Why grade inflation is good for the GRE

You need variation to make decisions. I talked about this yesterday when I was discussing faculty evaluations. Today, I want to examine the consequences of that principle in graduate school applications.

In our department, we require students take the general Graduate Record Exam (GRE). In many places, the GRE is apparently the most important factor in deciding whether an applicant is accepted.

Now, there are good and valid arguments against standardized tests in general and the GRE in particular.^* One argument that people make against using the GRE is that undergraduate GPA should tell you everything you need to know about a prospective grad students academic chops.

The problem is that there is less and less variation in undergraduate grades.

I’m sure that most of academics in the United States have seen this chart, which shows that a few years ago, “A” become the most common grade at universities in the United States.

As grades vary less, they become less informative, and people will stop making decisions based on them. And this can only be good news for the standardized test business, like the GRE. As long as GRE scores vary a lot, people are more likely to use them to make decisions, as flawed and as imperfect as though those scores may be.


^* In our department, GRE scores are just one of several pieces of information we look at, and they are not the most important. I might talk more about our reasons for requiring the GRE some other time.

Chattin’ about STEM

Here’s an interview I did a few weeks back for our Office of Graduate Studies about our STEM graduate programs.



Not sure why my sound is so quiet on this. I was wearing a microphone and everything!

Any feedback welcome!

Personal statements and “I-don’t-know-what-is-it-but-I-like-it”

Imagine you were going to listen to a bunch of new songs. Could you tell me which songs you would like before you heard them?

You could probably make some good guesses, in broad strokes. “I like jazz, but I’m not very into country.”

But it starts to get very unpredictable at the level of individual songs? Even for my favourite artists, for songs I know well, I couldn’t tell why this song works for me so much better than that one.

There isn’t a formula to predict what songs are going to be global worldwide hits, and which ones are going to find an audience of maybe a few thousand. The small audience may love their song as passionately as the large audience loves the global hit. But the only way to tell which is which is to put it out there to the masses.

I realized today that personal statements, which we use so much for things like grad school applications, are like that for me. I can often pinpoint why I don’t like something retroactively, but I can’t easily articulate the common features in ones that I like.

This is frustrating for me as a teacher and grad program coordinator. I teach biological writing to my undergraduates, and I always have them do personal statements. It’s always the students’ favourite assignment. They find it useful. I try to help students who want to apply to grad school.

It’s as difficult to explain to people what will make a successful personal statement as it is to explain to them what will make a hit pop song. The things I can explain to people are very general – like saying, “Accordion songs are not likely to be huge hits.”

Of course, for students, it may be a revelation that they may have to put away the accordion if they want to reach a large audience. But I wonder how much more can be conveyed on the subject.

Photo by Irregular Shed on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Grad school recruitment can be alarming

Last night, we held our now annual Graduate School Fair. The idea is to have a showcase for all the university’s programs, and by doing it all at once, we can generate a bit more publicity on campus and in the general community.

I was scheduled to give one of the presentations. One of the grad school staff has just asked me if I wanted to set up my presentation, and I’d said, “I am the presentation!”

When the fire alarm started ringing. And it kept going. And we all left the building. You know, normal stuff when a fire alarm goes off.

But I wasn’t expecting a fire truck to show up.

I never did quite figure out what the problem was, but it wasn’t just a false alarm - there was apparently some smoke from somewhere.

They let everyone back in the building after half a hour - which was, coincidentally enough, exactly the allocated time for my talk.

That's right, my talk would've been so hot it set off the fire alarm.

Oh, by the way, the picture within the picture above:

“This isn't for anyone who doesn’t have tiger blood,” strikes me as a fair assessment of grad school. It was originally from the Pittsburgh Zoo blog, which since has taken it down.

Additional: Heh. The university’s coverage of the event neglects to mention the excitement of the fire truck coming to visit.

Questions posed by grad schools

If you’re applying to a grad program, here are couple of questions you might find on an application.

Describe your professional goals you hope to achieve by pursuing a graduate degree.

Translation: “What job do you want after you finish your degree?” Or, to be even more blunt: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

First sentence should be something like:

“I want to work to be a [ professor / technician / researcher / patent lawyer ] in a [ teaching university / research university / community college / state government / federal government / start-up company / pharmaceutical company ], because....”

The rest of your response should flow from that first sentence.

Here’s another question you might get.

Describe why you are interested in your chosen field of study.

