Misery Loves Company

An IA is an Internal Assessment – something you work your butt off, your teacher grades, the IBO gnomes audit, and then they take your firstborn child away. That’s how they get new IBO gnomes. Most IB kids don’t have firstborn children, so the IBO gnomes take our scores instead.

Anyway, Internal Assessments. Last year we were doing them for Psych and PT went over the ethical rules three million times. The IBO’s ethical rules regarding animals are stricter than PETA, which sucks because our original idea was to light hamsters on fire and throw them at people. Come to think of it, we probably would have gotten a better grade with that. (Are you sensing some bitterness on my part regarding IAs?) But their guidelines about people are basically YOU CANNOT STRESS THEM OUT ON PURPOSE. YOU CANNOT STRESS THEM OUT ON ACCIDENT. YOU CANNOT STRESS THEM OUT.
At the time, when PT was making sure she had said this to us every minute of every class period we were working on our IAs, I thought it was silly. Why would we stress people out on purpose?

Now, I realize, there’s a reason IB is so worried about it. Apparently sleep deprivation, high stress levels and four years in IB have a negative effect on the psyche. (Who knew?) And by now, we’re the psychological Hannibal Lectors of high school. We’ve suffered and we want everyone else to feel the crushing pain of a stress-maxed all nighter.

How did I come up with this theory? We’re working on another IA in bio about heart rates. My partner and I, despite both having been in Psych last year and getting the IB rules drilled into our heads hundreds of times, decided we wanted to test the effects of stress on heart rate. And not just any stress. We wanted to make lists of faked “stats” about college admissions, one with horribly stressful stats (90% of college students are unhappy with their dorm room, 80% are not at their first choice college, etc.) and another one with the same stats only reversed. We planned to ‘debrief’ the participants afterwards and tell them the stats were made up. But when we asked whether it was “ethical”, PT asked us if we were pod people replacing kids who had actually been in her class. Well, she didn’t actually ask that. But her face said it all.
The thing is, we knew it was completely unethical from the start. It was only a fantasy. Which leads me to two conclusions:

1.) Subconsciously, we’re sadists who want to see regulars endure the same stress we do
2.) Subconsciously, we’re masochists who wanted to get a zero on that IA, thus denying ourselves our diplomas.

Good evening, Clarice.