Comment by gwd
21 hours ago
> When 2:50 rolled around and your meeting was supposed to end, do you think people actually ended the meeting? Noooooo. Absolutely not!
At U of M, they solved this problem by having classes officially start 10 minutes after the time they were advertised as. That is, a class listed as being 10-11am was actually 10:10-11am; nobody showed up until 10:10.
Sure, technically it's the same thing, but there's a pretty massive anchoring effect for things on the hour. Still being in the meeting room at 11:01 feels a lot later than still being in the meeting room at 10:51.
In Finland the universities (and I believe in many other European universities have/had this as well) there was "academic quarter" which meant that if something was scheduled for 10am it would actually start at 10:15am. IIRC if they used precise time (10:00) then it would actually start at that time.
I've heard it dates back to when people didn't have easy access to precise time. It would allow students to hear the hourly bells and walk to the class.
Same in Germany. Times are usually assumed to be ct (cum tempore) and start XY:15. When something starts sharp, it's specified as st (sine tempore).
It also allows you to have "1 hour" classes that are at 10am and 11am, and you aren't forced to leave early or arrive late. A 5m gap isn't enough for huge numbers of classes in many campuses.
How much can you actually do in 1 hour that’s 45 minutes long?
All my classes were 1.5 hours long. Yet professors still regularly chose to introduce new material on days with back-to-back classes, leaving standalone classes for practice or “less important” topics.
I confirm, we have it in Italian universities (it's called "quarto d'ora accademico" in Italian).
This thread is absolutely fascinating — American, never heard of this practice (esp ct/st), and desperately want it in my life now!
For the most part, American Universities were established after railroad time tables were a thing…and in the US Latin and the other liberal arts were never the primary curriculum at most US universities, so cum tempore might as well be Latin.
Yep I even had one professor who locked the door at the start of class. You either had to pound on the door to get in or accept defeat. Most people just walked away unless it was an exam day
In Poland "academic quarter" has a sense that if the teacher didn't show up and it's 15 minues past, the students can leave. They still need to show up for the class at 00 every time and are scolded to varying degree if they showed up after the teacher started which they do right after they arrive.
At my university in New Zealand they didn't take attendance for lectures. You attended the lectures so you could learn stuff so you could pass the exams. It's surprising that isn't considered normal.
(There's some nuance to that statement as science courses tende to have labs - I don't remember why first-year physics was a requirement for software engineering, but it was - mathematics courses tended to have weekly assignments, and at least one software course had a very unusual style of putting us in a room one whole day per week for a semester to work on group projects.)
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... so the old American high school "if the teacher is 15 minutes late, we're legally allowed to leave" meme has some roots in reality? Huh.
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Same in Denmark. Actually often needed to get from one auditorium across campus to another auditorium
Times are given as "c.t.", cum tempore.
so did things end at 11:15am as I imagine a lot of times there was something to be done in the next hour of 11AM?
At the universities I've been to classes were almost always 1½ hours, so until 11:45am.
Same thing in Sweden in the 1980s
Still is, standard lecture is scheduled for example for 10-12. It starts at 10.15, pause 11.00-11.15, continues until 12.00. So it's neatly split in two 45 minute halves.
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Still is!
Thankfully
A bit different in Russia and Ukraine, there's a notion of "academic hour" which is 45 minutes. Same idea though.
Yes except classes in schools usually start at X:00 and breaks between them are X:45 - (X+1):00. The first class is usually at 9:00.
Same in slovenia, in technical colleges at least.
For some lectures it was great, you really needed those 15 minutes to get coffee, go to the bathroom, etc., but for some late afternoon stuff, you just wanted to shorten the last three breaks to 5 minutes and leave half an hour early.
At Michigan State, I had a math prof (Wade Ramey) who would lock the door after class started. If you were late, you couldn't attend.
