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The Pitt News

The independent student newspaper of the University of Pittsburgh | PIttnews.com | January 10, 2018 | Volume 108 | Issue 86

SGB CALLS FOR CHEAP TEXTBOOK OPTIONS

ICE, ICE BABY

Madeline Gavatorta Staff Writer

At Student Government Board’s first public meeting of the semester Tuesday night, SGB President Max Kneis introduced and read a resolution calling for the University to expand the use of open educational resources, such as PDF textbooks. “[Textbooks are] just another added cost, so anything we can do to make college more affordable is a step in the right direction,” Kneis said.

Vice President and Chief of Cabinet Krish Patel co-authored the resolution with Kneis and Sarah Grguras, who is on the PittServes advisory board. Patel became interested in the resolution when Grguras, a junior environmental studies and ecology and evolution major, suggested it to SGB. The resolution cited the Office of Admissions and Financial Aid, which recommends students prepare to pay $772 for textbooks for the 2017-2018 school year.

“That cost, that’s someone’s rent.

That’s someone’s grocery money for the entire semester,” Patel said. “That impacts the students way more than people really see.”

Along with the resolution, Kneis appointed Patel as the Arts and Sciences undergraduate representative for the provost search committee following current provost Patricia Beeson’s decision to step down. Patel’s main requirement for the new provost is that they be someone

A recently erected ice sculpture of Roc, sponsored by Pitt Program Council, begins to melt in uncharacteristically warm winter temperatures Tuesday outside the William Pitt Union.

Christian Snyder ONLINE VISUAL EDITOR

Surveying the semester with OMETs Bailey Frisco Staff Writer

As each semester winds down and students begin to prepare for finals, they are burdened with one more task to complete — OMETs. OMET — Office of Measurement and Evaluation of Teaching — is a department at Pitt that administers a survey of student opinion for professors. The main objective of the survey is to evaluate teaching effectiveness.

Madison Heebner, a sophomore studying German, said she thinks OMETs are useful for the instructors, but can be repetitive for the students. Heebner noted a drawback to the OMETs is most of them ask the same questions.

See SGB on page 6 “It’s difficult to tell someone what they

should be doing when you have pretty basic questions,” Heebner said. “Even with the comments, it’s kind of hard to tell someone what you think they should be doing better when you have five more [surveys] to complete.”

Some of her past professors added their own questions onto the OMET form, and some seemed to take the OMETs more seriously than others. Heebner said she would put more time into the survey when it seemed like it was important to the professor, and worry about it less when the professor seemed not to care about it.

Lisa Votodian — assistant to the director at OMET — said the response to the survey from the faculty is positive, and they enjoy getting the student responses.

“Many instructors are very attentive

to the survey process, and check their response rates periodically and contact us if they feel that there are any issues with any aspect of the survey administrations,” Votodian said.

Jeff Oaks, a Pitt professor in the department of English writing for the last 30 years, is among the professors who feel the OMETs are important.

Oaks said the OMETs can be beneficial to professors in terms of helping them get raises and promotions. He said parttime professors get new contracts every semester, whereas full-time, non-tenured professors — such as himself — get new contracts every five years. This means that a professor with a five-year contract See OMETs on page 2

News OMETs, pg. 1

and a generally positive reputation with OMETs, like Oaks, has a solid chance of getting his contract renewed, while parttime professors rely more heavily on the semestral evaluations to maintain their positions.

“If you are part-time, the OMET has a bigger effect on your being hired because you have to be hired more often, in a way,” he said.

There is one thing he doesn’t like about the OMETs — getting the students to actually fill them out. This becomes an added responsibility for the professor. In order to get his students to complete the OMETs, Oaks tells his students to bring a device to the last class and gives them 15 minutes at the beginning of the class to fill them out.

“It seems to me there needs to be some

other system to get the students to respond better, if they want more responses,” he said.

Heebner said one of her professors used the same tactic as Oaks of setting aside time for the students to fill out the OMETs, even going so far as to leave the room so students could have some privacy.

Professors who utilize this tactic to get their students to complete the surveys are taking a similar approach to how the survey used to be completed. The only difference is they are no longer handwritten.

