College Level Game Theory

"Now I'm waiting for reports from some of you... Listen, I'm not joking. This is my job!"

A computer science professor at John Hopkins had the following policy for exam grading on a curve:

[E]ach class’s highest grade on the final counts as an A, with all other scores adjusted accordingly. So if a midterm is worth 40 points, and the highest actual score is 36 points, “that person gets 100 percent and everybody else gets a percentage relative to it,” said Fröhlich.

This is a really bad policy for at least two reasons. The first is that the highest grade on the test is very likely to be an outlier when compared to the distribution of the rest of the class.  For example the highest grade  could be a 36 while the class average is 18 and the second lowest grade is 25.  This would result in the high score being 100%, the second highest score being 69.4% and the class average being 50%.  The only passing grade would be be the top scoring outlier.  Not exactly an ideal result.
The second reason this is a bad idea is that collusion among the students could result in every student getting the same grade which would result in every student getting a perfect score of 100%... and that is exactly what happened here.

“The students refused to come into the room and take the exam, so we sat there for a while: me on the inside, they on the outside,” Fröhlich said. “After about 20-30 minutes I would give up.... Then we all left.” The students waited outside the rooms to make sure that others honored the boycott, and were poised to go in if someone had. No one did, though.

This is a really good example of a basic game theory problem played out in the real world.  Usually this wont work because a single individual has a massive incentive to cross the picket line and be the only person taking the exam.  As long as they score a single point then their grade will be 100% and everyone else will get 0%.  The reason that didn't happen here was the use of peer pressure by waiting outside the exam room to make sure no one went in and being ready to run in and take the exam if necessary.
There is a lesson to be learned here.  People are very, very good about gaming a system. Whether it is unemployment, food stamps, etc., people will make decisions that maximize their utility and not give a shit about the consequences to the government or others.  The key from a policy standpoint is to make sure that you don't create "moral hazards" where people are incentive to keep accepting benefits rather than go out and get a job.  Do you know why they always ask how much your annual income is when you buy life insurance?  Most companies won't write a policy for more than 10-15 times your annual income (make $100k a a year then max out at $1.5 million in coverage).  The reason for the limit is that at some point your wife will start doing to math that a few million dollars sounds a lot better than having her boring husband around leading to some "accidents."  Moral Hazard indeed.
http://www.volokh.com/2013/02/17/when-everyone-wins-with-a-zero

A could other funny examples of college classroom shenanigans:

Carry a student to your final exam:
http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/openbook.asp
(I highly recommend an Asian girl, their weight/smarts ratio is unparalleled)

The "Do you know who I am??" blue book toss:
http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/doyouknow.asp

The reverse blue book toss gambit:
http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/stolen.asp




The "Bird Foot" exam:
http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/birdfoot.asp

The old "eraser clock throw:"
http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/eraser.asp

Daily Dose of Random Awesomeness 2-15-2013

If you see what I see: a vermin-infested, tree-scavenging, hole-digging, soulless rodent, then you've come to the right place. On the other hand, if you're like the irritating minority of weak-minded and girlish sweetmeats who see a cute woodland creature, then take your slumber party somewhere else: you don't belong here.

Someone has ISSUES.  (Including me, because I actually stumbled upon this in Google search earlier)

http://www.squirrelassassins.com/

Lawrence keepin' it real on the Teen Jeopardy Tourney:

 "Alex, I don't know the answer, and frankly, I don't care, because it's time for you to GIVE ME MY FORTY RACKS."

The Jeopardy Teen Tournament. Just. Got. Real.

Pretty incredible footage coming out of Russia this morning.  A 10 ton meteorite traveling at or 30 Kilometers a second exploded over the skies of Russia blowing out thousands of windows and injuring over one thousand people.

You can see the meteorites streaking across the sky at 4min 40sec and the wildly violent sound of the explosion and shockwave at 7 min.

Obligatory:

Don't wanna close my eyes
I don't wanna fall asleep
'Cause I'd miss you, baby
And I don't wanna miss a thing!!!

Jimmy Kimmel, the Super Bowl and... Hitler ????

So I'm on the treadmill at the gym last night (Rule #1 =  Cardio!) and notice one of the nightly cable news programs is running a clip from the Jimmy Kimmel Show. The clip is a bunch of interviews of people being asked about who won the Super Bowl. The only problem is that the Super Bowl hasn't happened yet. Still we get people very confidently talking about the winner, MVP, etc. 

Normally I would chalk it up to people being stupid (they are) but that's a lazy analysis so let us dig a bit deeper.

In the aftermath of WWII a fundamental question was asked.  Why had virtually the entire German population gone along and actively participated with the German war machine and the Holocaust ??? Was the entire military "just following orders?"  Was the entire civilian population just being patriotic or overwhelmed with nationalism ???  Were the German people just evil as a country and race?

In 1961 after the start of the trial or the Nazi Adolph Eichmann a series of studies began that later became know as the Milgram Experiments.  The setup was simple:

The Test Subject (T) was to administer a series of questions provided by the Examiner (E) (who is wearing a shiny white lab coat) to a Learner (L) that is separated by a wall.  If a wrong answer is given the T presses a button administers an electric shock to the L.  The shocks get progressively worse (or so T is led to believe) which each wrong answer to the pain that L is screaming out in pain. The E's job is to assure the T that it is perfectly safe and that they will not be held responsible for injuring or killing the L.

Some test subjects paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment. Most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few subjects began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner.

If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, in this order:

1. Please continue.
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice, you must go on.

If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was halted after the subject had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession.

Surely very few people made it to the final massive 450-volt (twice the voltage of a clothes dryer outlet) shock??

In the first set of experiments a whopping 65% of test subjects made it to the final shock. A prior poll of 100 students in a psychology class at Yale predicted that just 3% or fewer would give the final shock.  Implicitly, this means they expected only sociopaths, sadists and outlier to be able to inflict that kind of pain on a total stranger. The result was the exact opposite-- the outliers were the only ones to speak up and refuse.

Here is a recreation form 2009:

So what does this have to do to Jimmy Kimmel ???  The Super Bowl spot clearly shows how easy it is to convince a complete stranger to abandon a fact they have in their head to please someone with a camera and a microphone. I would bet that everyone of those people thought that the Super Bowl had not happened yet they ate up the lie with a spoon in order not to be potentially embarrassed on camera or displease the person with the microphone.  It's disturbing on many levels

So what is your stupid point, Professor?

Before you go putting on a white lab coat and trying to order your wife/girlfriend/whatever around I think there are better lessons to be learned. I think the point of all this is that we need to be more cognizant of our individual actions when confronted with these types of situations. We all laugh at the Kimmel idiots, but really, how many of you would have doubted yourself and unwittingly gone along with the farce?