The psychology department has recently moved its T-point system online in a change that promises to greatly benefit Psychology 1 and Psychology 6 students, according to department chair Howard Hughes.
The T-point system is a tool used by the psychology department to supply faculty and graduate student psychology experiments with the necessary amount of human test subjects. It awards students enrolled in Psychology 1 and 6 with small amounts of course credit for spending a set amount of hours participating in experiments.
Hughes said that the decision to move the program online was determined by a psychology department committee that oversees the T-point pool.
"We made the change basically to streamline and automate the system," he said.
Under the old system, students used to register for experiments by hand on a sign up sheet outside of Filene Auditorium.
Psychology 1 student Kevin Yates '06 said that during the first few weeks of class when the old system was still in use, "there would be a mad dash before and after class to sign up."
"For a given experiment, they would have only so many slots for the 150-plus students," Yates said. If you weren't there when they posted the experiment, you wouldn't stand a chance of getting a spot as a subject."
Now students can sign up for T-point experiments at anytime, from anywhere on campus.
T-Point experiments are still assigned on a first come first serve basis, but students no longer need to pick an experiment time on the spot.
"I like that I can now sit down in my room with my schedule at hand and then decide what time slots I want to choose," Yates said.
Before the system went online, students used to drop off a card that they receive at the experiment site at a box outside of the department office. These cards were sorted and then credit was then assessed manually.
According to Hughes, the department now saves itself time because an administrative assistant does not need to sort cards by hand because credit is automatically recorded online.
Hughes said that the online log is particularly helpful because it keeps track of how many T-points a student has. He said that this eliminates the possibility of there being a discrepancy between how many T-point credits a student thinks he has and how many the professor actually has him down for.
"Now, the students see the same exact information that the faculty does," he said.
Hughes said that the T-point program's transition to automation will not jeopardize the safety of Dartmouth students in any way.
For instance, he said that there would still be human monitors to make sure that students do not sign up for too many MRI-based experiments in a given time.
Although he said that to his knowledge, there is no implicit danger from getting too many MRIs, Hughes said that the department will still monitor the online site to limit the number of MRIs a student can get in a given interval because of federal regulation standards.
Hughes said that, in any case, all Psychology T-Point experiments are safe.
"There is a committee for the protection of human subjects," he said, "so you can't do any research of any kind, on human or even animal subjects, before this committee approves it."
The T-point system has been used by the Psychology Department since before Hughes came to Dartmouth over 20 years ago. Hughes said that although many of the research projects that use the T-point experiments feed into are funded by external grants such by either foundations or the federal government, many in fact do not rely on funding and thus desperately need the free student labor that T-point rewards guarantee.