As one does in school, one reads a lot of academic papers, and particularly in a graduate program. It's actually very hard for me, because I can't resist engaging with the articles as if I were a reviewer. So much of what I read I find frustrating, and I often wonder how journal reviewers and editors let some of these papers get published.
Personally I think making higher education more accessible is full of good intentions. But the execution is not well-thought out. When the global North decided to widen access to higher education, it created wider demand for faculty. Where would they come from? Consequently many more PhDs were minted, many by schools that have no business granting doctorates. But as you may guess, some of these accreditation bodies are a joke. All they care is that the Ts are crossed and the Is are dotted. And long-winded essays are written in some obtuse fashion so as to prove the school's worth.
Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, many so-called PhDs give fellow doctorate holders a bad name. I mean, seriously, if one can get a PhD in three years, and one is nowhere near a genius, well.... If dear reader, you are one of those, let's just assume you are a genius.
Take research. I am simply amazed that even in the 21st century, so many published articles still report only alphas on their instruments. We have known since the 70s that demonstrating reliability isn't enough. If a measure is not valid, it's bullshit. And a measure can be reliable but not valid. A study that only reports reliability means absolutely zilch. I would have thought that today editors and reviewers would have totally DEMANDED validity data. But oh no. WTF.
And I was reading this article, and they reported all this statistics etc. Only then I notice that despite all that so-called statistical significance and elaborate math, the R-squared reported was, get this, 0.07. No shit. Their fucking elaborate model is able to explain 7% of the variance. A monkey throwing darts can do better. And it's published. And morons reading these things will just take note of the idea that A and B contribute to C, and so on, and miss the fact the model does fuck all.
In another article, the researchers report on a pretty massive quantitative study involving more than 500 subjects. These subjects were videotaped and different observers watched the tape and coded the behaviours. The article reports inter-rater reliability (i.e. whether different observers report the same thing) at 15-20%! Fuck! Two monkey throwing darts would give you 50% agreement! And it gets published.
What the fuck were the reviewers doing?
Now for something that I simply HATE. Why do people not use the Oxford comma anymore? In what fucking way is it better to say blue, green, red and white, than to say, blue, green, red, and white? Why do we need to give the possible confusion that "red and white" is one item?
It's just me.
I guess aspiring academic writers are glad that I am no longer reviewing papers.
