A student's grandmother is far more likely to die just before an exam | Hacker News Reader

A student's grandmother is far more likely to die just before an exam

pike.psu.edu

157 pointsDK00755 comments

This is indeed a strange and worrying phenomena. I am in fact aware of cases where a student has managed to lose 3 or more grandmothers while pursuing an undergraduate degree. This leaves the student with a negative number of grandmothers. The underlying mechanisms allowing this is highly mysterious and is certainly deserving of further research.

The author addresses this point, and how it is possible, but why so many grandfathers choose to remarry so quickly is still mysterious.

> As more people go to college, their families find that, for safety reasons, it is wise to increase the number of grandmothers per family. Since there is currently no biological way of doing so (though another grant proposal in preparation will ask for funds to look into the prospect of cloning grandmothers, using modern genetic engineering techniques), the families must resort to in creasing the pool by divorce and remarriage.

Which Author?

Although it seems to be stored on Dongwon Lee user dir, he states this document was written by "Mike Adams". I couldn't find this Mike Adams and I find it a little disturbing to read a Study that has no references, no date and the Author doesn't bother about writing his own name in it.

As I said below, my tentative assumption is that this article is a humor piece, not based on actual data.

TFA covers this, actually. Divorce and remarriage can help a student have more grandmothers. Also consider the future possibility of cloning grandmothers.

My hypothesis is that there are students out there with just a single grandmother to balance out the 3 grandmothers cases. This leads us to deduce the general Law of Conservation of Grandmothers.

More serious note: I have a hard time believing this from my anectodal evidence - my grandmothers were a couple of loving but otherwise spaced-out individuals who were only vaguely aware that I was in school for something at any point. The timing of my exams was not within their remotest knowledge.

We might also be able to solve the world hunger by giving heaps of homework to mediocre students. Valuable nutrients which now end up in dog food could be made available to the starving masses.

I had "3" grandmothers. One was a step grandmother from remarriage. Shockingly they all died before big events in school. Never used it as an excuse though.

As a friend of mine once commented, "I get along well with most of my parents".

Perhaps there are recent advances in sexual reproduction leading to greater allele recombination at a time of crisis for our species.

Will higher education help to solve our Medicare/Medicaid problems?

Yes, every teacher has experienced this.

A lot of teachers have become jaded and will assume every student who brings this up is a liar and a cheat.

The problem though is that although the majority of the cases are made up to get out of exams or assignments, a small number aren't. These students, in addition to losing their beloved relative then can become very distraught to find themselves unexpectedly saddled with a false accusation of being a liar.

Because of this, when I taught, I would nod and sympathize, then say that because there had been some abuse of this in the past, they could have an extension or such only if they provided an actual published obituary from a newspaper or funeral home. Some other teachers use another method, of having a certain number of exams or assignments that can be dropped without penalty. Of course what often happens in those cases is students drop an early exam, and then later claim injustice at not getting an extra one for the deceased grandparent.

My senior year of college I wrote to the provost expecting a close relative would die close to my exams. His sympathy was immediate, and separately from that, an obituary or other certificate would set the incomplete/rescheduling machinery in motion. He did not apologize or explain, so by presenting his personal sympathy and his professional administration of a system he was able to protect both the school's expectations and an emotional, stressed student. I think this is the best approach.

Bingo. This was even covered in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, of all places

Sadly I have experienced this.

I was in mourning after losing a relative and refused to participate in an overtly cheerful activity.Not only was I reprimanded for it, but later heard the professor felt the need to complain to other people as well about yet another kid 'whos grandma had died'. It just so happened that my grandma had not died, nor would have I cared much if she would've had, but a much more cared for relative.

Thankfully it was quite a lot of years ago.

Isn't it quite easy to present proof that a relative has really died?

It really depends.

Many people, especially poor folks, don't do obituaries, because they can be expensive. Original death certificates are always in high demand, and people tend to not realize that they need dozens of them -- proving to a teacher that grandma died is low priority. There are other cultural factors as well. Some religions call for immediate burial, so publication of the obituary will likely lag the student's absence.

Another factor to consider is that fall exam times line up with the holiday season, which also happens to be a time of the year when death rates spike.

Given all of the other accommodations that colleges give students, I don't see the big deal here. When I was in school, I was able to get incompletes to finish coursework or take exams late for various reasons. I had friends who got ADD diagnoses from doc-in-the-box places because they found taking exams in lecture centers with tiny desks impossible to deal with. If a C student gets an extra 3 days to study, the outcome is likely the same as it would have been.

I'm a professor in a university. For us a photocopy of the obituary, death certificate or an equivalent document is enough to allow the students to take the test ~1 week later. But the exact documentation needed probably depends on the university.

No, generally not in the timeframe between being notified and the funeral. There may be an announcement in a local newspaper -- local to your deceased relative -- but this is as likely to be after the funeral as before.

I don't think there's an issue with saying "you're getting a 0 on the exam until you furnish proof of death and proof of relation, at which point you can (re)take the exam." Surely even the most bureaucratic university would have some mechanism in place to allow a student to take an exam, even a final, later than planned (or even the next semester?)

yes, it's called an Incomplete.

Of course, students have no reason to report deaths of relatives when there are no consequences to missing class. So, deaths most likely only get reported during exams.

Furthermore, more conscientious students are more likely to grin and bear it, thus giving the A students a lower rate of reporting.

I agree, but that still doesn't explain why the reported death rate for grandmothers is 24 times higher than that for grandfathers.

I suppose it's possible students care about their grandmothers more than their grandfathers.

Men also die earlier than women so it's possible most students grandfathers are already dead before they reach college. I know this was the case for me.

