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On Comprehensive Exams

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

It is undoubtedly the case that most students do not only accept the state of things, but they never even question why things are the way they are. This should perhaps not be loathed, since the answer most students would be likely to get upon questioning is “this is the way it has always been – deal with it.” That’s not much of an answer.

In my program, in contrast to most PhD programs, there has not been a formal and required exam as part of the program. Recently, however, this has changed. The reason for this is that the department has received poor scores in peer reviews and that the dissertations produced by students have not always been of the best quality. Fair enough, poor results should lead to change in order to effectuate improvement.

The reaction by the department is to increase the number of tests students have to take, and this is – as far as I understand – imposed retroactively also on students in the “old” program. Not only will there be a qualifying exam after the student has finished the program’s core course, but there is a paper to be submitted after the second year and a comprehensive exam as part of the dissertation proposal.

This is where I get confused. I fully understand the attempt to “control” that students have indeed understood the materials in the courses before they get to move on and start working on their research. But then, when they have reached the point where they are to defend their dissertation proposal to their committee, does it make sense to have another written test?

I think not.

It is easy to see how the faculty obviously panicked and felt the need to “do something.” Another test is however the wrong way to go. To understand this, let’s have a look at the process leading up to the dissertation defense. This process means the student works alone and/or together with his/her advisor to produce a text introducing the problem, the literature, what value is to be produced, the methods to do so and the expected problems and results.

When one’s advisor finds that the student is ready to defend the proposal and the committee has had a chance to review and comment on the proposal, then the student is invited to orally defend the proposal. The committee will ask questions and make sure the student knows what he’s/she’s doing. That’s fine; after all, the student is supposed to learn how to do research.

But at this point, what does a written test based on the material in the proposal add to the process? This is difficult to understand. It is especially troublesome since the comprehensive exam is a written test with limited time and closed books. How many researchers would you guess study the literature to the point of memorization before they write grant applications and research project plans? Of course they don’t – why would they? It is a waste of time to memorize details of others’ research that may not be relevant. And even to the point it is relevant, the articles and books are always available and need to be reread a thousand times in order to produce a fair analysis.

So “real” researchers don’t do that – but students should?

But maybe there is a reason to test the students – for sake of quality. Sure, this could be the case. Let’s have a look at this argument: students are to write a closed-book, memorization-testing exam on the material on which they are to do research in order for the department/faculty to make sure that the dissertation will be of good quality. Of course, for this to be even close to a real solution we need to assume that memorization of material makes one’s own research better and that the test as constructed by the committee does just this. Also, we need to assume the committee consists of experts in the exact area chosen by the student for research.

But remember the process as discussed briefly above. No student gets to defend his/her dissertation proposal without the consent and approval of the advisor. So if the department has experienced low-quality dissertations the problem is really that advisors don’t take their job seriously and let students defend their dissertation proposals prematurely. (We here ignore the troublesome fact that committees seem to consistently have chosen to approve proposals and dissertations of poor quality.)

So it must be concluded that the comprehensive test, as it is designed in my department, can only be seen as a test of whether the advisor has done his/her job properly. If the student is allowed to defend the dissertation proposal he or she must have already been deemed “ready” to do so by the advisor (and committee). So the student needs to take a comprehensive exam on the basis for his/her own research because the department cannot trust the advisor to do his/her job?

I guess this is where the pseudo-arguments “but everybody else does this” and “this is how it has always been done” are added. After all, without these pseudo-arguments there would be nothing left. The students are forced to literally waste weeks of their lives memorizing details of research they already know in order for the department to know the advisor and committee have done what they are supposed to.

If the problem is that some advisors (I doubt it is even a majority) allow their students to defend their proposals (and dissertations?) prematurely, then it is reasonable to assume the faculty already know who they are. But they are obviously afraid to bring this out in the open, possibly because they are likely to make enemies with people they have to work with for the rest of their lives. After all, academia spells t-e-n-u-r-e and this means life-long service in the same department. So it is a lot easier to have students jump through another hoop for the sake of appearing to assure quality and thereby saving face and avoid making enemies.

