Being held accountable

[Tim]

The abolishment of ‘Testat’ brings a great freedom and a strengthens the personal responsibilities of students how to study and organise.
Nevertheless, with the sometimes overwhelming changes that the transition from high school to student life brings specifically in the first year, some structure and accountability is benefitial to the students success.

Accountable is an app that teams up students from ETH. Every member agrees to check in on someone else and to be checked in by someone on milestones they define. The person you hold accountable is not neccessary the same that holds you accountable, but definitely a peer student from ETH.
It can be used to be held accountable to follow some routine such as work out, quit smoking or eating healthy but, even more so, to keep up with problem sets, assignments, papers, readings and studying.
It creates a win-win situation: The app creates the messages and intervals to check in to make it easy and convenient, but it is send and received by someone (anonymous) on the other side. This increases the accountability, which, as research in the topic suggests, leads to a more likely positive outcome with respect to the milestones that one sets for oneself. Participants agree to check in on someone and can use the tool to be held accountable by others. Furthermore, it fosters a spirit of community and can lead to friendships between students.

Let me know what you think about it or how you would improve the idea. I am happy to lead efforts to create such a tool and establish it campus wide (or in a small sample cohort of starting students to see if it works).

[Karin BrownKeymaster]

Hi Tim
I really like this idea of increasing accountability. Have you see the post about the coffee reward/punishment group? I can see some similarities between these two ideas.

[Moritz]

Great to see, that there are other people that want to tackle that problem. I had quite a similar idea (For my proposition see the link in Karins message.). It would be great to join forces, don’t you think?

One thing that I concentrated on, when I framed my solution: How do you install incentives for every party involved to keep them using the system? Because people shouldn’t need to use discipline to solve a problem they have because they lack discipline.

@Karin: Maybe we can merge the two topics if Tim is ok with that.

[Tim]

Hi Moritz,

i am happy to join forces and merge topics / ideas and develop both our concepts further. I created a new thread for mine because my proposed solution was more digital, while yours was more community / buddy system focused, yet i also saw the similarities of our ideas.

for the discipline:
research suggests that being held accountable even without punishment is already a reward. the reward will also be more time / more success / achievements.

Tim

[Tim]

also, one could incorporate the ideas that you and Karin mentioned:
with payment apps such as venmo or paypal one could incorporate small donations or small punishments. One could also try to partner with the coffee places at ETH to get and give coffee – vouchers (usually better perceived than money!). Although the challenge is if it is a digital agreement it is hard to prove success or failure for a task.
My idea goes more along the line:
I don’t do my problem set or assignment if it is voluntary, but if someone asks me if i did it, i want to tell that person: yes i did it!

[Moritz]

Speaking of coffee: I think it would be great to sit together during a coffee break. Are you in Zurich (or even Basel) during the next few weeks?

Just write me an email, my acronym is gueckm@…

[Author]

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