Ethics for Nerds

Dear students,

the re-exam will be next week on Thursday (September 28). If you want to participate, you have to be duly registered

1. on your personal status page in dCMS and
2. according to the rules of your examination office (e.g., in LSF).

The registration deadline for dCMS and LSF registrations is tomorrow (September 21).

Please register before the deadline. Otherwise, we might not be able to let you partake in the exam!

The exam inspection will take place in SR 016 in E1 3 on August 22. Please come between 9:00 and 9:30. There might be wait times. Please don't forget to bring your student ID card.

If you are in a study programme that does not use the LSF and need a paper certificate, please write an email to Sarah if you have not already done so.

The results of the exam are now available on your personal status page in the dCMS. With 30 points or more, you passed the exam. You are also able to see the points you scored per issue as well as the gradescale table, where you can see how points translate to grades.

In some cases, we prematurely terminated the grading of an exam in case it was obvious that no more than 24 points were reachable in total. This applies to you if the total point score displayed is less than 20. In this case, the score shown is an underapproximation of the points scored. If an issue is displayed with “n.p.” instead of a number of points, this means that you either did not solve this issue or that it was not corrected due to this reason.

Everybody will have the chance to inspect their exams. The exact date and time of the exam inspection will be announced on Monday.

Best wishes,
Your Ethics for Nerds team

 

The first exam will take place on Monday, July 31. Please read the following carefully:

• Check your assigned lecture hall and seat on your personal status page (scroll to the bottom to see the section “Exam Seats”). Only students who have an assigned seat can partake in the exam. If you think that you should have a seat but your personal status page does not show one, then please get in touch with Sarah as soon as possible.
• We will start at 10 sharp with the exam. Please be in front of your assigned lecture hall at 9:45. Students who are late might be denied entry to the lecture hall.
• The exam will take 120 minutes.
• You will need your student ID card, as well as a pen with indelible black or blue ink, preferably a ballpoint pen. Fountain pen ink that can be erased with ink eradicators ("Tintenkiller") is not indelible.
• You may bring one handwritten, double-sided DIN-A4 cheat sheet. Dictionaries are not allowed unless your dictionary is accepted by the staff member in your lecture hall before the start of the exam. We advise against bringing dictionaries.

If you have any urgent questions regarding the organizational details of the exam, please get in touch with Sarah in time.

See you on Monday! :)

You can find the feedback for your final reports on your personal status page. If you wish to partake in the exam, then please register both in the LSF* and in the dCMS until Sunday, July 23. We cannot let you partake in the exam if you are not properly registered in the LSF. In order to register in the dcms, please go to your personal status page and click the respective button.

* Students in certain study programes cannot register in the LSF. If this applies to you, please make sure that your subject of study is correctly stated on your personal status page.

The feedback for your revisions of Project Phase 5 is out! You can see them on your personal status page.

Since you are in a very advanced phase with your reports, we graded the revisions differently this time. You either got a “pass” or a “downgrade on report” (formerly: fail). So, instead of failing, some groups’ report will be graded a bit more strictly than the reports of everybody else, such that you did not do all the work on the report in vain. So, all of you can proceed with their reports!

The feedback for Project Phase 5 is out. If your submission says “revise and resubmit” or “fail”, then please upload a revised version until Friday, July 7 at 6 pm on your personal status page. Please use the Writing Workshops and the office hours if you are unsure about your submission. The tutors will help you to achieve a revision that passes. Also, it is ok if you split up in your group such that part of your group works on the report and part of the group works on the revision of Phase 5.

Recap Sessions become Writing Workshops

As announced in the lecture, the Recap Sessions will become Writing Workshops. You can stop by and work on your assignments which a tutor there to help you with questions. You can come and go as you want. (But note that tutors will leave if nobody is there anymore.)

Online office hours

If you want to partake in an online office hour (every Tuesday at 14:15), then please write a private message to Laura in MS Teams either before or during the office hour takes place. She will then call you when it is your turn. This way, you can ask questions online without having to wait in a large online session for a long time.

Please take the Resubmit of Phase 4 seriously

Writing valid arguments can be very hard. So, please put effort into your Resubmits of Phase 4. If you fail this, you will not be able to take part in the exam. If you want to check whether you are on the right path, go to a Writing Workshop or an office hour. The tutors will be happy to help you with your solution.

Feedback for the last Revise and Resubmit online

If you had to revise and resubmit Phase 3 or the Theories of Ethics assignment, you can find feedback for that on your personal status page.

Evaluation

Course evaluations are happening. You will get a evaluation link in a separate email shortly. Please take some time to evaluate the lecture there.

 

Also, remember: there are no lectures this week or next week. But please take a look at the videos we uploaded online.

Best wishes,
Sarah

This is a friendly reminder that today‘s ‘lecture‘ will start at 9:00 instead of 8:30 and that it will not be a real lecture. Instead, we will go through the last project assignment together, I can give you some dos and don‘ts and you can ask questions you might already have.

Best wishes,
Sarah

 

Lecture this Week

This week, we will have a mini lecture on the final reports. Since the lecture will not be very long, it will only start at 9:00, instead of 8:30! We will go over the task description of the last project phase, I will give you a few tips and hints that might be helpful and you will be able to ask any questions you might have. The lecture will be recorded, as usual. So if you cannot attend, you will still be able to get the information you need to know.

Guest Lectures

Originally, it was planned that Kevin will give some guest lectures. Unfortunately, he is unable to do so and we decided that the best option would be to provide you with the recordings of last year’s lectures by him. You can find them in the Materials section. These lectures are not obligatory for the exam, in the sense that you will be able to get 100% of the points without having watched these videos. They might nevertheless be helpful for some exercises in the exam. They are project relevant, though, so at least a few people per team should have watched the videos!