So what does this mean? It means, of course, that I will have to spend a lot of time memorizing things I believe my committee members believe is important in the material relevant for my research. It also means a break from my line of thinking and this, in turn, means I will have to start over with the research project – thereby losing even more time. Then I can finally do the research that I am in the department to do in the first place.

For the record, I sincerely doubt my advisor would allow me to defend an unfinished proposal. Instead, he would be frank with me and tell me that my proposal simply doesn’t cut it. After all, I am working with him to produce a document that will be approved by the committee (the advisor usually has the last word) – and if not, then the advisor has obviously not done his job. So this means I am not really affected by the new rules, except for the hoop-jumping part: I will most likely have to take the test. In order for the department to know “for sure” (if there is  such a thing) that my advisor has done his job.

It also means I will have to memorize a bunch of stuff that I am likely to challenge in my own research. I fail to understand how memorizing [at least some] conclusions that I am sure are wrong, or at least drawn on faulty bases, would help me, unless it is the case that I have misunderstood the articles and that another read will help me understand this mistake (both conditions are, of course, necessary for this to not be a complete waste of time).

Does this help my research? I sincerely doubt it. Does it potentially improve the quality of my future dissertation? Not a chance. The reason for this is that what is important in a PhD student’s research is not whether articles have been memorized, but whether (1) he or she can think (which is undoubtedly a scarce quality in academia…) and (2) if he or she has received proper guidance from his/her advisor.

The former is not dependent on a formal test such as the now offered comprehensive exam. In fact, if the student can think intellectually a dumb memorization-based test is likely to either bore the student (hopefully not to such a degree that he/she decides there are more worthwhile activities to spend lifetime on) or dull his/her mind.

The latter is also independent on any formal test of the student, since guidance is rarely testable and what is important is finding and understanding the literature. Both should be easy to identify in a proposal and oral defense, whereas they are both quite impossible to test in a formal written exam.

So why enforce a comprehensive exam, especially if in addition to a qualifying exam and a required two-year research paper? I have, I believe, suggested the true reasons above. But it must be concluded that since there is no logical reason to test whether a student has memorized the existing literature, especially since what is of importance is the judgment of primarily the advisor and secondarily the committee, there is no real reason to have such a test.

Sometimes the world isn’t very rational. Or, perhaps, in a tug-o-war world where one’s turf is everything one has, the only thing one can do is jump through the right hoops and hope for the best.

But please do prove that this disillusioned student is but a little confused.

Posted in Academics | 2 Comments »

Responding to Klein and Rothbard on Agorist Organization

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

Peter Klein wrote a blog post yesterday on the Mises Economics blog continuing the agorist vs. anarcho-capitalist discussion on organization. In his post, Klein summarized his contribution to the discussion followed by a quoting Rothbard’s assessment of agorists view on organization. But both Klein and Rothbard make unsupported general conclusions that they seem to base on some agorists’ personal preferences rather than agorist theory.

It is true that agorists in general do not fancy “organization, hierarchy, leaders and followers, etc.”, which is a common preference among anarchists of all varieties. Rothbard (and Klein) is right in that there is not necessarily anything wrong with voluntary organization or voluntary “membership” in hierarchical structures where one is subjected to the rule of majority vote or the whims of a ruler. But as good economists both Rothbard and Klein seem to assume too much: there is nothing wrong with making an informed decision to take a low-level position in a hierarchy ceteris paribus.

Ceteris paribus should here be understood as choosing in a situation where the only thing that distinguishes the hierarchical position from the non-hierarchical is hierarchy. But this is hardly ever the case in State society. Rather, individuals have to choose (if at all) from a very limited set of alternatives, where hierarchy and submission is part of all or most of the alternatives. Vietnamese children working in a Nike sweatshop are better off than as child prostitutes, ceteris paribus. But one cannot take the choices as exogenous to the political situation in the area, the region, the country, or the world. A political theory such as agorism needs to take into account the effect of political rule in the choices people make.

Agorists do just that: they realize that the limited options for a child, i.e. working in a sweat shop or becoming a prostitute, are not the result of the market but of political institutions. The choice in itself may be easy, but the context certainly isn’t. The person making the choice is subjected to political oppression through the unavailability of choices due to political regulation, rule, and coercive institutions.

