Damn third-years have fucked the system already!

The BBQ Pit
1

In the third year of my course at university (Psychology), we have to write our dissertation. For this, we need to come up with our own idea for a study, get it past the ethics committee, and then…well, do it and write it up. For your study, you need participants, who you need to find yourself.

This year, our course leaders decided to try a new idea. To all second and first years, they’ve given out a little pamphlet. It had room for 60 stickers. Their idea is, we take part in the studies of third year students, for which we recieve one sticker per 10 minutes we’re in the study. So, to fill up the pamphlet thing, we need to participate in 600 minutes, 10 hours worth, of studies; in any number of different ones. If we fill up our pamphlet, then in our third year we get 60 stickers to give out to second and first year students, and the whole cycle carries on; the idea being, third years will always have a good supply of people to participate in their studies, and get at least 600 minutes worth of participation. Seems a good idea to me; it’d be more difficult to get strangers to take part in studies, and other students aren’t usually motivated to take part, especially if you need them to do a task for about half an hour or longer, or need them to come back for follow-up stuff.

But because this is the first year they’ve done this, the professors have given the current third years 60 stickers for nothing, and the third years have decided to fuck the whole system up.

The third years have, for the most part, decided that they’re not going to give out stickers per ten minutes. They’re going to give out one sticker per study. So we’d need to take part in sixty different studies in order to get all of them. And we get one sticker for doing a ten minute questionnaire, or for doing an hour-long task with ten minute follow-ups for a couple of weeks.

There’s been so many complaints about this to the professors that one of them talked to us about it in a lecture; apperently, since it’s just a test, they’re going to allow us, the students, to talk about it amongst themselves and reach a compromise.

Most (not all) of the third years are being fucktards and refusing to give out any more than one sticker per person; that way, they can get a lot more participants than if they paid them per 10 minutes.

Of course, it fucks us second years ( and the first years too, but at least they’ll have next year to get stickers too, and I’d hope that my year would work this honestly) completely.

Selfish fucktards.

2

It seems to me that the data set will be rather bias since they all do psychology?

It sounds like they gave you an easier way to do things, and this didn’t work. Go back to the old way. That’s probably the reason they didn’t care. That, and course-co-ordinators like to experiment. Of course, it never works the first time, and they only correct it by the next year, in which it is too late for the guinea pigs.

3

Collectively decline to participate in any study that does not give a double ration of stickers for every ten minutes of participation, and don’t forget to post “Free Beer Party” posters throughout campus and the scummier areas of town listing the prof’s home address.

4

Um…methinks you’re **all **part of a study you didn’t sign up for. Do your teachers have clipboards and make notes at random moments during your arguments? Someone moved your cheese.

5

My (American) university made students in the general interest psychology classes like Psych 101 and a few others, take part in three studies each to pass the class. That worked out pretty well because Psych 101 was the most popular course on campus and researchers got a good cross-section of somewhat naive subjects. Maybe you could suggest something like that.

6

Ever thought that one of your professors is about to write a paper entitled “Cooperation and Competition among Individuals for a Time Delayed Reward” and submit it to someone studying the social security problem?

Or WhyNot got to my answer first.

7

Heh. You’re telling me. I recently went to one of my course co-ordinators to talk about one of our assignments. It was a very stupid assignment. He showed me his lecture he was going to give to his EDUC6000 students which detailed his “experiment”, complete with data, hypotheses, the works. Apparently, 2nd year Science students are test subjects for post-grad Education students.

8

That was the previous system; you just had to take part in a certain amount of studies in order to pass the year. There was also a lot of advertising around the campus for students on other subjects to take part, but it seems the professors are so confident of this new method that they’re not doing that this year.

And WhyNot and amarinth, i’d be pissed off if that was the case but I think i’d be pleased - at least that way we’d presumeably go back to the old system after they’re done studying us.