Life, the Universe, and Everything

A Course Blog for GET1029/GEK1067

Tag: 1910 (page 3 of 3)

Not Sure If You Have Ever Wondered About This…

Suppose students randomly assign answers for the weekly quizzes–what kind of scores will they receive? Wonder no more–the graph is attached. The mean and median score would be a 2 (upon 8). This tells me a few things. First, students need to do better than random just to get at least 3 upon 8, and a lot better than random to get 6-8 marks. Historically, the mean score for the weekly quizzes (the average of the weekly averages) is around 5.8, and the median is usually 6, this means that students are doing significantly better than random–it assures me that most of you are actually understanding most of the concepts and making careful and strict inferences from them (as that’s what the questions ultimately test for). Either that or most of you found good people to emulate. (That’s an inclusive “or”, of course.)

Just to complete the picture–what would happen if all the students assign their answers randomly? I would expect that for each quiz, our class of 448 students will return around 45 students with 0 marks, 120 with 1 mark, 140 with 2 marks, 93 with 3 marks, 39 with 4 marks, 10 with 5 marks, and 2 with 6 marks, and none with 7 or 8 marks. So, yeah–you are definitely doing a lot better than random as a cohort.

Nonetheless, this project video is still epic:

Moral Relativism

Mentioned in W04 Factory-Farmed Meat:

MORAL RELATIVISM: No such thing as what’s right or wrong ‘absolutely’, only what’s right- or wrong-for-something.

(Analogy: “Being to the left” is a relative property. There is no such thing as being to the left absolutely, only, being to-the-left-of-something.)

Now, technically, Moral Relativism is not a topic in the module. But since it was alluded to in the Norcross reading, I should say something about it for those who are interested, having also promised to in the lecture. This post is mainly about making sure that you understand what that concept amounts to–because it is often confused with a bunch of other close by notions. Whether Moral Relativism is true or “hard to swallow” will be a longer and more complicated story.

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