Use of drugs to enhance academic performance

[twofish-quant]

The debate is concerned with the question: should the taking of these drugs on a regular basis in order to increase one's overall ability to learn and remember information be simply permissible, actively encouraged, or actively discouraged?

I think it's more complicated than that. If you are going to take these drugs anyway, and the administration becomes hostile to it, then you have the worst situation in which everything is happening under the table without any monitoring. All drugs have side-effects, and I've found that you absolutely need someone that is closely watching you when you are taking them, and that you can have frank, open, and confidental conversations about. However, a school that was interested and compassionate enough to provide those sort of services to students, would also probably not have idiot professors that threaten to fail most students. If the professors are obviously incompetent, then I wouldn't count much on the medical staff.

Also, increased focus may not be such a good thing. People who get prescribed SSRI's or similar medications often find that it increases focus but makes them less creative. It's also common that people that are good at physics and math get something like "runners high" from solving hard math problems, and medicines that make it easier to absorb information get in the way of that. Drugs are also a poor substitute for natural rhythms.

The thing that increases my focus is the right amount of sleep. Using coffee and benedryl to get the right amount of sleep doesn't cause the same benefits, and using drugs to force the right amount of sleep quickly leads to problems.

The reason that I'm worried about all this, is that my experience has been that people that are really good at physics and math are often "half crazy." They are just crazy enough to come up with weird and strange ideas, but not so crazy that they have to be locked up. People that are high performers in this area are skating on the edge of insanity anyway, and so doing something that changes neurochemistry has to be watched very closely.

It's not that I'm philosophically opposed to people taking medication to do well on tests, but I am very worried that there isn't a red emergency panic button that people can press if things go very bad.

 

[atyy]

I would never take an ADHD medication in order to "cheat" on an exam. I want to earn the score that I've earned, not what some pill has earned me.
I've always been against performance enhancing drugs. I drink coffee on occasion, but NEVER before studying or before an exam. Because I avoid caffeine, I'm pretty much limited to juice and water.
Unfortunately, I realized that the juice was probably giving me a sugar buzz that would be an unfair advantage and I didn't want to go out seeking sugar to get an edge. Because of that I changed to sugar free drinks for a while...until I realized that the artificial sweetener in most of them is Aspartame!
The first thing that happens in the digestion of Aspartame is the cleaving of Phenylalanine from its molecular structure.
Of course, phenylalanine gets converted to l-tyrosine...which undergoes tyrosine hydroxylase to form L-DOPA which undergoes a decarboxylase to form Dopamine!
Yes...the dopamine that is often touted as a potential cognitive enhancer.

If that's not enough, another simple decarboxylase away is Norepinephrine...the same performance enhancing neurotransmitter that many ADHD medications base their action around!

My only recourse was to completely avoid all food and water for a full 4 days before any major examination, and ingest no nutrients at all during finals week.

I felt comfortable with this, knowing that I was earning my grades on my own merit and not cheating my way through a test with performance enhancing drugs.

Imagine my sadness upon reading that severely calorie restricted diets increase life expectance in test animals by 20% or more!
I'm doing all I can to keep from cheating and in that quest I've committed the ULTIMATE CHEAT! It's bad enough to cheat on a single exam by using something to help you study, but I'm potentially extending my lifespan by decades!

That's 20 years that I can spend learning and gaining knowledge that my peers do not have. I've not only done something to give me an edge on a simple quiz, I've given myself hundreds of potential tests that my peers will never have the opportunity to take!

The only logical course of action I can find at this point is to take every performance enhancing drug I can get my hands on (including steroids and growth hormone). I'm begrudgingly giving myself an unfair advantage now, but feel safe in knowing that my shortened lifespan will ensure that I've cheated none of my peer group out of top grades for their entire life.

I think you can lay off the steroids - according to http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropharm.2007.09.009 , aspartame is enough!

 

[twofish-quant]

I would never take an ADHD medication in order to "cheat" on an exam. I want to earn the score that I've earned, not what some pill has earned me.
I've always been against performance enhancing drugs.

Then I'd imagine that you would be shocked to live in a world in which you basically had to in order to graduate. I worry that we are gradually moving toward that situation. If you take medication to do well on tests that's your business, but if this results on people who don't doing less well and getting punished, then we have a real big problem.

If you end up having to take medication to get through college, then you probably aren't going to object in 30 years when your kids and your students do it too. And if you do object, then you might flunk out and what you think won't matter in 30 years.