This is not the same as making choices “subject to” alternatives made available in a free(d) market. The market measures costs to benefits and awards individuals with alternatives to the extent economically feasible. Political rule, however, causes imbalances in the marketplace which forcefully (directly or indirectly) removes alternatives that should have existed were it not for political oppressive rule. The choice between a sweat shop and prostitution is a choice only because of politics; it is not a “real” choice set, since it is forcefully limited.

The same is true with any choices we make today, and agorists, compared to other anarcho-capitalists, tend to put more weight on the choices that have been forcefully taken away from us. While many libertarians would compare a choice to status quo, an agorist would compare the choice situation with that which should obviously have been real in a free market. It is not an economic analysis, it is a political analysis based on a radical passion for justice.

This is relevant to the debate on organization, since agorists have a slightly different perspective than anarcho-capitalists, especially economist anarcho-capitalists. There is of course nothing supporting any counter-factual view on what would have been the case under different circumstances. But it is reasonable to draw some conclusions: the child would have more alternatives in a free market than sweat shop work and prostitution, of which some would likely have been better than both.

Only the better alternatives are important to our analysis, but it is safe to say that we can remain fairly confident that such better alternatives (subjectively identified and valued) would exist. State oppression has therefore deprived the child (in this case) from the choice he or she would have made were it not for State oppression. An economic analysis, at least using the tools commonly taught in academia, is too limited: it does not take into account the fundamental and far-reaching effect of the State on institutions and individual as well as collective behavior.

From this perspective, it is not necessarily the case that people in a freed setting would organize the way the presently choose to. It could be the case that people organize in large corporations, but it is unlikely. Why? Because people in general tend to dislike being “bossed around” by others, and they tend to very often dislike management because it is management or because they believe management’s decisions are incorrect or improper. Ask yourself: in a free(d) market, would more or fewer people choose to work in large structures where their actions are subjected to the decisions/management by others?

The answer isn’t necessarily obvious, but considering the multitude of organizational solutions that would be available were it not for the State, as well as the cost of e.g. corporation-like limited liability if fully internalized by the individual actor/organization, the answer becomes clearer. Agorists don’t despise or dislike organization per se, but I believe it is reasonable to say their analysis takes more facts into account. In quantitative economics lingo, agorists tend to control for many more variables.

So how does this relate to Klein’s post and the Rothbard quote? It provides the reason agorists, on average, are more skeptical than other libertarians to contemporary organizational structures. Agorist theory does not dismiss organization, but agorist class theory identifies, comparatively speaking, a great many more State-caused and State-inflicted problems with severe effects on the very bases on which choices are made. This makes agorists more skeptical towards organizational choices in contemporary State society.

If it were indeed the case that agorists were opposed to organization in and of itself, they would abstain from organize themselves. But this is not the case: agorists organize their efforts in the Molinari Institute as well as the Center for a Stateless Society and the Agorist Action Alliance.

Furthermore, agorists are strong proponents of voluntary organizing of free markets to create individual wealth while withdrawing support for the state to the greatest degree possible and providing real and viable free alternatives to State-controlled institutions. Agorism provides a theory for how to set the world free through liberating yourself and thereby fully take advantage of the economic incentives naturally provided in a free society. So-called counter-economics is a cornerstone in agorist theory and practice, and arranging or joining a counter-economy is voluntary in a sense no choice made in the State sanctioned market ever is. This is perhaps what distinguishes agorists from anarcho-capitalists the most: that they define “voluntary” in a much more absolutist sense.

 

Cross posted as a comment to Klein’s blog post. For more information, see my articles Saving the World through Saving Yourself, A Strategy for Forcing the State Back, and my previous blog post The Savior Complex.

Posted in Academics, Philosophy, Politics | 17 Comments »

My View of Advanced Studies and Science

Thursday, September 18th, 2008

I’ve at the time of writing this post spent over a year in an American graduate program (doctorate) and there are some things I want to share with you. It is of course the case that most things taught are so-called mainstream science and as such it is as blindly fixed on empiricism and technical details as it is ignorant of the unreasonableness of the often contradictory underlying assumptions and premises. It has also, at least in my case as a graduate student in economics, evident that the science itself have to a large extent adopted statism in order to “fit” in the overall government command of education and research.

