Friday, August 27, 2010

Is it possible to pricemark the attention span ?

I gave a serious thought to the above. Call me a money minded capitalist, and I am proud to be so. Perhaps it is the greatest denial of our time. Most would say that they have a feeling for the patients who are under there care and I suspect they are nothing but hypocrites. True that we as health care providers do need to have an understanding of how a patient shall feel. But most senior people use the same ideology to get the dodgy workload cleared by their traninees and junior colleagues.

Getting back to the topic proper, I had a pile of answer scripts to be marked on my desk right now. Having had a cursory look at few sheets, I have the feeling that these need to be marked thoroughly. Then I started marking them, one by one, giving meticulous attention to each of the statements. After about one hour, I was done with two scripts, and there were fifty more to be assessed. Then I realized that it was going to consume an enormous amount of time. The golden question was, how much I was going to get paid for marking each script.

It is sad that the Uni authorities want us to believe a mere 0.25 USD per script is the reasonable price. You might agree with me that 'peanuts' is a lighter term to describe such a payment. Therefore I decided to curtail my attention span to match the price of an answer. I was feeling bad about it at the beginning but what else can I do.

I began to scan for the 'words' that are expected to be present in the script. If the words were present, I would allocate marks for each one of them. And I was done with the bundle of papers within forty minutes and another ten minutes later the marksheet was posted to the course co-ordinator.

Pricetagging the attention span what do you think?

Monday, August 2, 2010

That was disgusting

I am not sure I am angry or sad after what I heard from a very good friend of mine. He is extremely intelligent and a hardworking person decided to give up the perks of clinical practice in order to pursue a PhD in a leading University. He was doing well, until he realized that his research idea and protocol was hijacked en mass by a senior person.

Although I did not have a chance to speak to him literally, I could very well feel his anguish through the chat on MSN. In a place that promote attempted murders to higher ranks, can you ask for more!!

Anyway in research and academic life, the lesson is, NEVER trust anyone!!!!!