As I was sitting here taking a break from my Psych 242 (Research Methods) paper, I remembered this ridiculous email I received Friday night two weeks ago.
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To give you some background to this paper, they spoon-fed it to us. Starting at week 5, we were required to pick a topic, but then had until the 7th week to change it. If you didn't mind losing what amounts to about two days of work (assignments are due Fridays in discussion, and of course most people do it Thursday night), you could change your topic later on. From there, each week we were given a new piece of the paper to write. At first it was the introduction. The next week, revise the introduction. Next, find two sources (yes, that is it). After that we spent a few weeks working on the body paragraphs about methods, procedures, and how we were going to get our participants. To her credit, we did move into statistics a bit last minute and it was basically a crash course, but if you were really lazy, you could just copy someone else's numbers. Oh yeah, did I mention it was all hypothetical and we share the same data and base our experiment around that?
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[Somewhere in there the math is off by a couple of decimals because of rounding, or at least compared to the TA's results, but everyone was off by about +/- .2. If you
really want to, go ahead and run those numbers again and see where it's wrong, I'd be interested to find out, but I can't imagine anyone wanting to run a bunch of random numbers for a hypothetical t-test (including the "researchers"!).]
Basically if the girl who sent this email reads this blog, I've already done the data portion for her, easy peasy! Did I mention we started this at week 5? I
suppose she only had about 8 weeks, not 15 as I said in the email (due Friday), but when I started working on the paper as a whole Tuesday the 19th, I just copy and pasted the different homework assignments together like some really boring Frankenstein.
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| 2 am instead of actually writing my paper. Graw indeed. |
So do you see what she did there? Something really. really.
really stupid.
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| Really really. |
But it's okay, because it was just a "spur of the moment joke with my friend after feeling stressed" even though "I'm not kidding". Because isn't that what we all do when we are stressed? Send a humorously-written email to
200 freaking people?
