the bad writing....it burns!

I'm grading student research papers. The good news is that this is a team-taught class, so I have someone sympathetic to share the misery with. (I think it's not so much that the students in the class were BAD, as it was that they put their papers off literally until the last minute, and in no universe can you write a good research paper by doing that).

There are awkward places (which I indicate as a big red AWK on the paper) a-plenty. And lots of "don't leave me hangin', bro!" sentences that start out one way, get lost in the middle, and then end up differently than what you expect.

It makes me sad because these folks are seniors. And by and large, they're smart people. But they just procrastinated/were over-confident on how much they could get done in a short time. And it's going to come back to hurt them.

In other news, I read a journal article yesterday (I actually read it while Helicopter Mom was trying to break into the exam room where her daughter was, so she could be SURE to tell the doctors that they needed to go out and find the dog, like those nice doctors would on "House, MD*" but not that mean sarcastic doctor, no more like the Black guy and the girl who always looks like she's going to cry....)

(*I originally typed that as "House, MF" HAH hahahahahaha.)

Anyway, this journal article. It was so bad it literally made me hurt inside. And made me almost violently angry: why did that mofo get his article published, but my MUCH BETTER AND MORE COMPLETE article get denied?

Here's what the turd did: he gave a Likert-scale survey to his class to assess whether they felt the goals of General Education had been met. Then, the next semester, he gave the same survey, except after lecturing at them about why the Gen Ed goals are important*. Then he did an ANOVA on the data.** And SHAZAM! the scores went up.

Headdesk. And a journal saw fit to publish that.

(*Total stats FAIL #1: the classes are not going to be strictly comparable. He gives no description of the characteristics of the classes, how they might have differed, how he tried to control to make them kinda-sorta the same)

(**Total stats FAIL #2: I do not think you can actually do a parametric test on ordinal-scale data. *I* certainly never would. He should have done some other test, like Kruskal-Wallis. Or, for that matter, his experimental design sucked so hard that NO stats test could rescue it)

So I'm a bit irritated. I hate it when crap work gets rewarded by publication. Perhaps I'm in the wrong field, one where we actually expect rigor and a proper understanding of how stats work....