Next week and the week after that, we will not have an in-person lecture.

Feedback for Project Phase 4

You can now see your results for Project Phase 4. If your assignment says “revise and resubmit” or “fail”, then you are eligible to make changes and resubmit it again on your personal status page. Your feedback may tell you that you only have to revise and resubmit a certain task, usually issue no. 4. In this case, you do not have to upload all other tasks again. The deadline for this is June 28, 18:00. The submission for this will open tomorrow.

If your submission says “pass”, you do not have to upload a revised version again!

Change in Admission Criteria

The requirement that you might only have a revise and resubmit in two project phases was suspended. You can have any number of revises and resubmits and will still be eligible for exam admission. Note, though, that it will not be possible to revise and resubmit an individual project phase twice. If you fail a revision, then you failed the exam admission criteria and cannot take part in the exam. Also note that there are no revises and resubmits of Final Reports! If you fail the final report, you will not be able to attend the exam.

But, don’t worry if Project Phase 4 was you second or even third revise and resubmit – that will not be an issue. :)

 

Feedback uploaded

The feedback on your last two assignments has been uploaded over the weekend. Please check it out on your personal status pages.

Revise and Resubmit

If your submission says either “fail” or “revise and resubmit”, you can still get a pass by revising it and submitting it again until Monday, June 12, at 18:00.

In case you need to resubmit both Project Phase 3 and the Theories of Ethics Assignment, it will only count as one Revise and Resubmit. Please hand in both submissions in one PDF then.

Public Holiday

Next Thursday, there will not be a lecture nor a Deep Dive Session due to a public holiday (Fronleichnam). There will, however, be an online office hour in the regular slot in MS Teams for anyone with urgent questions on the current assignment. The Recap Sessions are not affected and take place as normal. This week, they are still on writing valid arguments, which is an important skill for both the assignments and the exam.

Have a nice week and enjoy the public holiday! :)

This week, a new topic in recap sessions will start. Leon, Ahmed and Laura will exercise writing valid arguments with you (which is an important skill for the exam). As the recap sessions never reached their full capacity, I did not open a registration this time. If you want to join a session, just come to your favourite slot.

In-person recap sessions are:

• Tue, May 30, 10:15, by Leon in SR 015, E1 3 
• Wed, May 31, 8:30, by Ahmed in SR 106, E 1 1 
• Tue, June 6, 10:15, by Leon in SR 015, E1 3 
• Wed, June 7, 8:30, by Ahmed in SR 106, E 1 1 

The online recap session is:

• Tue, June 6, 14:15, by Laura, online

Best wishes,
Sarah

Recap Sessions

The recap sessions this week and next week will be about how you can detect invalidity of arguments. This is a very important topic, so we suggest you to take part in the respective recap session. There are still plenty of slots left for this week. So, consider registering for one of them.

Schedule Change

Due to limited demand in online recap sessions and office hours, we will changed the timetable a bit: the online office hour on Friday will be cancelled and the online recap slot on Tuesday will start alternating between an office hour and a recap session. You can see all changes in the timetable.

No lecture on Thursday

There is no lecture (and also no office hour) on Thursday, since there is a public holiday.

Have a nice week and enjoy the holiday! :)

Hello everyone!

As the poll that I did during the last lecture was very inconclusive, I decided for a compromise: the next submission contains both the Theories of Ethics assignment and Project Phase 3, but the deadline is in three weeks instead of two. I hope that most of you will be happy with that solution. Future deadlines are changed accordingly (see Timetable). The benefit of this is that you now have one more week where you can concentrate on the final report.

Also, please note one important thing: for about twenty seconds, the wrong version of the file was online. Sorry for that! If you downloaded it right at 18:00, please download it again.

Best
Sarah

We will be having a guest lecture by Ingmar Weber on Tuesday, May 9, from 14:00 to 16:00 in Lecture Hall 003 (E1.3)

The title: Collected for Profit, Repurposed for Social Good: What Advertising Data Reveals About Society

The guest lecture is not mandatory, but I nevertheless recommend you to come, because Ingmar Weber’s talk are usually amazing!

You can now see our feedback for your submissions to Project Phase 1. You will find a pdf on your personal status page where you have originally submitted your solution. Most of them will not contain a lot of feedback, since we asked for your opinion and there is little to say about that.

If you failed the first assignment, you have the possibility to resubmit a revised version until Tuesday, 9 May, at 18:00 on your personal status page.

If you want to participate in an in-person recap session, you will have to register on your personal status page. This is to ensure that these session say within the capacity of the rooms they are in. The registration is first-come-first-serve. Please only register if you plan on coming, so that you do not take slots away from other students.

If you want to participate in an online recap session, you do not need to register, but you can just come to your preferred slot. Online recap sessions will take place in MS Teams.

During the recap sessions you will get to practice skills that are relevant for both your assignments and the exam. In case of the recap sessions on theories of ethics, this will be: practicing the application of consequentialism, of Kant’s moral theory, and of Scanlon’s contractualism. Attendence is completely voluntary and all materials that are used in the sessions will be posted online, too. Notice that all six recap sessions in the next two weeks will be identical. So, attending one of them will be enough.

See you around! :)

Some of our office hours and recap sessions are online. The timetable tells you, when these are. If you want to participate, you have to join the Ethics for Nerds team in MS Teams. This is how to do it:

1. Open MS Teams, click "Teams" in your sidebar, and use the button for joining and creating teams.
2. Enter this team code: lbvcq96
3. Join the respective call in the only existing channel.
4. Ignore all the other functionalities. (They're useless for us, but Teams doesn't let me disable them.)

See you around!