One thing that I find interesting is how the morality of drugs is influenced by one's environment. In the Middle Ages, people drank lots of beer and wine and spent the day mostly intoxicated. That makes a lot of sense if you think about it. Beer has lots of calories, no nasty bacteria, and you really don't need to be that sober to be a peasant. The problem with beer is that bad things happen if you end up drunk near large machinery, which is why coffee and tea became popular around the time of the industrial revolution.

Also, one thing that did happen in MIT when I was there was that people drank large amounts of alcohol during the weekends to deal with the large amount of stress.

I don't morally object to people using medications to do well on tests. I worry about the body count that will happen while all that is going on, and whether drugs are going to cause more problems in the long run. If nothing else, you'll end up with drug makers making huge amounts of money and having more power than maybe they should.

 

[atyy]

If nothing else, you'll end up with drug makers making huge amounts of money and having more power than maybe they should.

Drinking coffee is natural!

 

[DukeofDuke]

Dear twofish-quant,
So, question is: How rampant at competitive colleges like MIT is this and other prescription drugs used to help focus/study/prepare for tests ?

Thanks...

Rhody

I think the people best equipped to answer this question are current undergraduates like me
First, starting generally, adderall has become the punchline to many jokes. Have you ever been to the site textsfromlastnight? You should go, you might find it interesting. There is a subset of college students who actually do the kind of stuff tfln talk about...anyways, adderall jokes are pretty prevalent there.
There are definitely a lot of people who use them to focus here at Duke.

The math and science guys, we don't use them as much. I've only seen one kid using it, and I know of a second. When he left the room to use it, the rest of us laughed at him (because he was the worst academic performer amongst us by far, a leech in the lab, and he "needed" a drug to do what the rest of us were finding easy).

So you can see that there's a natural pressure not to take it if you're good enough. Taking those drugs implies you can't get their on your own. For ridiculously smart, relatively arrogant kids, this can be a turn-off. However, there's another type of kid out there. We call him the "pre-med" and/or anyone who works as hard as the premed. For them its results, and yes its well known they take adderall or other focusing drugs. A lot of times kids use it to focus while writing papers.

Its definitely an issue today. As a student, I'm acutely aware of it, I've seen it, I've joked about it, I've laughed at jokes about it...so yeah its a reality.

Also, one thing that did happen in MIT when I was there was that people drank large amounts of alcohol during the weekends to deal with the large amount of stress.

heh. Come on. Its a university. You drink because you're IN COLLEGE, not because "you're stressed", at least I hope that's the case.

 

[twofish-quant]

One thing here is what do you mean by "performance"? One thing that I've noticed when I drink coffee is that it keeps me awake, but it's not "real awake" since I can feel that the muse in my brain is still asleep. I remember that people at MIT used to drink vast amounts of coffee to stay awake to do the problem sets, but I don't think that anyone really tried to do that for the tests.

The other thing is that "performance" may mean different things. One thing about my education is that everyone *de-emphasized* the importance of grades. If you got a B+ instead of a B-, but you still didn't understand the material then that didn't help you much at all. One thing about MIT is that financial aid is not keyed to grades, and it's difficult to flunk out.

heh. Come on. Its a university. You drink because you're IN COLLEGE, not because "you're stressed", at least I hope that's the case.

Universities are places to learn physics and engineering. At MIT, the drugs of choice on the weekend were alcohol and I think that there was an LSD subculture there. People tended to drink massive amounts to get away from the stress on the weekends.

 

[DukeofDuke]

twofish,
by performance I mean being able to do 12 hours work in 8 hours (by increasing focus/efficiency).

Also, many of my rich friends (me included) have absolutely no fear of losing money, nor do we have a fear of flunking out. The point is, grades lead to "better" graduate schools and law schools and business schools and ibanks.

And yes, I realize that its a continuous chain, and that its rather arbitrary, and at any given level of "excellence" there's always another and you'll always be running the rat race etc etc.

Those are facts that come a priori to any of our reasons for participating in the grade frenzy. For many, x or y level of accomplishment is enough, and they can quit the race and sit back self satisfied. And yes, that level is arbitrary, and yes, that's linking your self esteem to external things that one may look down on (such as a chaired professorship, or certain level of income, or certain level of prestige). But I don't think people could live rationally, so they live according to other (from my view, arbitrary) standards, and many of those standards will heavily notice the difference between a B+ and a B-.

SO, people care about grades. Telling them off won't solve anything. Neither will trying to convince them that they'll never reach "the top"- because their reasons for wanting to be at the top in the first place are feelings, not logical deductions from agreeable first principles. Not to mention, plenty of them don't even want to be at the top, they have arbitrary levels of success which would sate them (and for those goals, a B+ and B- will make a very real and noticeable difference).