He also insisted students purchase a stapler and staple their homework. And he would give negative points on assignments. You could say "I don't know how to do X" for a step in a proof (0 pts), but if you put in something wrong, you would get negative points on that part.
He was a good prof, and I enjoyed his classes.
>And he would give negative points on assignments.
I remember reading (maybe from Nate Silver) of a professor who would use this technique to teach about uncertainty. You could weigh your overall grade with a proclamation about how certain you were about the answer. Right answers with high certainty could really amp up your grade, but conversely if you claimed 100% certainty on a question you got wrong, you’d fail the course!
There are a number of variations. You might actually be thinking of https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/my-favorite-liahtml or possibly https://gwern.net/doc/statistics/prediction/2022-gelman.pdf (if neither of those are it, it might be one of the others I collated in https://gwern.net/fake-journal-club#external-links ).
This is the best/most fun way to bet on the Oscars.
You pick the winner and then assign 1-25 (or whatever) points to it (using each number for only one category) and if you get it right you get that number of points.
It basically prevents ties. It lets you make risky picks without falling out of the running. The downside is a shocking number of people won't be able to follow the rule and end up with 22 used twice or whatever.
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I have a medical condition (autoimmune hypothyroid, extreme edition) which I wasn't aware of, but was suffering from severely, during my University years. Waking up was extremely difficult for me and as a result I was often late. At the time I couldn't understand why I seemingly had a problem that nobody else did, and presumed I just lacked self control. Nope, I just needed (a lot) of medication.
Your Prof Ramsey would have penalised me for this unknown condition. This isn't behaviour to be celebrated.
You seem to expect the professor to give you a reasonable accommodation for an affliction you didn’t even realize you had. If you want to hold him accountable for his (unfair?) rules, you need to first hold yourself accountable for getting the disease diagnosed.
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It is baffling that you are claiming “can’t show up on time” is something professors need to work around as a reasonable accommodation.
In cases where a student shows up 10+ minutes late to a course and disrupts the lecture, what percentage of the time do you estimate the reason for tardiness is a diagnosed or undiagnosed illness or hardship.
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> Your Prof Ramsey would have penalised me for this unknown condition. This isn't behaviour to be celebrated.
On the contrary, your anecdote is evidence of how this seemingly arbitrary behaviour can actually uncover real issues and prompt people to question and investigate.
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You seem to think that if everyone were more empathetic, it would be possible to arrange our society so that people with serious un-diagnosed medical conditions never have to miss out on anything important.
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Why not. I mean if you're expected to come and relieve a co-worker at 5pm, because he has to go get his kids from daycare, and you show up at 5:30 so now the police are at the daycare collecting his kids (because he's waiting for you all the time)
It always baffles me. Make accommodations for your conditions.. So the 30 plus students are meant to have their time interrupted by a late arrival. I have ADD, so when in a class if someone comes in late, I get distracted and can't pay attention. Which person should this prof accomodate? Me with ADD or you.
The "make accommodations" is always argued by the few, against the needs of the many. It's self centred. If waking up is hard, go to be earlier, get a better alarm clock, pick classes later in the day. Make accommodations for your own disability.
My ADD has me working from home, with noise cancelling headphones. I accommodated my own-self.
As someone who is _often_ late, your inability to be there in time is not someone else's problem. Unfairly punished...gimme a break.
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Fifteen minutes late used to be the academic standard in Germany (and other countries): it was noted by “c.t.” in the timetable, meaning “cum tempore”.
When I studied it had already been mostly abolished. Sometimes starting times were explicitly marked “sine tempore”.
> it had already been mostly abolished
c.t. is still standard at many German universities (and at all Bavarian universities I know). However, I know at least one university of applied sciences where lectures start at full hours.
Those are strange annotations; it looks like at least one word is missing. They mean "with time" and "without time".
Tempore is in ablative case, and in english there isn't a good substitute. This means it isn't a static set time event, it has some leeway so to speak. German has the ablative case, so I think it works out for them.