But it is not these problems, however important, that I want to discuss in this post. Instead, I want to discuss the structure of the education I’m getting and what it seems to focus. Herein lies an important lesson to be learned about education in general and especially how students are treated. It is obvious that many professors seem to struggle with understanding how to treat graduate students, which means they sometimes fall into the “undergrad trap” and talk to us like were we at the very beginning of our studies on a higher level.

An even more obvious fact is that professors seem to lack an understanding for the greater issues. Someone has told me that students tend to focus on theory and theoretical reasoning because “it is easier” than “real” empirical research. I strongly disagree with this view; I find it ignorant and, frankly, stupid. It is not easier to develop a good theory than, as is supposedly “more difficult,” to grab a data set, run [standardized] regressions and then claim to have found The Truth. Such a statement makes me lose whatever respect I had for the person making it; they deserve no respect – rather, they deserve to be despised.

Even though most professors do not share (or at least not state) this view, misunderstanding or non-understanding is common. Often the problems I identify with premises for published papers that we’re reading are ignored, probably because they require a philosophical mindset. I’m not saying I’m a prodigy or hyper-intelligent and that “all professors” are stupid; on the contrary, my experience in both the Swedish master programs and the American PhD program is that the professors are usually highly intelligent people. However, they are not scholars and therefore cannot grasp the essence of discussions on a purely conceptual or theoretical level. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, but they are not many.

Professors have chosen to (in some cases been forced to) focus on details for so long that they have more or less forgotten what they’re doing is all about. They no longer have an interest in finding Knoledge or Truth (if this ever was the case), but are more interested in specific “cool” details of theoretical-empirical papers that have, for some reason, become famous. It is no doubt the case that details can be interesting – and even very interesting – but a detail or sub-reasoning can only be interesting if the overall theoretical framework is a reasonable construct upon a basis of sound premises. This is, I’m afraid, not often the case. Papers are very often empirical or try to develop a theory from a semi-inductive approach to knowledging, and as such it seems the authors have not spent much time thinking through the foundation of the theory developed.

It is a sad truth that even academic researchers doing theoretical work have been so “empiricized” by the pressure of mainstream that have lost touch with the real world as well as interest in and understanding for the importance of premises and assumptions.

This brain washing (to use my adviser’s words) begins early in people’s academic careers. Graduate school is supposed to create a basis of knowledge while teaching the student how to think critically, but the real nature of the programs is that they aim for the streamlining of thought rather than encouragement for individual, unique, pioneering thought. It is true that all programs pay lip service to the dogma that students must learn critical thinking and that they must engage in research on their own even if they are taking a heavy course load. But the truth is that as little time as possible is left for the student to actually engage in such activities.

My own experience is that advanced studies are not very difficult; there are of course problems of notation, language and concepts one has never encountered before, but the level of difficulty is not unsurmountable. It appears to be difficult simply because there is so much work involved with learning what is taught in the course, but the work is not primarily time and effort spent tryting to wrestle complex concepts or advanced reasoning. Most courses cover fairly intuitive concepts.

I realize that I sound like someone who believes he is a Nietzschean übermensch, but that is not at all what I try to say. I have struggled quite a bit with the courses I’ve taken; it is only after finishing the course work that I have realized that the level of difficulty was not as high as I thought. And it has nothing to do with my “understanding what I [now] know.” The problem i have with the structure of the courses is that they seem to focus so much on details and technicalities that students cannot grasp what the professor is trying to say.

Take, for instance, a course I took in advanced micro economic theory. The theory itself, and especially the concepts behind it, is relatively simple – if you know anything about economics you should understand what make actors demand or supply goods and services on the market. But that is not what the course is about. Instead, the course barges into a jungle of calculus where the student struggles with finding first and second order conditions of abstract functions supposedly symbolizing a person’s “utility function” or a firm’s “production function.”