Oaks said the OMETs used to be proctored by a student who was paid to administer the survey while the professor left the room during the last 15 minutes of class. He said the survey was not digital then, but handwritten instead. There are still students, however, like Heebner, who don’t require this sort of pressure and voluntarily complete the survey in certain

cases.

“I will say that I’ve never really looked forward to telling a professor off, but I did have one who I wasn’t really a fan of, and I did look forward to giving my feedback — but not in a scathing way,” Heebner said.

Nancy Reilly, director at OMET, said the OMETs have been in existence for a long time, but only started being completed online less than 10 years ago. She said the surveys emerged when she worked in the OMET office in 1979, but became widespread by the time she returned again in 1998.

“They started out just in the School of Arts and Sciences back in the mid-to-late 70s, and then slowly expanded to other schools like Education,” Reilly said.

Reilly said the survey format changed again slightly last year when the office signed onto a new survey software company that was more efficient and included more features. Since the OMETs were

instituted, though, they have maintained the objective of protecting the identity of each student who completed the survey.

One misconception about the surveys is that they are entirely anonymous, but this is only true for professors who view them. According to Votodian, the OMET staff sees each response and its correlation to a specific student, but that information is kept confidential and not passed on to the instructors.

Students, though, appreciate the privacy when it comes to giving an honest review of their professors. The confidentiality allows them to provide feedback of their professors without fear of retribution.

“It’s nice that they’re confidential because you can provide your opinion to a professor — even if it’s negative. You don’t have to be afraid of them,” Heebner said.

Sarah Frumkin contributed reporting.

The Pitt News SuDoku 1/10/18 courtesy of dailysudoku.com

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Opinions

Editorial: Oprah’s speech not grounds for presidency online

column

SELF-AWARENESS SNAPS UNCONSCIOUS BIASES Vaibhavi Patria Staff Writer

Imagine you’re walking down Forbes Avenue one afternoon, and suddenly a man wearing a ski mask grabs your backpack and sprints away. You call the police immediately, and although the backpack is nowhere to be found, they’ve arrested two men who match your description of the perpetrator. You’re taken into the police station to assist in identifying him — one of the men is white, the other black.

Perhaps you wouldn’t expect yourself to naturally feel inclined to thinking the black man is guilty — but statistically, you probably would.

We’ve all probably experienced this phenomenon on one street corner or another. It is known as implicit bias — harboring unconscious biases or expectations, regardless of ill will or any selfaware prejudices.

Our unconscious train of thought cannot be controlled, so these beliefs are not our fault. Having implicit biases does not make us bad people, and doesn’t make us explicitly racist. But a society motivated by uncontrolled, unconscious beliefs is not a very effective or a very judicious one.

Implicit racism holds many dangerous implications within society, including racial profiling, injustice for minorities within the court systems and employment practices. Professionals in our community are only human, after all. They are just as likely to succumb to these beliefs.

These instances can cause a great deal of emotional and political dissatisfaction from victims of implicit racism, leading to social and political backlash.

Luckily, there may be a solution to the problem. Several different studies show that just being more informed

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on biases reduces the extent to which they come into play in one’s life. Simply reading about it is a step toward reducing or eliminating your biases altogether.

Being self-aware of our feelings and beliefs is key to understanding our biases — only then can we move toward honest social progress. This allows us to make more just, informed decisions and avoid decisions based on emotion that results from blindly following implicit biases.

One of the best, most effective ways to increase our awareness is to read and understand a few important social experiments and studies.

The implicit association test is one of the most popular tests in studying these biases — it’s designed to measure the strength between concepts and evaluations. This is important because it eliminates the dangers of social desirability biases that can occur in people’s core beliefs, specifically racism. Social desirability biases occur w h e n respon-

dents change their answer to a question to adhere to social norms.

However, with the IAT, subjects cannot lie or alter their responses because they fear judgment from the experimenters or society. Since the test employs subjects’ unconscious beliefs by handing individuals tasks that ask respondents to immediately categorize stimuli into groups, the response time between the categorization of one group and another shows the presence of implicit biases because the test only employs one’s innate responses.