This question uses sleight of hand. I think it’s what it’s trying to find out is not your reasons as much as whether you have a “chosen field of study.” It’s a subtle way of asking if you have an understanding of what is currently being researched. Are you engaged with an intellectual problem? Have you read any research literature?

That means your first sentence should be something like:

“I want to study cell biology / ecology / herpetology / evolutionary biology / animal behaviour / taxonomy / molecular biology, because...”

The more specific you can be about the field in the first sentence,
the better. For instance:

Good: “I want to study microbiology, because...”

Better: “I want to study extremophile archae that live in high temperatures, because...”

Still better: “I want to study enzyme stability of extremophile archae that live in high temperatures, which several faculty in your department work on, because...”

Grad school drama, continued

The story about the grad student who was awarded a doctorate after failing requirements has been making the rounds on Twitter. I got some interesting comments there, particularly on the nature of anxiety, with two people pointing out that not seeking help for anxiety is common, as it often develops late.

With a little more thought, here’s what I would like to have seen. I would have tried to get everyone – the student and the graduate faculty of math – to figure out what a reasonable accommodation would be, and have everyone sign off on that. Then, the student does whatever everyone agreed to. Or not.

Everything is above board, everyone has agreed, and nobody is making a unilateral decision.

I’m less certain about the decision of the university to suspend a professor objecting to all this. But it certainly doesn’t look good from a distance.

Exam anxiety + academic standards = drama!

A math graduate student doesn’t complete all his required classes. Instead, an undergrad class is allowed to substitute for a doctoral class.

The student fails the comprehensive examinations. Twice.

After failing the exams twice, the student then claims to have exam anxiety, and asks for accommodations for this disability. The University of Manitoba decides to award the student a doctorate in mathematics.

Oh wait, we haven’t even gotten to the drama yet.

Astonishingly, an assistant professor (that is, someone without who probably does not have tenure, the major mechanism in place to protect instructors from being punished for speaking their minds), Gábor Lukács, goes to court, asking that his university not award this student a doctorate.

The University of Manitoba suspended Dr. Lukács without pay for three months for insubordination.

I’m sorry, but University of Manitoba? You are in the wrong on this one, at least on the issue of the initial request for accommodation. Someone should ask for accommodation before the fact, not after it - twice. That’s the transparent thing to so. Accommodation should be limited by what is reasonable, and not be a permit to do whatever the requester wants.

The facts of the case were reported by The Current radio show, Macleans, and the National Post.

This is grad school

This series of images describing what grad school is all about. And it’s bang on target. It could still be better, though, if it were an animation, instead of a series of static images.

The downsides of meritocracy

Academia is supposed to be a meritocracy: You rise through the ranks because your work (and, by extension, you) is better than someone else’s. I think this emphasis on merit might be doing people a disservice, in a couple of ways.

The entire process de-emphasizes happenstance and luck. People chase and chase and chase after those grants and high impact publications, figuring that if they just work that much harder, they must get them. Particularly in tight financial times like these, where there are more proposals and papers submitted than can be published, you’re essentially playing a lottery. There is just no way to be that much more outstanding than all the other bright people to ensure success.

And I think this can be very demoralizing for people. Academics are usually very bright people. For much of their lives, things have often been relatively easy for them academically. They do well in school, through their undergrad degree, grad school, and so on.

But then they start reaching the point where things aren’t working as well as one would hope. They get a job at an undergrad university instead of that major research university you’ve been working towards for a decade or more. They don’t get the grant. Again. You can’t get the publications in the journals you want. And when these things happen? There’s that little niggling voice in the back of your head saying, “Well, it’s a meritocracy, so you deserve what you get. Loser.”

From reading a lot of other academic blogs, and comments thereupon, I sense that a very particular path of success in research is presented to students that utterly buys into the meritocracy model and utterly discounts the lottery-like aspects of the career.

It could impede science more generally. People could be pursuing that last experiment, that last piece of data so that they can get it in a “better” journal, rather than publishing something that is perfectly interesting in its own right for others to see. People can get to be afraid of shipping.

For a supposed left-wing institution, academia often has some of the competitive elements associated with right-wing politics.

Academic titles as lubrication

I hate formality.

It’s one of the many deep flaws in my character. This may seem strange for someone who actively puts his title in the name of his main website and uses it as part of his Twitter name, but I realize that many people like formalities much more than I do. Robert Heinlein, so often good for a quote, wrote:

Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as “empty,” “meaningless,” or “dishonest,” and scorn to use them. No matter how “pure” their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.

A little note on academic formalities, then, for students, particularly those applying to a program or a grad school.