Of course, in the real world there is no such thing as a production function – a firm has assets and produces output using the resources and assets at hand in the best way possible. They are not making a generic function of their business processes and then taking derivatives to find the “optimal point.” And there is even less of a utility function (a somewhat humorous concept, I might add).

The details and technicalities are what is important and the understanding for what is really going on – or why the discipline ended up with these functions and conditions in the first place – is not only left out, it is ignored, dismissed, and considered “unimportant.”

As an analogy, imagine an automobile manufacturer where the engineers are hired to focus on making components as efficiently as possible without thinking of their use in the whole. If no one thinks of what the automobile is supposed to do – or how to put it together – there will be no automobile. Just like experts in economics (which is my field) can talk of “properties” of functions for ages without ever mentioning or even considering what the functions are for, where they come from, or what they try to explain.

What is the importance of the generic, differentiable, mathematical function to how people act in a market?

Academia is so consumed by discussing the details that nobody has time for or ever considers the so-called “whole picture.” Even in “softer” courses it is the case that students need to read as many articles as possible on certain details and technical matters that there simply is no time for reflection. After reading a couple of dozen articles – in a short time period – that all discuss the same technicality, how many students would you think are able to take a step back and reflect on the importance of the technicality qua technicality? Not very many.

It is therefore the case that academic education of today bears no resemblance whatsoever with the classical education of Ancient Athens (such as Plato’s Academy or Aristotle’s Lyceum) or even the education in the modern era. For instance, when German philosopher Immanuel Kant taught courses he discussed problems of morality and let the students consider his own theory and comment on it. I am not saying that the education of that time was unstructured or that it was some kind of dopey discourse post-modern style, but that there was a fundamental interest in ideas.

It may be unfair to compare the modern “hard” science of economics with the soft philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. But the thing is that Aristotle, for example, spent a lot of time on explaining natural phenomena and did so systematically and in an as structured and scientific way possible in that time and age. Yet his aim was not to dissect a detail of a small part of that which he found – he strived to understand and explain the world around him.

A criticism to my comparison of modern economics and the natural science research of Aristotle is that today’s society – as well as our knowledge – is way too advanced to use Aristotles methods. This may be true to some degree, but do not kid yourself – we are not as advanced compared to previous times as you would like to think. In terms of knowledge, we’re to a large extent in the process of rediscovering what scientists hundreds of years before us discovered, described, explained, and understood.

As a matter of fact, we have forgotten the reason for doing scientific work and research. We have to rediscover the purpose of what we are doing, but so far we are so focused on the details and technicalities that we haven’t even started acknowledging that we’re missing the whole picture and even parts of it through staring at one stroke of the pen.

Science is literally worthless if we cannot allow us to reflect on it and make it useful on a higher level of  abstraction; we are so busy doing scientific research that we have forgotten what the research is for.

So it is not surprising that that the [few] questions I [find it worthwhile to] ask aren’t understood. I am no Cicero, so perhaps my questions could be much more clearly articulated. But I doubt that the problem is primarily my inability to phrase the questions clearly enough – the problem, I maintain, is that they are of another nature than what science is thought to be all about. I cannot help finding similarities between theories, conflicts in implicit underlying assumptions, and problems in the questions being asked (rather in how they are answered). I am not interested in the technicalities or detailed answers; I am interested in the questions.

Perhaps you say that it is sad that I was not born a few hundred years ago, in a time where people still thought the way I think and were interested in the kind of things I am interested in. That is, in a time before the sciences were divided into separate disciplines and before the quantification of knowledge-seeking. And you may be right – I was born too late.

But on the other hand, science has lost its way and is maundering without compass or aim. I am certain that we will soon discover that we are not asking the right questions – and that we aren’t really asking questions at all. The recent interest for so-called “interdisciplinary research” is definitely a step in the right direction, even though it is a very small step. Science, I believe, will once again find a way back to the path of knowledge discovery; it is a matter of when not if.

From this perspective, I’d like to think that I was not born a few hundred years too late. Rather, I was born too soon. Or perhaps I can help science find its way back to its roots and purpose; that is, find the way home.

Posted in Academics, Economics, Philosophy | 7 Comments »

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