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Record W2134227405 · doi:10.2304/plat.2009.8.1.46

Academic Folk Wisdom: Fact, Fiction and Falderal

2009· article· en· W2134227405 on OpenAlexaff
Nicholas F. Skinner

Bibliographic record

VenuePsychology Learning & Teaching · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicAcademic integrity and plagiarism
Canadian institutionsThe King's UniversityWestern University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCheatingMathematics educationPsychologyMultiple choiceSittingSocial psychologyLinguisticsPhilosophyMedicine

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Each generation of professors and students is heir to the academic folk wisdom of its predecessor. However, empirical evidence calls several tenets of this well-intentioned legacy into question. Specifically, data presented here suggest the following iconoclastic conclusions: placing a few easy questions at the beginning of a multiple-choice examination does not build student confidence; changing the first-chosen answer to a multiple-choice question can frequently be beneficial; printing multiple-choice examinations on paper of different colours (to discourage cheating) can be disadvantageous to students; choosing ‘c’ when in doubt about an answer is not an effective multiple-choice examination strategy; students sitting in front/middle seats do not always receive the highest marks; most students are not academically dishonest; humour on examinations enhances student performance; the highest grades are not achieved in morning classes; most students do not perform considerably better on multiple-choice than essay questions (or vice versa); and, students with unusual names do not typically earn poor grades. Consequently, caution is advisable in the acceptance of apparent academic truisms.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.005
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.032
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesResearch integrity
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.998
Threshold uncertainty score0.027

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0050.032
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0030.002
Science and technology studies0.0060.032
Scholarly communication0.0090.011
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0020.005
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.002

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.031
GPT teacher head0.385
Teacher spread0.354 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations3
Published2009
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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