If you don’t know if a person should be addressed as “Doctor” or not, you haven’t done your homework.

It used to be easy to claim ignorance of someone’s academic credentials, but now, it’s hard to do so. You can usually uncover people’s academic credentials with a little Google stalking, particularly for people running programs.

Not everyone insists on being addressed by their title. I don’t (see above). But still, correct use of titles can be a signpost for several things.

One of my colleagues, who had a doctorate, told me that students – almost invariably male students – would refer to her as “Miss” or “Ma’am,” but would then turn around and refer to a male instructor as, “Doctor.” Even after this was pointed out to them. These were cases of macho bullshit, as far as we could tell.

And another thing, students: Never use “Dear Sir or Madame” in your email to your potential supervisor. If you can’t even figure out whether I’m a man or a woman, I sure as hell don’t want you in my lab.

As a gleeful thrower of sand, I never insist on formality. As a scientist, though, I almost always insist on accuracy.

Photo by russelljsmith on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Why is this taking so long?

Are American scientists twice as good as British scientists?

Because the Americans are spending about twice as long working on the doctorates then the Brits are.

DrugMoney said the length of a doctorate has fluctuated from five and a half to seven years. I asked if this was U.S. data, but haven’t seen an answer yet. Those kind of numbers are also typical of Canada, too.

But the typical length of a doctorate in the U.K. is about three years. That kind of length is typical for Australia, too.

DrugMonkey also said:

I'm willing to accept that 4 years may be too short of an interval(...)

I’m not willing to accept that. Because I don’t automatically think my colleagues who got degrees in other countries with shorter doctorates are crummy half-rate scientists.

I didn’t exactly rush to finish my own degree (I was pretty happy as a graduate student, and I had a lot to learn), but I don’t think that the expectation that a degree should take that the better part of a decade is healthy. It reminds of the report I talked about before that talked about “maintaining incentives for entry into scientific careers as the training phase extends” rather than shortening the training phase.

The disconnect between policy and ground truth was represented in a recent presentation to some U.S. lawmakers. Not surprisingly, they didn’t know what things are like for incoming scientists:

The members of Congress seemed surprised and, according to Miller, “deeply concerned” and “disappointed” by this and other testimony – which indicates how effectively the viewpoints of the research universities and today's established scientists have dominated the discussion and how little attention tomorrow's scientists' concerns have received.

The lawmakers, two of them UC alumni, all expressed chagrin. Miller in particular seemed flummoxed by Tyler’s presentation. He mentioned briefly that what she revealed appeared to contradict the widely assumed scientist shortage. “It’s almost as if we’re toying with some of the brightest, most talented, and skilled people in our society,” he mused in dismay.

As far as I can tell, the length of expected training for scientists before they can start an independent research career – particularly post-docs – has very little to do with actual amount of training to be done, and a lot more with the strangled job market for researchers.

Photo by ATIS547 on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Places versus programs versus people

When I talk to students about how to pick a graduate program, I usually tell them to find “The guy.” ^* Find the person who is the best in the world at the kind of research you want to do, and who is a reasonable person for you to work with.

Now, “the guy” might be in a place you have never heard of. This, to my way of thinking, should not matter. Grad school is about personal relationships, not bricks and mortar.

At least, that’s what I’ve thought. But lately, I’ve had a gnawing worry about whether this is the right strategy.

At the undergraduate level, I was disappointed to read how much the average starting salaries differ for university graduates in the United States. As I started to think about the intangible factors that lead to scientific success, I went back to the list of some prominent scientists in an earlier post.

• Carl Sagan: Pulitzer Prize winning book The Dragons of Eden published in 1978. Degree from University of Chicago, worked for Harvard and Cornell.
• Stephen Jay Gould: Breakthrough paper on punctuated equilibrium published in 1972. Graduate work at Columbia and worked at Harvard.
• E.O. Wilson: Breakthrough book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis published in 1975. Degree from, and worked at Harvard.
• Richard Dawkins: Breakthrough book The Selfish Gene published in 1976. Degrees from, and worked at Oxford.
• David Attenborough: Major television series Life on Earth debuted in 1979. Degree from Cambridge.
• David Suzuki: Began as host of The Nature of Things in 1979. Degree from University of Chicago, worked at UBC.

Call me suspicious, but I see a fairly small cluster of institutions in these sorts of lists. It almost feels like people are only willing to let scientists from certain places be “prominent.”

Have I been wrong all this time? Should a student looking to go to graduate school just find the most “famous” school they possibly can, and consider who they might work with as an afterthought?

