Today was a students' midthesis seminar. In our program we require this seminar when the student is about 50% done with the research for their PhD. It is such a valuable experience for the student to have to get up as often as possible and present their findings in a seminar format. They have to get comfortable with this as it will be a big part of their professional life if they want to be successful.

Just came across an article on scientific blogs:

L. Bonetta (2007) Scientists enter the blogosphere. Cell 129:443-445

Forms, forms, forms. Seems like everyone wants you to fill in their form. One comes from the group writing a big grant for the NIH needing information on how my research fits into the translational framework. This is a really big thing in funding these days - how your research is translational. A second form concerned the vacation time I have take and my technician have taken over the last 3 months. Another form circulated requesting availability for meeting with the Department Head for the annual meeting.

For the first time in quite a while I had several students complain about the final. Part of the issue is that we give 3 section exams then give a comprehensive final which is worth 50% of the grade. A fair number of the students just work to memorize all the material then forget it the day after the exam so studying the material for the final is like learning it anew. The student who wrote felt the questions were not reflective of the material. For several reasons he is wrong. First the questions for the section exam and the final are put together at the same time with 70% of the questions coming from a pool of questions used in previous exams. It is hard to imagine that all the instructors in the course chose picky questions. The second is that the exam does not have to reflect all the material. It is to test the level of their knowledge. I would argue that the level of knowledge in part of the course would be reflective of the students level of knowledge in most of the course. In the past I have looked at the exam scores for the students. In general a student who does well on one exam will do well on all of them. In general a student who does poorly on one exam will do poorly on all of them. There are of course exceptions and basing the grade on 3 section exams and a final avoids some anomalies but in general it is true.

One of the more troubling aspects of the academic life is the more corporate aspects it is taking on. The newest proposal is to assign space to departments based on a money formula - the cost of the space depends on the quality of the space and its purpose. If a Department needs more space it has to come out of their budget (already stretched by cuts in state funding). But how is a Department head going to handle the space of a faculty member who is between grants. Remove his space to save the Department money? Right now they will at least wait a while to see if the funding returns.

Ah, a great way to start a new week. My cells are contaminated so I have to start growing them again pushing this experiment back a week. My understanding was that the coordinator of the first semester of our course had an agreement with one of the faculty in this two semester course to move the lectures they gave from the second to the first semester. Turns out this is not how the faculty member who gives the lectures sees things. They of course will not deem it their responsibility to contact the course director to iron out the issues but that the course director, who already apparently thinks the issues have been addressed, should be contacting them.

Just finished another frustrating conversation with a faculty member. I had given my own evaluation form to the students for the course I run rather than rely on the online form the college uses. The response rate on the colleges' form has been dismal for a number of years. To me the problem is the number of questions they ask about each instructor. It is not a problem when a very limited number of people teach a course but this course is team taught and has about 18 instructors in total. I know if I were faced with a lengthy form to fill out I would not do it. Anyway, the form I used had 1 as the best and 5 as the worst - one question per instructor with a place for comments. I then gave an average for each instructor. This person was really perturbed that I had not used 5 as the best and 1 as the worst - they would not be able to understand the numbers if 1 were the best. The 1 to 5 had been fine with the leaders of the other two sections of the course. They were also worried about using this number for promotions when the reverse is the school norm - I did not realize until after we stopped talking that all the faculty involved were full professors and promotion was no longer an issue.