The Dead Grandmother Syndrome Reconsidered

Students don't question professors who miss office hours because of sick children or aging parents. So why are professors so untrusting of students who claim to have a sick or dying grandparent?

Every stage in life has its joys and sorrows. A typical university student is around 20 years old. His or her grandparents will be in their mid- to late 60s, 70s, or 80s. The death of a grandparent is something people often experience in young adulthood, just as the death of a parent brings grief in middle age.

The odds of any one grandparent dying during any given semester are, happily, low. The table below shows 2009 Canadian mortality rates - the number of people who died per 1000 individuals - by sex and age. An 80 year old granny has a 4.74 percent chance of dying in any given year; a 1.58 percent chance of dying in any given four month term (assuming deaths are distributed evenly throughout the year). Each individual 80-year-old grandmother, therefore, has a better than 98 percent chance of living through the term.

But In a class of 100 students, there may be 300, 400 or more grandparents (adding in step-grandparents and great-grandparents). Even though almost all of those grandparents are, as individuals, highly likely to live through the term, the odds of all of the grandparents making it through are actually fairly low.

I often teach classes of 65 or 70 students. To make some back-of-the-envelope calculations, I assumed this corresponded to a grandparent pool of 100 grandmothers and 100 grandfathers, half of whom are between 75 and 79, while the remainder are between 80 and 84. To find the odds of all of the grandparents living through the term, I multiplied together the odds of each individual grandparent living through the term.

It turns out, given the age and gender distribution assumed above, and Canadian mortality rates, the odds of all 200 grandparents surviving the term is just 16 percent. In large undergraduate classes, some grandparents will pass away almost every semester.

Now that I understand this, I don't worry about students asking for extensions or deferrals because of sick or dying grandmothers. Odds are, the excuse is legitimate. So I say something along the lines of, "I'm sorry to hear of your loss. Take the time you need. I will want to see a copy of the death certificate or obituary, however. Please provide it to me before the end of term."

I think some undergraduate students don't realize just how public and well documented deaths are. It's far easier to verify whether or not a grandmother died than it is to know whether or not a student was genuinely too sick to complete an assignment. 

What about the rare student who lies about his or her grandparents' health? Providing false documents or false excuses is misrepresentation. It is a violation of academic integrity, and typically carries heavy penalties. It's also tempting fate.

So, in general, I believe my students. But I still don't know why so many more grandmothers seem to die during the course of an average semester than grandfathers.

Comments

[Alex Usher]

Lower male life expectancy means they;re more likely to die before students hit college?

[Fran R Woolley]

Alex, yes, that was my thought too. But lower male life expectancy could also mean grandfathers are more likely to die while the students are in college, if the age gap between generations is fairly small. It may also be a result of divorce - dads who become estranged from their children will eventually become grandfathers estranged from their grandchildren. Mothers are less likely to lose contact with the kids.

[Marina Adshade]

The big excuse I have been getting lately is "I had to be out of the country for a grand-parent's birthday. " These students are often gone for weeks at a time and when faced with the consequences of that decision they respond "You wouldn't understand, but in my culture family is very important." I hate dealing with these situations because they always make me feel like I am personally being insulted because they are right; I don't understand why a grandparent would risk their grandchild's term over something so trivial as a birthday. But that doesn't mean I don't think families important. I just think that these things could be done during the breaks.

[Fran R Woolley]

Marina - Interesting. I was chatting with a friend who teaches in a Taiwanese university the other day. I said to her "some students here at Carleton say that they have to sit in the back of the room/against the wall/in a corner when they write an exam because it has the best feng sui. How do you deal with this issue in Taiwan?" She told me, "We'd say 'you know where you can find some great feng sui? Your own home. You're free to leave any time.'"

UBC has a very diverse student body - they must have some policy about which excuses are acceptable and which are not. In that situation, I'd hide behind the official equity office policy.

