College credit for this? - by Hollis Robbins

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College credit for this?<br>What that Oklahoma Bible-citing essay controversy was really about

Hollis Robbins<br>May 15, 2026

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Social science is broken and I was glad to provoke Michael Inzlicht’s viral substack post this week, “A Dean Stopped Trusting Social Psychology. My Colleagues are Why,” agreeing that yes, a great deal of social science is broken. Why should anybody believe any study these days?<br>The implications of the recent replication crisis for higher education are broader, deeper, and truly alarming. Millions of college degrees rest on coursework in fields that cannot vouch for what they teach, delivered through a billion-dollar credentialing infrastructure that certifies competencies the assignments inside it do not require. The rot goes all the way down to the bottom and if you even half agree with the premise that social science is broken, hold on as I walk you through what is obvious.<br>Readers may remember the December 2025 controversy where a psychology major at the University of Oklahoma got a failing grade on an essay, written for a required online developmental psychology class, that cited the Bible to argue against the assigned study’s premise about genders. The graduate teaching assistant who failed the student said that the essay did not answer the prompt. The university subsequently suspended the grader calling her decision “arbitrary.”<br>The headlines were all about “woke” ideology on college campuses. I’m not going to name the student or the grader because they are not the story.<br>The real story is the online course, PSY 2603, Lifespan Development (also known as Developmental Psychology), a required course for all psych majors at OU and a transferable general-education option for everyone else. It sits in the Oklahoma Course Equivalency Project as PY 103 and has an equivalent at public institutions nationwide.1 Roughly 60,000 students a year take a course of this kind across the country.<br>In this particular course – again, taught online – students had to write a 650-word “reaction paper” to a 2014 empirical study, “Relations Among Gender Typicality, Peer Relations, and Mental Health During Early Adolescence.” The list of prompts included:<br>Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published1. A discussion of why you feel the topic is important and worthy of study (or not)<br>2. An application of the study or results to your own experiences<br>3. An application of the study or results to observations about other behaviors<br>4. Linking the objectives or findings from the assigned article to other domains of development or other findings that we read about or discuss in class<br>5. A suggestion for further studies or experiments that might help researchers better understand the topic being studied<br>6. Alternate interpretations of the researchers’ findings<br>7. A discussion of how development in this domain might proceed differently at other developmental stages<br>8. Your own thoughts about how development proceeds in the domain being researched in the article<br>Everything that is wrong with American higher education is right there in the list, which basically asks students to “comment,” offering opinion or speculation, as if the paper were a social media post. I’ve put the full soul-killing assignment in the footnotes. 2<br>Given such a loose list, of course the student’s “reaction paper” was appropriate. Anything would have been appropriate. No brain work was required, nobody seems to have noticed. Even the American Association of University Professors and president Todd Wolfson thought the story was about a breach of academic integrity, arguing that faculty hold a professional responsibility to evaluate student work against established scientific criteria.<br>The study in question, “Relations Among Gender Typicality, Peer Relations, and Mental Health During Early Adolescence,” a co-written paper by a University of Kentucky social scientist and her graduate student (listed as first author) is weak and flawed. It is cross-sectional, which means it measures gender typicality and depression at one moment and cannot say which preceded which: depressed children may report themselves as less typical, rather than atypicality producing depression. The total sample was 84 middle-school children, 34 boys and 50 girls, in a single school setting. Gender typicality was measured by the children’s own ratings on a self-report scale, with no behavioral observation, no longitudinal follow-up, no replication across schools, and no comparison across cultures or class settings. The peer-relations measure depended on the same children’s descriptions of hypothetical popular and rejected peers rather than on observed social network data. Effect sizes are modest, the moderation by gender means the headline finding holds only for boys, and the authors acknowledge the directionality cannot be...