* “The guy” might well be a woman. I think “guy” can be almost gender neutral, but tell me if I’m wrong.

No postdoc? No problem!

Professor in Training tries to warn people starting tenure-track what they’re in for (second installment here). Unsurprisingly, the first two points both revolve around money, and a big chunk of that concerns postdocs.

For those of you who one day hope to be tenure-track, have you thought about what you can do if you can’t have postdocs?

Your first response might be, “I wouldn’t take a job where I couldn’t have a postdoc.” Are you sure you want to limit your opportunities that much? Especially in the current economy?

You can survive and conduct research without postdocs, but you have to think about it. It’s very helpful to have ideas for $5 projects in your pocket as well as $50,000 projects. There’s a lot of research that can be done with time and elbow grease instead of big bucks.

Undergraduates can be awesome in the lab. The trick is to recruit them early, in their first year. That way, you have the potential to work with someone for three or four years. Still, you can get a lot of good work with people who are around for a year.

There are programs a-plenty to support undergraduate researchers, both financially and intellectually. Beta Beta Beta publishes a journal of undergraduate research. If the work with an undergrad student goes well, some might stay for graduate work.

Institutions that don’t have postdocs are also unlikely to have doctoral programs, but there are often master’s programs. Master’s students have more experience, but the turnover rate is often faster than for undergraduates. There are also far fewer funding opportunities than for undergraduates or doctoral students.

Big labs in big universities train so many people that they get to think that those are the one and only model for scientific success. That does not need to be the only way to do research.

Are they finally going to get serious about grad school here?

The Austin American-Statesman reports this morning on the push for more higher educational institutions in our area of southern Texas. The University of Texas system might be leading the push (Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa pictured).

The headline is about prospects for a medical school, which always occupies a significant (I dare say occasionally disproportionate) amount of everyone’s attention.

But I’m much more interested in statements like this:

UT System officials also will consider expanding programs in science, technology, engineering and math – the so-called STEM fields that state officials have deemed a high priority – at the Valley's two public universities, UT-Brownsville and UT-Pan American.

I’m a little leery of the wussy wording. They’ll “consider” expanding programs? I think I agree with the president of our neighbour university:

Juliet García, UT-Brownsville president, welcomes the attention.

"The chancellor has put us on the radar screen in a very big way before the regents, and we're very pleased with that," she said. ...

She said expanding those programs would require additional state appropriations — hardly a sure thing in a time of tight budgets.

It is nice to hear the encouraging words, but I worry about “unfunded mandates.”

Let’s get personal

The Dr. Jekyll & Mrs. Hyde blog had a quite good post on writing personal statements.

There’s a tricky thing about personal statements: It’s almost impossible to find good and bad examples of them. Because personal statements are part of competitive applications for programs or positions, they’re confidential, and rightfully so. It’s almost impossible to see how other people do them.

Thus, people don’t have an easy way to learn that something that is highly important to them personally – like having seen a close relative struggle with illness – is not that unusual. It’s easy for a professor or administrator to joke about the “grandmother story” being a cliché, but someone trying to write a personal statement for the first time has no easy way of knowing that their story is common.

The moral, for someone trying to write a personal statement, is to find someone who reads them regularly and get feedback before you send it off to that big program you’re interested in.

Overqualified

Sincere question, not rhetorical.

How and when and, for goodness’ sake, why did “overqualified” become a reason to turn someone away from employment?

This is starting to bother me a lot. I mean, I help run a Masters program, and am advisor on a major grant to create graduate opportunities for Hispanics, am the lead on one undergraduate research program and participate in another.

But I have my doubts. Reading things like this or this... don’t help.

The concept of “overqualified” just gnaws away at the whole reason for those programs. Not just ours, but nationally. Internationally.

How are you going to create a technically skilled work force in a society when there’s a threat that that very training can be held against them?

I understand that when there are too many applications too read, you’ve got to cut something somewhere. But it seems to me that, “Oh, they’ll just leave when the economy is better” is short-sighted. This is a fantastic opportunity to get amazingly smart people in your company. Imagine the energy and talent a hiring business could recruit today if it said, “nobody is overqualified.” Even if they do leave, you’ll probably have a better company at the end than when you started.

Somehow, I can’t help but think that what’s really leading to the concept of “overqualified” is that an employer doesn’t want an employee smarter than they are. Too likely to upset delicate workplace power relationships. Or something.

I clearly don’t get it.

$1.75 million dollars

My institution just put up a press release was just issued concerning the Title V grant I mentioned almost two weeks ago.

