This is indeed a strange and worrying phenomena. I am in fact aware of cases where a student has managed to lose 3 or more grandmothers while pursuing an undergraduate degree. This leaves the student with a negative number of grandmothers. The underlying mechanisms allowing this is highly mysterious and is certainly deserving of further research.
Yes, every teacher has experienced this.<p>A lot of teachers have become jaded and will assume every student who brings this up is a liar and a cheat.<p>The problem though is that although the majority of the cases are made up to get out of exams or assignments, a small number aren't. These students, in addition to losing their beloved relative then can become very distraught to find themselves unexpectedly saddled with a false accusation of being a liar.<p>Because of this, when I taught, I would nod and sympathize, then say that because there had been some abuse of this in the past, they could have an extension or such only if they provided an actual published obituary from a newspaper or funeral home. Some other teachers use another method, of having a certain number of exams or assignments that can be dropped without penalty. Of course what often happens in those cases is students drop an early exam, and then later claim injustice at not getting an extra one for the deceased grandparent.
Of course, students have no reason to report deaths of relatives when there are no consequences to missing class. So, deaths most likely only get reported during exams.
This is one of the best submissions I've seen on hn. So often these days, people are treating 'SCIENCE' as a completely objective enterprise when it is usually the interpretation of objective observations that is fed to the public, which is a very subjective matter.
I can add one more anecdote. My grandmother passed away before my first semester final exams in my first year. My parents didn't actually tell me until after my exams finished.<p>The thing is that she passed away in India. My grandmother would spend summers in Canada and winters in India. She passed away the same week a cousin married.<p>My hypothesis is that stressful things happen at the end of seasonal quarters. Final exams just happen to be one of those things. Flu season also happens to be December/January. Allergy season is around May/June.<p>I did a quick Google search but I can't find any information regarding death rate and monthly distribution. I would assume that it is evenly distributed but I wouldn't be surprised if the assumption was incorrect.
This is really amusing, but I'm a little skeptical that it's based on real data. Where does this author get the data on "number in family" for each student presented on p.3, for instance? (The article would be <i>fascinating</i> if it were true, but I'm tentatively treating it as a humor piece.)<p>In case it is true, let me second kenthorvath's comment: students have much less incentive to tell a professor about deaths in their family when there's no exam coming up. (I can't judge the grandmother/grandfather ratio information, because the article presents absolutely no data on that point at all. Hence even more skepticism.)
Just as a comment to any current students who do experience the death or illness of a relative: it's probably best to discuss things with your academic advisor (grad or undergrad) before or instead of contacting individual professors. An email from another prof has infinitely more credibility than one from a student; you only have to discuss it once, with someone you already know; and your advisor should know what resources are available to you and can help you plan the rest of the semester.
When I used to TA a very large freshman class, we handled it by letting the students know on the syllabus that in such cases we would send a sympathy card to their home address.<p>The theory was that if the story was legit, it would be a nice gesture by the course staff. If it wasn't, the student would have some 'splainin' to do at home.
Reminds me of the old joke.<p>Four students, all roommates, thought about skipping an exam since they haven't prepared well. They arrived really late for the exam, and gave the excuse that they had a flat tire on the way. The Professor agrees for a re-exam.<p>After a week, they come really well prepared. But, the question paper was a shocker.<p>"Which tire got punctured?"
Last year my granddad died the day before an exam. I'm not sure if the point of the paper is that students use this as a excuse or that we just don't mention relatives dying at times when they do not conflict with other major events in someones life.
Some of the data seem a little suspect. The grade correlation result is unreasonably strong, and the bin sizes aren't specified, among other shortcomings. That said, this was a very entertaining read.<p><i>edit:</i> Appears to be from 1990.
reminds me of the fmri of a dead salmon (<a href="http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf</a>)
This article is apparently only a joke. I found some indirect report of the opinion of author (near the end of the article): <a href="http://host.madison.com/news/local/doug_moe/doug-moe-poking-fun-at-students-and-their-excuses-to/article_1a9ec28e-dedc-11de-b50f-001cc4c03286.html" rel="nofollow">http://host.madison.com/news/local/doug_moe/doug-moe-poking-...</a>
Hilarious! Reminds me of another paper suggesting a game theoretic approach to the toilet seat problem - <a href="http://home.tiac.net/~cri/1998/toilet.html" rel="nofollow">http://home.tiac.net/~cri/1998/toilet.html</a>