After 14 years of teaching the same old “Critical Issues in Psychology” course, BYU Professor Donald Harping is wondering if it might be more interesting this semester to turn his class into a horrifying social experiment, one that completely defies ethical testing methods and scares participants for years to come.

“I was thinking it would be enlightening to find out how my students would react to being violently discriminated against based on their eye color the entire semester. Or maybe I should just teach the normal course? I don’t know.” Donald thought to himself. The well tenured Professor Harper’s internal struggle has reportedly been going on for several weeks now. “They could sure learn a valuable life lesson if I had half of the students take on the roles of escaping prisoners and the other half beat them into submission at the start of every class… But maybe that’s a bad idea.”

Harping’s class, which traditionally teaches students to identify and describe basic assumptions that underlie major theories, methods, practices, and schools of contemporary psychology, has consistently gotten average reviews by students. Maybe a little change could improve approval ratings?

“What if I had 90% of the classroom lie every time they answered a question during the period… would the other 10% conform? That would be helpful to the psychological research community, right? Uh, I don’t know…”

“If over the course of the semester I turned the students into a strict arm band wearing fascist cult that bent to my every command and harassed all non-members, would they understand the psychological effects of absolute authority better?”

Although the inner turmoil continues, Professor Harping was last seen muttering to himself that he should “probably just stick to the textbook this semester…” Well, we’ll see what happens!