{"id":2093,"date":"2014-01-13T07:00:01","date_gmt":"2014-01-13T07:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2014\/01\/13\/the-dead-grandmotherexam-syndrome\/"},"modified":"2021-12-17T06:27:53","modified_gmt":"2021-12-17T14:27:53","slug":"20140113-01","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20140113-01\/?p=2093","title":{"rendered":"The Dead Grandmother\/Exam Syndrome"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I draw your attention to this research paper from <a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20100527184417\/http:\/\/www.easternct.edu\/~adams\/\"> Professor Mike Adams from Eastern Connecticut State University<\/a> titled <a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20100528001006\/https:\/\/www.easternct.edu\/~adams\/Resources\/Grannies.pdf\"> <i>The Dead Grandmother\/Exam Syndrome<\/i><\/a>, also published in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.improbable.com\/airchives\/paperair\/volume5\/v5i6\/v5i6-toc.html\"> <i>The Annals of Improbable Research<\/i><\/a>. In the paper, Adams investigates the phenomenon he summarizes as follows:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"q\"><p>A student&#8217;s grandmother is far more likely to die suddenly just before the student takes an exam than at any other time of the year.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>He takes twenty years of historical data and confirms the existence of the phenomenon, thereby drawing attention to an important but overlooked national health problem: Increased mortality of women with grandchildren in college during the weeks leading up to exams.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>If there is no exam imminent, the death rate is independent of how well the student is doing in class.<\/li>\n<li>As a midterm nears, the death rate goes up by a factor of ten. As a final looms, it goes up by a factor of 19.<\/li>\n<li>The effect is strongly dependent on how well the student is doing in class. Grandmothers of students doing poorly are at much greater risk. A grandmother of a failing student is 50 times more likely to die in the week prior to a final than a grandmother of a top student when there is no examination imminent.<\/li>\n<li>Grandmothers are 24 times more likely to die than grandfathers.<\/li>\n<li>The effect is independent of family size.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Adams develops theories which attempt to explain these phenomena and also has some proposals for addressing the effect.<\/p>\n<p>A follow-up study by Professor Lee Jussim of Rutgers University examined ways of addressing this enormous danger posed to grandmothers. In <a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20110609015741\/http:\/\/www.rci.rutgers.edu\/~jussim\/grandma.html\"> <i>A Preliminary Report on an Intervention Designed to Reduce Grandmother Death Resulting From College Exams<\/i><\/a>, Jussim found a way to save the lives of 4 out of 5 grandmothers during the lead-up to exams: Inform students that the make-up exam will be brutally difficult.<\/p>\n<p><b>Bonus chatter<\/b>: The articles are written tongue-in-cheek, but other less whimsical explanations for the observed behavior include<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>If a grandmother passes when no exam is imminent, the student will miss class without explanation.<\/li>\n<li>Good students are less likely to ask for assistance with exams even if they lose a grandmother.<\/li>\n<li>A student with an ill grandmother is more likely to have poor grades due to stress\/worry.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Note also that the predicted grandmother popular collapse did not come to pass. One theory is that this was prevented due to another phenomenon: Grade inflation.<\/p>\n<p><b>Update<\/b>: In <i>A Thorny Problem: Student Deceptions<\/i>, Professor Karen Eifler shares her simple solution for this problem: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facultyfocus.com\/articles\/effective-teaching-strategies\/dealing-with-student-deceptions-what-to-do-with-death-in-the-family-excuses\/\"> She sends a condolence card to the family<\/a>. If the student experienced a genuine loss, the letter is received warmly. On the other hand, a student who is being less than completely honest has some awkward explaining to do when their family asks them what this card is about. Within a year, the false claims of family deaths evaporated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A statistical analysis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-2093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>A statistical analysis.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2093\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}