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April 19, 2018 By Andrew Guest

Cognitive Distortions and Irrational Beliefs: Students, Faculty, and Finals

a woman looking at a penguin in an aquarium As we approach final exams, and wrap up an academic year’s worth of blogging on student mental health, many of us feel an accentuated sense of stress and anxiety. That is normal, and sometimes even healthy – stress, in reasonable quantities, is an adaptive response to improve motivation and performance. But many of us also see students approach finals in unhealthy ways – where the subjective feeling of stress is beyond any rational appraisal. Might there be little things we can do as faculty and academic staff to re-frame finals?

Though there is no magic solution, I often find myself talking to students this time of year about some simple cognitive-behavioral techniques to manage stress. Cognitive methods in psychology focus on identifying and challenging dysfunctional thoughts and beliefs to change subjective feelings. Though in-depth versions of these methods can be part of serious psychotherapy, simple versions are often popular parts of reasonable self-help techniques. They can work because the types of cognitive distortions and irrational beliefs we experience are remarkably common and consistent: we all sometimes “catastrophize” (exaggerate the critical importance of things like one bad exam) or engage in “all-or-nothing thinking” (see our work as either great or terrible with nothing in-between).

Sometimes just recognizing those types of thoughts, and providing some evidence to refute those thoughts, can help mitigate our negative emotional reactions. Sometimes, in other words, students might benefit from a little perspective on finals.

It’s worth noting that a little perspective is not enough for students with more serious mental health concerns – we should avoid minimizing real distress, and keep referring students in need to UP’s counseling services. But we might simultaneously be able to chip away at some of the common cognitive distortions and irrational thoughts that can go into overdrive for any student around finals week at UP. Here are just a few examples:

“If I don’t get a good grade on this final, my parents are going to kill me.” This is an easy one for the obviousness of its irrationality; the parents of our students love their children, and while they may express that love in different ways it never involves capital punishment!

“This final is going to be impossible.” Technically, an impossible final would be one that no one can pass. I know of no class at UP that fails every student. Sometimes students just need a friendly reminder that many students past, present, and future pass all of our exams – and even those that don’t do quite as well as they hope usually go on to get their degrees.

“How can I write this paper when I don’t know what you (the professor) expect?” Professors do sometimes have specific expectations for their assignments, and it can be good to clarify what to include. But all professors I know mostly want to see that students have engaged with course material and concepts, and have learned something through the process. When students focus on learning rather than the imagined expectations, they tend to do just fine.

“I have too much work to do; I’ll never make it through finals.” Students, and faculty, may indeed have lots to do before the end of finals. But sometimes it can be helpful this time of year to offer a simple reminder based on consistent experience: every year to date finals do, eventually, end.

Featured Image: Photo by Zachary Spears on Unsplash

Filed Under: Community Posts, Featured Tagged With: mental health, students

October 13, 2017 By Zach Simmons

Writing letters of recommendation

small wooden blocks with letters stamped on them sit in a wooden boxThe air is starting to cool. The days are getting shorter. The rain is coming back. It can only mean one thing – letter of rec season has returned (also, pumpkin spice everything).

Most of us have never received any formal training in how to write a letter of recommendation. Rather, we have pieced together a working knowledge of how to do it based on letters we have read, people we have talked to, and a liberal dash of discipline-specific intuition. By now, we are all veterans of many of these letters, which brings with it a sense of confidence and expertise in our writing. It can also lead to complacency: turns of phrase recycled one too many times or accolades that end up sounding so rehearsed that they lose their potency.

If you are concerned that your letters might be getting a little stale, it might be time for a refresher. To that end, I recently came across a wonderful online resource devoted entirely to best practices in writing letters of recommendation. It offers helpful advice on both appropriate content and engaging style (hint: don’t be boring, but no explosions), and includes a number of sample letters that will likely make you feel at least a little bad about your own. The full guide can be found online here.

It also concludes with some prescriptive ‘commandments’ about writing letters. Most will be familiar to anyone who has thought carefully about the function of such letters, but one in particular resonated with me: “We write letters as a professional courtesy and because others wrote them for us”. I am certainly guilty of thinking about letters in a more transactional way, as a debt that I owe to my students in exchange for their hard work in my courses. That may seem benign, but it I cannot help but think it colors my evaluations. If I agreed to write a letter for a student, then said student must have been great, or I wouldn’t have agreed to write the letter, right? It is my hope that a little reminder about the nature of the process can serve as a corrective to my own biases.

/** Featured Image: Letters by Davide Vizzinni used via CC 2.0  **/

Filed Under: Community Posts, Featured, Teaching Tips Tagged With: recommendations, students, writing

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