There's not really an age when women outnumber men 24:1 though [1]

[1] Figure 2, http://cnx.org/content/m42935/latest/?collection=col11407/la...

For me as well. And I have three grandmothers, courtesy of my stepmother. Two of them died while I was in college, the third is 97 y.o., and I've got two more semesters to go, so there's a chance I may be one of those people who dips into the "negative grandmothers" category.

This is a very good point. Both my grandfathers passed away when I was young (i.e. before I took any important exams), whereas both my grandmothers are still alive and kicking.

Along the same lines: for a young college student the death of a grandparent might very well constitute the first experience of losing a family member. With little experience, it's not always clear how these situations should be handled with respect to work or school. More mature individuals are more likely to handle deaths within the family with discretion.

With increasing age it is also more likely that you've already had your grandparents die.

This is one of the best submissions I've seen on hn. So often these days, people are treating 'SCIENCE' as a completely objective enterprise when it is usually the interpretation of objective observations that is fed to the public, which is a very subjective matter.

I actually did have a grandmother die 2 days before a final exam. Needless to say, no one believed me. :(

Agreed though that this is a great representation of using educated subjectivity to draw reasonable conclusions from data. That's the one thing that a science degree should be teaching over all other aspects. Remembering equations, careful experimental technique, etc. all pale in to significance compared with critical analysis skills.

Agree, excellent submission. I saw this as an great example of drawing important conclusions after spotting interesting data.

I can add one more anecdote. My grandmother passed away before my first semester final exams in my first year. My parents didn't actually tell me until after my exams finished.

The thing is that she passed away in India. My grandmother would spend summers in Canada and winters in India. She passed away the same week a cousin married.

My hypothesis is that stressful things happen at the end of seasonal quarters. Final exams just happen to be one of those things. Flu season also happens to be December/January. Allergy season is around May/June.

I did a quick Google search but I can't find any information regarding death rate and monthly distribution. I would assume that it is evenly distributed but I wouldn't be surprised if the assumption was incorrect.

This is really amusing, but I'm a little skeptical that it's based on real data. Where does this author get the data on "number in family" for each student presented on p.3, for instance? (The article would be fascinating if it were true, but I'm tentatively treating it as a humor piece.)

In case it is true, let me second kenthorvath's comment: students have much less incentive to tell a professor about deaths in their family when there's no exam coming up. (I can't judge the grandmother/grandfather ratio information, because the article presents absolutely no data on that point at all. Hence even more skepticism.)

Just as a comment to any current students who do experience the death or illness of a relative: it's probably best to discuss things with your academic advisor (grad or undergrad) before or instead of contacting individual professors. An email from another prof has infinitely more credibility than one from a student; you only have to discuss it once, with someone you already know; and your advisor should know what resources are available to you and can help you plan the rest of the semester.

When I used to TA a very large freshman class, we handled it by letting the students know on the syllabus that in such cases we would send a sympathy card to their home address.

The theory was that if the story was legit, it would be a nice gesture by the course staff. If it wasn't, the student would have some 'splainin' to do at home.

Reminds me of the old joke.

Four students, all roommates, thought about skipping an exam since they haven't prepared well. They arrived really late for the exam, and gave the excuse that they had a flat tire on the way. The Professor agrees for a re-exam.

After a week, they come really well prepared. But, the question paper was a shocker.

"Which tire got punctured?"

I've changed a flat and then completely failed to remember a week later whether it was on the left or right side, so I guess I would have been in some trouble.

Last year my granddad died the day before an exam. I'm not sure if the point of the paper is that students use this as a excuse or that we just don't mention relatives dying at times when they do not conflict with other major events in someones life.

Some of the data seem a little suspect. The grade correlation result is unreasonably strong, and the bin sizes aren't specified, among other shortcomings. That said, this was a very entertaining read.

edit: Appears to be from 1990.

Exactly. I was reading skeptically and trying to guess what were the errors in the methodology that create this effect. Until I see the Figure I, with the almost aligned dots (If you ever made some physics or statistical experiments, you would be happy to get a measure like this.) The dots are almost aligned and one of the axes is the A/B/C/D/E grade, that is very indirect nonlinear measure. A graph like that usually means that the data are cooked.

Apparently this is only a humor piece, but many of the comments seams to take this seriously.

I can't believe how much serious discussion is taking place here. When I read the article I thought it had to be from theonion or something.

The sad thing is I actually did lose a grandmother and grandfather a few weeks before exams. :(

ninja edit: this was years ago, to clarify

This suggests to me that saying your grandFather has died instead of your grandmother is a far more plausible excuse.

Confirms this : http://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_christakis_the_hidden_infl...

reminds me of the fmri of a dead salmon (http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf)

This article is apparently only a joke. I found some indirect report of the opinion of author (near the end of the article): http://host.madison.com/news/local/doug_moe/doug-moe-poking-...

Hilarious! Reminds me of another paper suggesting a game theoretic approach to the toilet seat problem - http://home.tiac.net/~cri/1998/toilet.html

Many academic papers just follow the same flow and they get published.

For me, truth. My grandmother died my Junior year of college right before midterms.

Deleted comment

Lighten up - it's humour satirizing students trying to get out of exams by claiming grandma died, not research.

Exactly, I get it. Wonder, why everyone here is discussing the issue seriously rather than noting the humor in the piece.

Many of the comments in here are tongue in cheek. The current top comment is incredibly so, in the same vein as the paper. Others are discussing it seriously because there are some aspects which may be true even about the joke of an article.

I would strongly advise grandmothers of this risk.

old, but funny

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