There’s simply no time to think — the responses are instinctual.

Another study by the West Virginia Law Review explored the implicit racism within the legal system, demonstrating the ways these unconscious biases can push us to make unjust decisions in determining whether someone is guilty of a crime.

In this study, researchers tested and found that when study participants were shown images of black and white perpetrators, they found accompanying evidence of the mock crime to be supportive of a guilty verdict for the black man.

Jordan Mondell CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

January 10, 2018

The jurors were unintentionally biased in their evaluation of evidence. If more people were aware of these tendencies, the unfair treatment of racial minorities in the justice system could finally improve.

Implicit racism has long plagued the American justice system, and a 2014 study

by The Sentencing Project revealed just how rampant the over-association between crime and black people is. In a 2010 survey during the study, researchers found that white Americans overestimated the number of crimes committed by black people by 20 to 30 percent.

Besides these social studies, more physical experiments found that the bias likely originates in the brain by using fMRIs — functional magnetic resonance imaging. These fMRIs show that when white subjects are shown unknown white faces and unknown black faces, the amygdala — which is associated with emotions like fear — is activated only when shown unknown black faces.

Fixing these thoughts, which have likely been ingrained into all of us from an early age thanks to actions and observations both personal and from the media, is hard work.

It requires digging deep and constantly reminding yourself that there’s more to a person than what anyone could conceive from the outside.

Becoming aware of your implicit biases may not create huge, noticeable changes in you, but you may not be so quick to point an accusing finger at those who’ve done nothing wrong.

Vaibhavi primarily writes about social justice for The Pitt News.

Write to Vaibhavi at vap37@pitt.edu

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Sports Staff picks: Making the most of wintertime The Pitt News Staff Everyone knows how depressing winter can feel in Pittsburgh. Low temperatures, gray skies and unpredictable precipitation force many to retreat indoors and suffer through long periods of inactivity while waiting for spring.

The winter doesn’t need to be all bad, though. The Pitt News sports staff gave us their favorite winter recreation activities for when they’re feeling brave enough to step outside and face the weather.

Ice-skating During the winter months, Pittsburgh offers a couple nice venues to skate, including a rink at Schenley Park. The most popular spot is probably the rink at PPG Place in Market Square around the giant Christmas tree that is lit every year. While I’m no Sidney Crosby, I like to make at least one trip out to the rink every year to skate around — or at least see how long I can last without falling -Grant Burgman, Sports Editor Cross-country skiing I am not an athletic person. Usually, when taken on a winter outing, it ends in 10 minutes before I start crying and asking my friends if we can just go drink hot chocolate instead.

Cross-country skiing, though — totally different. What is more relaxing than strapping on some long shoes and just gliding through the forest? Nothing, that’s what. Cross-country skiing really gives you the opportunity to

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Elise Lavallee CONTRIBUTING EDITOR imbibe the beautiful winter scenery that comes with other winter activities, but without the danger of falling and breaking your legs, or something.

-Jordan Mondell, Assistant Sports Editor Snowball fights Although Pittsburgh doesn’t get snow quite as often as I wish it would, it does get a few inches every now and then. On the days that it does, and if it is cold enough, it can be great to have a snowball fight. When I was a kid, if the snow was good enough to pack after school — or during a snow day — my friends and I would spend hours fighting. It’s a fun way to get outside in the cold weather and enjoy yourself, especially after cracking someone in the head with a big chunk of frozen water.

-Dominic Campbell, Staff Writer Building a snowman Building a snowman is an art that took

years of experience to master. To check the viability of snowman-building snow, I relied on the “crunch test.” If the snow made a crunching sound when I stepped on it in my boots, I knew the snow was perfect for building a snowman. Once I knew the snow was ideal, I usually recruited my sisters as assistants.

Each of us rolled a different body part of the snowman — the base ball, the torso ball and the head ball. Using extreme caution, my oldest sister, usually, carried the torso and head onto the base of the snowman while my other sister and I packed in snow at each connection point to act as “snow cement.” Once each ball was connected, we would rip off some branches from a tree to serve as arms, and find three rocks to give our snowman eyes and a nose. Finally, we raided our dad’s closet for hats, gloves and scarves to finish off decorating our buddy. While building a snowman didn’t give me the immediate joy of an activity

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like sledding, the sense of accomplishment I felt looking at my snowman was one of a kind.