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It seems to make sense if you interpret it as:
10am c.t. = 10am with extra time
10am s.t. = 10am without extra time
Cum can be translated as 'with', but due to cultural use, it can also be translated as 'in addition'.
Some younger Latin recipes use 'cum sal' as a one-liner at the end, to tell the chef to season to their taste, for example.
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They sound like appropriate abbreviations to me. Something like: "With time to get to the location" and "Without time to get to the location"
This is also fast becoming the norm in many big tech companies. The internal calendar tools will pretty much always start meetings 5minutes after the hour/half hour by default and end exactly on the hour/half hour by default (you can override if needed).
It's pretty obvious, you can't travel to a meeting instantly and 100% appreciated when you work in such a place. For those senior enough for all day back to back meetings you get toilet breaks!
If you work in a company that doesn't do this take note and if you're senior in a company you should start pushing for this to be implemented. A lot of calendar tools have options for meeting buffers by default and enabling it is all you need to do.
That’s called the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_quarter_(class_timing.... (It usually is 15 minutes.)
How very European.
AKA "Fashionably Late"
At St Andrews University we have the concept of an “Academic hour” where every class and lecture begins at 5 past and ends at 5 to the hour. So your 10:00-11:00 lecture is actually 10:05-10:55. I believe this is mainly to give people time to get between their classes across town and to standardise how much time one has to set up between lectures.
I really like and appreciate their system. It's simple and easy for everyone to adapt to.
my alma mater!
UC Berkeley does this too. Nobody told us freshman, and in my very first class we were all dutifully early, wondering where the professor was, and at 8 minutes after the hour the whole lecture hall was wondering if we needed to bail. Then the lecturer came in and asked what we were all doing there, didn't we know classes don't start until 10 minutes after the listed time?
Our team did the same during the pandemic. They declared that the first 5 minutes of every meeting were for bio breaks.
Now meetings actually start at :05 or :07. The prior meeting will often drag until that time, but you don't feel bad knocking at :00 or :02 and asking for the room to clear.
I'm sure that's where Larry Page got the idea.
Unfortunately UMich ended "Michigan time" back in 2018. I always thought it was a great solution to the problem.
> The 10-minute transition time will move before the hour instead of after the hour. Previously a one-hour class with an official start time of 9:00 a.m. would begin at 9:10 a.m. Under the new policy, class will begin at the official start time but end at 9:50 a.m.
https://www.michiganpublic.org/education/2018-02-20/universi... / https://record.umich.edu/articles/university-updating-start-...
Sad.
A rare case of institutional design that respects how people actually behave, not just how they're "supposed" to.
I've been doing this for years with my meetings and I wish Google Calendar had it built in. I have to keep manually adjusting start times and it's a pain.
It really should a setting that the user can toggle to default.
That stopped in about 2017, right after I finished my master's degree.
Yeah that seems like such an obvious solution to this problem.
At my schools and workplaces, meetings or classes would begin when they began, and then several people who mattered would be chronically late, and so whatever we did in the first 5-10 minutes was an utter waste and went down the drain, because the leaders would rewind and repeat it all "for the benefit of those who just joined us."
This was the worst part of being a person who is prompt and on-time for all meetings and events. If you're going to always accommodate people who are chronically late, then you don't respect my time or effort. You just slapped me in the face for being prompt when you rewound your lecture or repeated your introduction. You wasted ten minutes of my time to cater to other people who are [habitually] wasting ten minutes of everyone else's time.
It was horrible and reprehensible, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it or mitigate it. What was I going to do, be late on my own?
I learned about 25 years ago never to be late to anything, particularly an appointment or a job/volunteer role where I'm indispensable. I was fired as a volunteer from a very important role because I was late only once. It was a role which was strictly dependent on timing and promptness. I learned at that very moment, never to be late again, and riding public transit as I did, I always built-in at least 30 minutes of lead time so that I was super-early rather than on-time, or God forbid, late.