Graduate School awarded $1.75 million to transform graduate education - UTPA News

I should explain that the shirt was not in reference to the grant. It was the promo shirt made my the Office of Graduate Studies to promote all the graduate programs here. I joked with Sylvia (right) during the photo shoot that I was “appearing in uniform.”

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Face it: Being a scientist can really suck

There’s a refreshingly honest quote in this blog post, to which I’ve added some emphasis:

“People were questioning why there weren’t more women in science, and I had to point out that we are not going to be banging down the doors to enter a profession that just sounds so awful,” said Wu, who just completed her doctorate at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke.

The article goes on to talk about the importance of peers, time management, and stereotype threat, all the while ignoring the elephant in the room:

Science careers don’t have a lot going for them.

We have this weird Jekyll and Hyde relationship with young scientists. We tell them over and over that we want more people to enter technical careers. But then we sip the potion, and unleash upon them academic hazing rituals that go on for over a decade.

As another example, I just read an article by Villarejo and colleagues that looked at the development of students’ career interests and decisions. There’s much to be learned in this study, but there is an interesting moment. Here, the authors are Dr. Jekyll:

One novel finding of this study that deserves attention is that many individuals who chose careers as biomedical Ph.D.s had serious misgivings about the practical disadvantages of their career choice, in terms of balancing work and family and the financial insecurity they see as endemic to a career as a science researcher. Although they persevered despite these concerns, the same characteristics repelled others.

Now watch them sip the potion in the very next sentence...

Future studies should explore the personal characteristics that allow some individuals to pursue research careers despite the obvious drawbacks.

Suddenly, BAM! You’re dealing with Mr. Hyde!

Rather than what you might think would be a message to try to address real, recognized problem problems with the scientific career path, they argue for doing a better job of selecting the brave and crazy who succeed by pushing through the pain barrier.

It’s crazy.

The paper lists things that made science careers unappealing:

• Difficulty of getting a good job


• Other jobs pay better


• Getting a Ph.D. takes too long


• Lack of sensitivity to family concerns

No real surprises in that list.

BenchFly blog had a very similar take on completion rates for doctoral programs:

From the statistics, the article goes on to conclude:

“These data underscore the need to pick a graduate school wisely.”

REALLY?! That’s what those data mean? Not, why have less than 60% of students obtained a Ph.D. in under a decade?! Not is a 24 to 34% dropout rate acceptable?! ...

(I)n the bigger picture, this feels like a doctor telling a boxer “The solution for your headaches is Alleve” instead of “stop getting punched in the head.”

The problem with fixing this problem is that it’s about widespread cultural assumptions, which are invisible to most people. It’s like asking back in the 1950s, “How do you make sexism go away?” Many people then wouldn’t agree that it was a problem.

People who want to be scientists are not stupid.

Students in research labs look around them. They don’t see prospects for a lot of money for them. They see post docs in holding patterns, eking out a low pay existence. They see supervisors who spend huge amounts of time writing and administering grants, not doing science. And, perhaps more than anything else, they see people working their arms to the bone.

If anyone is being stupid, it some of us who are in the field now, since we seem to be the ones who are unwilling and unable to acknowledge this.

Additional: Lest you think all is gloomy, make sure to check out the follow-up post.

Reference

Villarejo, M., Barlow, A., Kogan, D., Veazey, B., & Sweeney, J. (2008). Encouraging Minority Undergraduates to Choose Science Careers: Career Paths Survey Results Cell Biology Education, 7 (4), 394-409 DOI: 10.1187/cbe.08-04-0018

V for victory... and five... and an old 80s SF series...

I’m the grad program coordinator for my department. I spend a lot of time trying to improve our grad program.

That task might have gotten a bit easier this week.

My university has received a big, chunky Department of Education grant to create graduate opportunities for Hispanic students. It’s a Title V grant (hence the post title). I will probably have my fingers fairly deep for that program for the next few years, I think.

The picture? Just amazed that people thought V was worth redoing. I doubt anyone will be able to match Diana’s fantastic bitchiness (wonderfully played by Jane Badler, R).

Perpetuating the cycle

Here’s a questions that prospective grad students and post docs might want to ask prospective supervisors.

“How did you get along with your main supervisor during your Ph.D.?”

Because patterns tend to repeat. You know the old saying that children of alcoholics, children in abusive home, are the ones most at risk of becoming alcoholics or abusers. I suspect that many people mentor their students the way they themselves were mentored, whether consciously or not.