-David Leftwich, Senior Staff Writer Tubing Tubing is great if you like feeling like a sardine being canned on a conveyor belt, followed by five seconds of joy — it’s a testament to the low threshold of entertainment in the wintertime. Tubing isn’t all bad, though. As a child, it’s really fun — a few moments flying down a hill larger than you can fathom is equal to a lifetime of excitement. The time spent trying and failing to hook up to the rope and slide slowly up the slushy, bite-size alps afterward is gone in a flash. With age, tubing is a great excuse to avoid dying with speeddemon friends racing down double black diamond trails without ski poles.

-Brandon Glass, Staff Writer

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SGB, pg. 1

Pitt Program Council Special Events Director Zach Linn discusses upcoming events during SGB’s first meeting of the year.

Sarah Cutshall STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER year. Two years ago, Bodea Crisan said there was little competition for board positions, which she connected to low turnout that year.

“When there’s no competition people

don’t vote, so the two are extremely, closely linked together,” Bodea Crisan said.

To promote this year’s election and increase student involvement, Bodea

The Pitt news crossword 1/10/18

who can connect the different groups at the University, like Beeson does now. “[Beeson’s] very great with working with students and understanding our sides, and she gives a great perspective, bridging that gap between faculty, upper administration and students,” Patel said.

Elections Chair Anastasia Bodea Crisan discussed the progress preparing for spring SGB elections. As of Monday, the election committee has application packets available in the SGB office and is holding an information session about running for SGB today from 7 to 8 p.m. in the William Pitt Union room 837. At least one board member will be present to answer any questions attending students have.

“In the fall our biggest goal is just to get the word out there because our job this semester is, a lot of it is to increase voter turnout and that’s a lot easier when there are more people running,” Bodea Crisan said.

Last year’s election saw high voter turnout — double from the previous

Crisan said the elections committee will use stickers, flyers with running requirements, Snapchat filters and T-shirts.

“You can rely on other people to vote and just assume, ‘Oh you know I’m sure whoever wins will be the same,’ or, ‘I’m sure, ya know, it won’t make a difference if I vote.’ I know that these are a lot of common things people say, but honestly the truth is every single vote does count and every candidate does have unique platforms and unique initiatives,” Bodea Crisan said.

As SGB works to promote running for next year’s board, winter break saw some shake-up with the current staff.

Kneis said Communications Director Nick Fisher resigned Dec. 8 due to personal reasons. Kneis appointed Associate Communications Director Sana Mahmood as the replacement. Additionally, a member of the judicial committee, Natalie Simmons, resigned Dec. 14.

Chief of Staff Derek Arnold was absent at Tuesday’s meeting.

There were not any allocations due to the break — allocations will resume next meeting.

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I N D E X

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Contact Jarred Brown 814-403-2798.

Apartments for rent.

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Studio & 1 Bedrooms Available Fall 2018. Heat included.

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Various 1-bedroom apartments on Meyran, Pier and Ward Streets. Starting from $765-$850. Available August 2018.

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Located on Morewood Avenue, 15 minute walk to Pitt/ CMU, Walnut Street.

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Available August 1st, 2018. No Pets. $1195+ g/e. Call Jason at 412-922-2141.

Pics/info: tinyurl.com/ morewood1br

Employment Research Studies Participants Wanted for Paid Psychology Research Participants wanted for an alcohol research study at Carnegie Mellon University To be eligible for this study, you must: •Be 21-25 yrs. old and own a smartphone •Drink alcohol at least weekly •Be able to show valid photo ID •Be willing to consume alcohol You may earn up to $365 for your participation in this multi-session study.

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Notices Adoption ADOPTION: Loving, stable family hopes for one more blessing to join us in our adventures! Please call Heather/Chris 1 (800) 444-3089

spring semester, to interview & process rental applicants, do internet postings & help staff our action- central office. Part time or full time OK. Starting in January; full time over summer. $13/ hour. Perfect job for current sophomores &

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