the top of the stack and take the bottom bin out to eat on that day...

[anef]

That is so great! Sprouts FTW! I hope it continues well for you.