Blog Period 3 results

Well, we made it. The blog is done.

gradesBlog Period 3 results: We had 167 no-shows, over half the class. A further 34 didn’t do enough to pass. Among those who did, the average was 77.3% (C+). Under my best-of-three-blog-periods grade algorithm, it is always a little hard to know what to make of the grades for the third and final period. The students who participate include those trying to improve their grades from previous blog periods. They are typically going for gold. And then there are a ton of students who are participating for the first time, so they have not had any feedback on previous work and worse, being procrastinators, many of them leave it till the end of the period before they start doing anything. We had some shamefully bad first attempts just hours before the deadline. Sigh.

Still, there were some posts I really enjoyed. Students unhappy with their grade (or indeed other things), might try forcing a smile. Much to my surprise, birth control provides fertile (groan) grounds for a discussion of confirmation bias, and reading real paper might be better than reading screens if you want to learn stuff. And if you are germ phobic, it’s better to touch the toilet than anything else in a public bathroom. A post on zombies contained material I had not known of — and used in class. There is also a great post about a hugely important topic: that your health might be massively affected by your social status. I think that will become one of the biggest issues in employment law one day. Workplace health and safety was once ignored; now it’s literally top of the agenda. But almost no one gets hurt by the stuff that involves. Instead, people get hurt if they are not fairly promoted. On a more cheerful note, I enjoyed learning about grocery store hunger and there was a nice discussion of what seems like obvious nonsense to me: a device you pour your wine through which allegedly stops hangovers. Sign me up for a randomized control trial of that. Though not if I have to pay $80 for the damn thing. As Valerie pointed out, you can buy several bottles of wine for that.

You can buy ten times more wine for $800. That’s the scale of the bill I was sent for my last annual medical check up. There was nothing wrong with me before I went and nothing after. But there was a lot wrong with the doctor who ordered a whole lot of tests my insurance company did not think I needed and even more wrong with the ever exasperating Mt Nittany Health who simply can not do billing properly. So I much enjoyed a post summarizing the evidence that annual check-ups are a waste of time when you’re well (the idea that healthy people need them is a myth put about by physicians). Michael even explains how to get a check-up for free. I wonder how many tests I would set if I got money each time a student took a test. And how high blog scores would be if I got paid each time I awarded an A. But I don’t. So:

The overall grade distribution was: A, 2; A-, 10; B+, 8; B, 11; B-, 21; C+, 24; C, 15; D, 27; Fail, 34.

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