My students are taking their final exam on our university's electronic learning platform. In an effort to reduce the amount of screw-ups we have, they've been asked to take a practice test consisting of several fairly ridiculous questions.
Here is one of them:
Baboons love potato chips (especially Thousand Island flavored ones.) They also enjoy sweet alcoholic beverages. Eight study abroad students are in a house, eating potato chips. They look out the window and notice two baboons having sex. The students grab their cameras and begin taking pictures through the glass. Unsatisfied with the results, the students leave the house and go outside to get closer to the action. The tricky baboons have in fact planned on this, and several of their fellows enter the house and begin eating. Do they delicately pick out two or three chips and save the rest for later, or do they decimate all of the packages lying about and then go for 'seconds' in the form of chocolate bars and a bottle of coconut rum with the lid improperly screwed on?
Most students responded with some variation of "the baboons eat all of the food." This is, in fact, what happened. The idiot students went outside, left the door unlocked, and basically put out a big baboon welcome mat.
Some students, however, begin talking about what the baboons SHOULD do..."They "should" save some of the food for the monkeys involved in the decoy activity"... and ... "The baboons 'should' not eat all of the food right away because they might be hungry later."
JEEBUS H CHRISTMAS, people! They're baboons! It's a question that is designed to be answered with ZERO thought!
Is it possible that they are more likely to think when they believe we don't want them to think?
I'm not surprised that students pay close attention to what baboons are doing but don't think much about what their professors or textbook authors say. From an evolutionary standpoint, they are closer to the baboons than us.
ReplyDelete> Is it possible that they are more likely to think when they believe we don't want them to think?
ReplyDeleteWho do you mean? The students, or the baboons?
No, they aren't thinking. THey are reacting according to programming. A colleague of mine has a very special snowflake who reacts to *any* topic -- the most recent was reading GIlgamesh--with the comment that the author "should" have spent more time on Jesus Christ. (In Gilgamesh. Seriously. I wish I were kidding.) I've given essays in which I ask students specifically NOT to write about what they think people SHOULD have done, but what they did. Inevitably the programming takes over, and the dreaded S-word makes an appearance.
ReplyDelete