Fake Charity Nerd Girl

Yesterday I tried to drop a class, and the online course enrollment system gave me an error message.

So I went to the course advisor and explained my situation. “Oh, that’s because if you’re a dual-degree student, the system won’t let you drop down to zero classes for either one of your degrees. I remember so-and-so had the same problem last year.”

“But I thought that was allowed.”

“Oh, it’s totally allowed, no rules against it. It’s just a bug in the system. Go to the Student Services Center, they’ll help you.”

So today I went to the Student Services Center and explained what happened. “Oh yeah, that’s just because you’re a dual-degree student; we see this bug all the time. Fill out this form, give it back to us, and we’ll override the system and drop the course for you within five business days.”

I looked down at the form, titled Petition to Change Course Enrollment. The first section asked you to check off a box to specify the type of request. And the first option was “dual-degree student trying to drop down to zero classes for one degree.”

Like … I feel like if you are at the point of printing forms for students to fill out to request that administrators manually override the system every time they encounter this bug, it might be easier to just fix the bug?

so I get emails from my college Women in CS organization

last week their event was “practice Dropbox interview questions while decorating cupcakes”

this week it’s “get networking tips from software engineers at Pinterest while making mason jar terrariums”

and I’m … not against these events they actually sound pretty fun … they just seem like things that would happen in Silicon Valley and not real life?

thanks Amanda Marcotte for annoying me enough to motivate me to read Quantum Computing Since Democritus

@theunitofcaring said: would you have expected mental rotation skills to not be trainable, or for training them not to improve the correlated trait (CS skills) because you’d have expected they were both just proxies for g or something?

More the second. I guess I just assume everything is a proxy for g.

Interesting fact: today I heard a talk from a CS professor who was teaching high school girls to code. Knowing that mental rotation skills are correlated with CS performance, he gave half of them training in spatial skills. Not only did that half do better on mental rotation tests at the end, they did better on the final exam, which was entirely CS and unrelated to mental rotation. This surprises me.