[Andre Vellino]

If it's true that "... some undergraduate students don't realize just how public and well documented deaths are. It's far easier to verify whether or not a grandmother died than it is to know whether or not a student was genuinely too sick to complete an assignment." why bother asking for a copy of the death certificate or obituary?

Also - would you kindly perform a similar analysis for "the dog ate my USB key"? :-)

[Dave Giles]

Frances - and then there's the TIMING of these deaths. Why does this correlate so well with the timing of mid-term tests? :-)

[Jim Sentance]

With respect to the grandfather vs grandmother question, it might be that grandmothers are a bit more special.

[Fran R Woolley]

Dave - say you have a class with 400 grandparents. There might well be two or more grandparental deaths during the term. Of those deaths, only the ones that occur around exam time will be reported. But I don't have to remind you about sample selection bias.

Andre - what I mean by this is that a typical medical certificate will say something to the effect of "I have seen the student who reported feeing vaguely unwell and gave me $40, here's a paper exempting them from school for the next 48 hours." Was the student really sick? Perhaps yes, perhaps no - how do any of us know what anyone else is feeling?

A death certificate, on the other hand, will say clearly and unambiguously Granny Smith died on such-and-such date.

On your second point - your dog or my dog ;-)?

[Fran R Woolley]

Jim - Now do you think it's that students genuinely are less upset when their grandfathers die, or do they somehow feel that "my grandfather died" is somehow not a tragic enough event to justify the deferral of an exam or an extension on an assignment?

[Patrick]

Once the dog really did eat my homework. But not the whole thing. So I brought in the remains as proof (teeth marks and all). It didn't help. I still got a 0 for not handing in the assignment.

[hix]

" I don't understand why a grandparent would risk their grandchild's term over something so trivial as a birthday. But that doesn't mean I don't think families important. I just think that these things could be done during the breaks."

First, why do they risk a grandchilds term? Only because the canadian university acts canadian, which the grandfather is not aware off. When there are no rigid deadlines and attendance requirements, as can be expected in many cultures there is no such risk.

Second, it is indead common to have a family first policy e.g. in India that puts minor family issues ahead of what we would consider urgent work deadlines in the west.

In general, many nations have a polychronic time culture (this is a spectrum, and e.g. Germans are more rigid sequential than Canadians), where people do whats in front of them and many things at the same time with not much prioriticing or regard for deadlines.

[Martin]

"But lower male life expectancy could also mean grandfathers are more likely to die while the students are in college, if the age gap between generations is fairly small. It may also be a result of divorce - dads who become estranged from their children will eventually become grandfathers estranged from their grandchildren. Mothers are less likely to lose contact with the kids."

Frances,

both my grandfathers died well before I started college. One in his early 70s and one in his late 80s. The latter was also about a decade older than my grandmother, whilst the former just by two or so years. I think the reason that grandmothers die during college is that they are generally younger than the men they marry and thus whilst grandfathers die in elementary school and high school, grandmothers die during college.

Both my grandmothers and my own mother were around thirty years old when they started having children. Around college grandmothers will therefore be around 80 (28+32+20, 28 for my grandparents generation, 32 for my parents generation and 20 for the college age) years old. If grandfathers are slightly older than grandmothers they would be anywhere between 82-90+ years old. In my case my grandfathers and my parents had a university education and people with that sort of background tend to have children at a relative late age. I don't know for how many in your class that's the case, but 75-79 seems a bit young for half the grandparents. On the other hand the effect due to under-estimation might well cancel out, as those people also tend to live longer as well.

I think that if you correct for the relative late age at which the parents and grandparents of your class have their offspring and if you correct for that males are generally older than the females they're with, then this could explain that you're much more likely to observe grandmothers dying than grandfathers dying.

[Marina]

The students themselves know that if they take three weeks off in the middle of the term they are putting the term at jeopardy - they are, after all, students at a Canadian university. Personally I think the rise of the grandparent birthday is largely of function of that fact that we do ask for proof of grandparent deaths. It is much harder to prove a birthday celebration (which, by the way, I think the university would require if they were going to make excretions.)

