Grade Inflation under the Threat of Students' Nuisance: Theory and Evidence

This study examines a channel, students’ nuisance, to explain grade inflation. “Students’ nuisance†is defined by “students’ pestering the professors for better grades.†This paper contains two parts: the game theoretic model and the empirical tests. The model shows that the potential threat of students’ nuisance can induce the professors to inflate grades. Ceteris paribus, a student is more likely to study little and to pester the professor for a better grade if: 1. the professor is lenient; 2. the studying cost is high; 3. the reward from pestering is high; 4. the cost of pestering is low. My original survey data show that 70%+ of professors think that students’ nuisance is “annoying†and “costly in terms of time, effort, and energy.†Regression results indicate that themore the student values the grade, the higher the studying cost, and the more likely the student is to pester the professor.Grade inflation; Grade exaggeration; Students' nuisance

Parallel programming using functional languages

It has been argued for many years that functional programs are well suited to parallel evaluation. This thesis investigates this claim from a programming perspective; that is, it investigates parallel programming using functional languages. The approach taken has been to determine the minimum programming which is necessary in order to write efficient parallel programs. This has been attempted without the aid of clever compile-time analyses. It is argued that parallel evaluation should be explicitly expressed, by the programmer, in programs. To do achieve this a lazy functional language is extended with parallel and sequential combinators. The mathematical nature of functional languages means that programs can be formally derived by program transformation. To date, most work on program derivation has concerned sequential programs. In this thesis Squigol has been used to derive three parallel algorithms. Squigol is a functional calculus from program derivation, which is becoming increasingly popular. It is shown that some aspects of Squigol are suitable for parallel program derivation, while others aspects are specifically orientated towards sequential algorithm derivation. In order to write efficient parallel programs, parallelism must be controlled. Parallelism must be controlled in order to limit storage usage, the number of tasks and the minimum size of tasks. In particular over-eager evaluation or generating excessive numbers of tasks can consume too much storage. Also, tasks can be too small to be worth evaluating in parallel. Several program techniques for parallelism control were tried. These were compared with a run-time system heuristic for parallelism control. It was discovered that the best control was effected by a combination of run-time system and programmer control of parallelism. One of the problems with parallel programming using functional languages is that non-deterministic algorithms cannot be expressed. A bag (multiset) data type is proposed to allow a limited form of non-determinism to be expressed. Bags can be given a non-deterministic parallel implementation. However, providing the operations used to combine bag elements are associative and commutative, the result of bag operations will be deterministic. The onus is on the programmer to prove this, but usually this is not difficult. Also bags' insensitivity to ordering means that more transformations are directly applicable than if, say, lists were used instead. It is necessary to be able to reason about and measure the performance of parallel programs. For example, sometimes algorithms which seem intuitively to be good parallel ones, are not. For some higher order functions it is posible to devise parameterised formulae describing their performance. This is done for divide and conquer functions, which enables constraints to be formulated which guarantee that they have a good performance. Pipelined parallelism is difficult to analyse. Therefore a formal semantics for calculating the performance of pipelined programs is devised. This is used to analyse the performance of a pipelined Quicksort. By treating the performance semantics as a set of transformation rules, the simulation of parallel programs may be achieved by transforming programs. Some parallel programs perform poorly due to programming errors. A pragmatic method of debugging such programming errors is illustrated by some examples

The Effect of Controllability Beliefs on Attitudes about Weight and Socioeconomic Status

Many studies have shown that weight and socioeconomic status are related, such that people of low socioeconomic status are much more likely to be obese than people of high socioeconomic status (Drewnowski, 2009; Ljungvall & Zimmerman, 2012; Pudrovska, Reither, Logan, & Sherman-Wilkins, 2014; J Sobal & Stunkard, 1989; Jeffery Sobal, 1991). Additionally, people are biased against both the poor (John-Henderson, Jacobs, Mendoza-Denton, & Francis, 2013; Williams, 2009) and the obese (Puhl, Andreyeva, & Brownell, 2008). Through two empirical studies, I investigated the relationship between people’s attitudes about weight and people’s attitudes about socioeconomic status. In study 1, which was conducted with an online sample, participants were asked to estimate the socioeconomic status of people of different weights, races, and genders. Results showed that participants rated fat targets as significantly less educated and significantly less wealthy than thin targets. Study 2, conducted with an undergraduate sample at Bard College, examined whether general beliefs about controllability affected attitudes about weight and socioeconomic status. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions (controllable, uncontrollable, or neutral), in which they read a passage that primed them into thinking about controllability. Participants then completed a series of implicit and explicit measures about their attitudes and beliefs about weight and socioeconomic status. There was a nonsignificant trend that, in the controllable condition, implicit attitudes about weight and socioeconomic status were more highly correlated than in the uncontrollable and neutral conditions

Public Confidence in the Judiciary: Some Notes and Reflections

Persons with intellectual disability have been found to perform more poorly on tasks, demanding the use of executive functions like planning, than their peers. This study investigated difficulties with planning, and how problems with planning ability can be supported by using cognitive artifacts to help performance on activities in everyday life, for adolescents with intellectual disability. The approach taken is one of situated cognition, where the natural environment plays a big role, to see if the same difficulties arise as results from traditional research has shown. The traditional view focuses a lot on executive functions, and experimental studies in controlled settings and often suggests interventions and practice of certain functions to get better abilities. Another way is to focus on the use of cognitive artifact, to support problematic abilities, and to get a well-rounded understanding of how the problems actually appear in everyday life, the alternative view of situated cognition is a way to go. The data was gathered through interviews and surveys with the individual’s parents and analyzed through categorization and a repeated measures ANOVA, with a bonferroni corrected post hoc test. Results show several problematic areas, and that there is a difference in how problematic these areas are estimated to be when it comes to planning in everyday situations. It is discussed how the natural contexts helps knowing what planning really means for the group, as well as how it can help finding properties in cognitive artifacts that can help raise the level of independence in planning related tasks

Parenting Styles, Effortful Control, and Academic Outcomes among Chinese Adolescents: The Mediating Effect of Activation Control

The present study examined the associations between parenting styles and adolescents’ academic performance, with a specific focus on examining the mediating role of activation control among Chinese adolescents. A framework of Chinese parenting style, which consists of three dimensions, rejection, emotional warmth, and over-protection, was utilized to predict activation control and academic outcomes. Structural models were fitted with the data collected from a Chinese sample of adolescents aged 15 to 17 years. Parenting styles were found to be associated with children’s activation control skills and academic outcomes. Activation control skills were found to be beneficial for promoting educational attainment expectation and reducing school work difficulties. The present study also indicates that in some cases activation control mediates the association between parental over-protection and experiencing school work difficulties. The findings of the present study reinforce previous research by demonstrating the importance of Chinese-specific parenting approaches and by identifying the importance of activation control in the Chinese cultural context

Partitioning non-strict languages for multi-threaded code generation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1994.Includes bibliographical references (p. 107-109).by Satyan R. Coorg.Ph.D