Tag: bergstrom

Calling Bullshit: An Appreciation

This past Tuesday, I went on a long rant about exams in general, and exams especially in the year 2020. That rant was inspired by a Twitter thread put out by Prof. Carl Bergstrom.

Now, if you happen to share my views on examinations, I’m guessing you were already likely to be a fan of Prof. Bergstrom. Today, your fandom might just go up a couple of notches. Check out the first paragraph on my favorite discovery of 2020 so far – Calling Bullshit:

The world is awash in bullshit. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Higher education rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit — and take advantage of our lowered guard to bombard us with bullshit of the second order. The majority of administrative activity, whether in private business or the public sphere, seems to be little more than a sophisticated exercise in the combinatorial reassembly of bullshit.

https://www.callingbullshit.org/

He and his collaborator on the project, Prof. Jevin West, are nothing if not thorough:

What do we mean, exactly, by bullshit and calling bullshit? As a first approximation:

Bullshit involves language, statistical figures, data graphics, and other forms of presentation intended to persuade by impressing and overwhelming a reader or listener, with a blatant disregard for truth and logical coherence.

Calling bullshit is a performative utterance, a speech act in which one publicly repudiates something objectionable. The scope of targets is broader than bullshit alone. You can call bullshit on bullshit, but you can also call bullshit on lies, treachery, trickery, or injustice.

In this course we will teach you how to spot the former and effectively perform the latter.

https://www.callingbullshit.org/

There’s a book, there’s videos of the course lectures (yes, you can earn credits for learning about bullshit), there’s a list of heuristics about detecting bullshit when it comes to interpreting visualizations, reading academic papers, and facial detection algorithms. There are case studies too!

And hey, if you insist on being politically correct (there’s merit in the argument that you shouldn’t, but hey, entirely your call) – well, they got you covered:

If you feel that the term bullsh!t is an impediment to your use of the website, we have developed a “sanitized” version of the site at callingbull.org. There we use the term “bull” instead of “bullsh!t” and avoid other profanity. Be aware, however, that some of the links go to papers that use the word bullsh*t or worse.

https://www.callingbullshit.org/FAQ.html

Some weeks ago, I promised somebody that I would come up with a lecture on demystifying statistics – and set myself the challenge of trying to come up with lecture notes without using a single equation.

As is the case with 95% of the things I really want to do, I promptly forgot all about it.

I haven’t seen all the videos yet on Calling Bullshit, but it does seem as if outsourcing this exercise – at least in part – to this fantastic website would be a really good idea.

Check out the syllabus here. A part of me is tempted to say that I would like to run this module as a summer school at GIPE, but you will remember what I said about things I really want to do.

But hey, there’s always hope, right?

Or should I be calling bullshit on myself?

On Conducting Examinations, Especially in 2020

This is less a blogpost, and more of a rant. Consider yourself warned! 🙂

This past Saturday, I cam across a most excellent Twitter thread:

https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1322369355930165248

The author, Carl Bergstrom (Wikipedia article here, University profile here) makes a detailed, reasoned argument against online proctoring of examinations, especially in 2020. In my blogpost, I’m going to riff on this Twitter thread, and some related points, and build an argument against the way we conduct examinations in Indian Universities.

To begin, watch this Sugata Mitra TED talk about education:

Just the first five minutes or so is enough for the argument I will be making today, but you really should watch the full thing. There was, as it turns out, a case for rote memorization at one point of time. But today, as Mitra says in the video, it is the computers that are the clerks. They do (and to be fair to them, they do it much better than we ever could) the job of remembering everything, so that we don’t have to.

To every single professor reading this blogpost: when was the last time you yourself spent a day working without looking up something on the internet? When was the last time you researched something, wrote something, without using your computer, or the internet on some device?

Then why do we insist on examining our students for their ability to do so, when we ourselves don’t do it? And for those of our students who are not going to get into academia, they wouldn’t last in their organizations for even an hour if they tried to work without using computers and the internet.

They would (should!) be fired for being Luddites!

And yet, to land up in that firm, they must spend the last week of their lives as a college student cooped up for three hours in a classroom without a computer, without the internet, and use pen and paper to write out the important features of xyz in abc lines.

I can’t possibly be the only one that spots the incongruity, surely?

Here, from the Twitter thread I spoke about earlier, is a picture of Bloom’s taxonomy:

Image

Read the Wikipedia article about Bloom’s taxonomy, or look carefully at the picture above. At best – and I think I am being charitable here – our question papers in higher education in India reach the evaluate stage, but certainly not create. And even that is a stretch.

Moreover, even if we somehow agree that we do indeed reach the evaluate stage, we are effectively asking students to evaluate based on their memory alone. Why?

One, won’t students write a better evaluation of whatever theory we are asking them to write about if we give them the ability to research while writing? Second – and I know this is repetitive, but still – are they ever going to write an evaluation without having access to to the internet?

In plain simple English: We train students for 25 years to get awesome at memorizing stuff, and then expect them to do well in a world which doesn’t value this skill at all.

(To be clear, some things you should remember, of course. Think of it as a spectrum – and I am not suggesting that we move to the end of the spectrum where no memorization is required. I am suggesting, however, that we are at the end of the spectrum where only memorization is required. Close enough, at any rate).

Coming specifically to this year, the year of online examinations, here’s a tweet that was quoted in Bergstrom’s thread:

There really isn’t much to say, is there? All universities the world over have sent out variations of this nightmare this year, and in some cases, repeatedly. It’s the whole null hypothesis argument all over again – we assume all students to be guilty until proven otherwise. That is, we assume everybody will cheat, and therefore force everybody to comply with ridiculously onerous rules – so as to prevent the few who might actually cheat.

And cheating, of course, being looking up stuff on the internet. The argument itself is pointless, as I have explained above, and we go to eye-popping lengths to enforce the logical outcome of this pointless argument.

Prof. Bergstrom makes the same points himself in the Twitter thread, of course:

https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1322372971730644992
https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1322375318108213248
https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1322376239164743680

This year, especially, is a good opportunity to turn what is otherwise a disaster of a situation into meaningful reform of the way we conduct examinations.

Students, parents – indeed society at large – will spot the incongruity of learning online, but being examined offline. If we, in higher education in India do not spot this incongruity and work towards changing it – well then, we will have failed.

And finally, the last tweet in the thread is something we would all do well to remember:

https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1322378737464172547