The worst (most likely true) excuse I ever got from a student was that he was given a construction contract in China and it had gone horribly wrong in his absence. He subcontracted the job to someone else while he was at school in Canada and, as a result of incompetence, five men working on the job had died. He had to go back to China to he held accountable for his actions. It all sounded pretty convincing at it was the one time I didn't ask for any proof.

[Bob Smith]

"The students themselves know that if they take three weeks off in the middle of the term they are putting the term at jeopardy - they are, after all, students at a Canadian university."

Plus, grandparent's birthdays are predictable, as are mid-terms and assignments, which means that students can schedule the celebrations (or at least, their participation in the celebrations) of the one around the others. It used to drive my father nuts when some student would ask for an extension to hand in their essays/assignments because they had some other predictable appointment or activity on the due date - did they not think about maybe getting it done ahead of time? Ditto the "I was sick on the day it was due" (yeah, so, surely you had it done by then? Why am I hearing about this two weeks later?)

Death, on the other hand....

[hix]

The student is a different question, but again, he might aswell not know about Canadian cultural expectations or he might not be in a position to make a decission for himself. There is no rule that asimilation/domination is the only viable way to deal with foreign cultures either. Another angel is that it is absolutly normal to make up excuses and never admit ones own fault in many cultures.

[Bob Smith]

"There is no rule that asimilation/domination is the only viable way to deal with foreign cultures either."

Who's asking for "assimilation/domination"? The expectation is adaptation - go to your grandmother's birthday, just get your essay done ahead of time and arrange to hand it in. Surely to god these are the sort of problem solving skills that we should be able to expect from university students. And if "when in Rome..." isn't a universal rule, it's probably a universally good rule of thumb.

"he might aswell not know about Canadian cultural expectations or he might not be in a position to make a decission for himself... Another angel is that it is absolutly normal to make up excuses and never admit ones own fault in many cultures. "

Perhaps, but wouldn't it be better to impart that particular cultural expectation as soon as possible in university? I'm pretty sure the newly-minted university graduate who provides their future employer (or client) with the "I can't get you the memo you asked for because it's my grandmother's birthday" line is going to find themselves on someone's sh*t-list PDQ (ditto for making-up excuses or not admitting fault). I mean, meeting deadlines seems trivial (and apparently is treated as a trivial skill by many public school boards in Canada, who don't feel inclined to enforce deadlines), but it's actually a rather important life skill. I realize that's not true in every culture (although I think that's changing - no matter where in the world my clients are located, they all seem to want answers ASAP), but why come to school in Canada if not to learn about Canadian (or western) culture?

As for not being in a position to make a decision for themselves, yeah, I get the importance of family pressure, but we're talking about adults here. You wear responsibility for your actions and acceding to family pressure is a decision.

[Bob Smith]

I just took another link at the article Frances linked to. The link between student grade and apparent grandmaternal mortality is telling. Apparently the grandmothers of F students are more like to die prior to an exam than those of their smarter compatriots. I suppose one could tell a story that tries to link university grades and grandmaternal mortality (i.e., you come from a disadvantaged family, therefore your grandmother is more likely to die younger and you're more likely to do poorly), but it seems like a real stretch.

Maybe I have a sinister mind, but has anyone considered the possibility that the F student are killing their grandmothers to avoid exams? That seems like a more plausible explanation than the "grandmother worrying herself to death about her grandchild's poor grades" hypothesis presented (albeit tongue firmly planted in cheek) in the paper, given that grandparents are unlikely to have detailed knowledge of their moron grandchild's academic performance and the F student is probably going to lie to their parents (and grandparents) anyways. Which isn't to say that you should respond to the next "dead grandmother" story by asking the poor student why she killed her grandmother.

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