My methodology professor was kind enough to schedule our midterm today,
So when I sat down this morning at about 10:20 to take on this test, I was more than prepared. The only thing I felt concerned about was time – it looked long and detailed and was certain to involve a lot of analytical writing and interpretations of tables, studies and models. My strategic priority here was to simply make sure I did not get bogged down in an earlier, simpler section, and then get fucked later on in the test by something more complicated.
Glancing through the few pages before I began, I saw that there were two different studies we had to interpret – after defining and explaining the significance of about ten different terms. One study was just a paragraph describing what a researcher had done; the second study was presented simply as a regression table.
Thinking I had a lot on my plate, I immediately set to work, writing down definitions as fast as I could, my sloppy handwriting smothering the page like a mud slide, my hand getting a bit stiff and needing some shaking about half way through. When I finally finished explaining the terms, I had 40 minutes left – half of the class period, right on schedule, hypothetically at least.
But I was still nervous. I had to read a few paragraphs describing some study about the variables which determine a country’s currency value, and below that were about 8 different short answer questions. I read quickly, scribbling some notes in the margin as I proceeded, trying to anticipate some of the questions. Once I felt I understood what I had read, I got started with my answers.
Question 1 seemed easy enough, but I was confused a bit by its wording. Question 2 was equally straight forward. And then it all went downhill.
Questions started asking me which variables were statistically significant. They asked me to name the control variables used in the study. They asked me to list threats to internal and external validity. Now, don’t get me wrong – having studied all weekend, I understood perfectly what these questions were asking me to do. But my answers still somehow seemed utterly wrong and confused – I found myself writing down things like “We don’t know whether the variable is statistically significant, because she gives us no information to assess this.”
“Why the fuck would he be asking these questions,” I thought, “when there is no table to get the numbers or control variables from?” I must have been doing something wrong, I thought. That, or he was trying to trick us – asking us for control variables when no control variables existed.
Yes! That must be it! When he asks, “List the control variables,” we are supposed to say, “There are no control variables – hence the whole study is garbage.” So that’s what I wrote – or something like it. What else could I do? There was no way to answer these questions – there was no information pertaining to control variables, no information pertaining to statistical significance, no information pertaining to external validity, sample size, coefficients or standard errors. Nothing. The whole study was flawed!
“He’s trying to trick us!”
But I was not comfortable. I didn’t have much time left. I felt I had done something wrong. I was not convinced that I had actually beat him at his own sneaky little game of trying to deceive us. And let’s not forget – I still had a second study to analyze on the next page, this one presented as a table of various variables and their corresponding coefficients, standard errors, t-scores, the works.
I flipped the page.
“Fifteen minutes you guys!” shouted my professor, updating the countdown on the board.
I looked at the table and the questions below it. They seemed vaguely related to the study I had just read a few paragraphs about. Even the author of the table was identical to the author of the study I had just analyzed, the study I had just so ruthlessly condemned as flawed. I stared at it for a moment, trying to push a terrible thought out of my mind. But no amount of logic could defeat the inevitable conclusion.
The table contained all the information I needed to answer the eight questions that I had already answered with entire paragraphs on the previous page. There was only one study, not two."Use the regression table on the next page to answer the questions below," the directions which I had not read had tried to tell me.
All of my answers were wrong.
I may have nearly hyperventilated. My heart instantly filled with a sense of my doom. I was in disbelief. I must have just stared at the table without comprehending anything it said for a solid two minutes. I tried to figure out what to do – should I go tell him about my mistake? Maybe he’d give me more time.
Then I remembered an earlier exchange. “What if we don’t finish?” a girl had asked. “Then you don’t finish,” my professor said, laughing.
“Remember to answer every question!” I suddenly heard him boisterously declare, “Just get something down – it will hurt you if you don’t!”
“But you only have ten minutes,” he quickly continued, once again replacing the number on the board. “So keep at it.”
“Jesus Christ,” I thought.
I scratched out questions four through eight on the previous pages of my blue book. I started scrambling to come up with replacement answers on the next couple pages. But my mind wouldn’t work like it usually does – I felt frozen, unable to function, incapable of complex thought. I could almost hear the clock ticking – I could feel my grave opening up below my seat to swallow me whole. I was fucked. There was nothing I could do.
I kept scribbling answers down. Then I kept realizing that I had misunderstood something in the question I had just re-answered. I had to answer it again. Then I perceived that, since I hadn’t seen this table, my whole understanding of the study had been completely skewed. Then I re-answered again.
The result was a mess of a couple pages in my blue book, with scribbles everywhere, dreadful handwriting overflowing across the neat straight lines beneath, random arrows pointing in different directions, and not a complete sentence to be found anywhere. On top of this, I still had 3 other questions, completely new ones which I hadn’t even read, that needed to be answered.
I answered them with a hurricane of jibberish.
I was defeated.
“Jeez, Andrew, hurry up,” I suddenly heard a friend of mine say. The time allotted for test-taking had so quickly come to an end – time itself seemed to have sped up so drastically in those last fifteen minutes.
I coughed up one more incomprehensible fragment.
“I didn’t see the regression table until near the end,” I said to my professor as I handed my test to him.
His eyes widened and his mouth dropped.
“What happened, man?” he asked, looking sympathetic, glancing down into my jungle of a blue book.
“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
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