Vibe Checks

Published

August 11, 2025

A vibe check assignment is due noon on Monday on CatCourses almost every week of the semester. The vibe check is a quick pre-flection on the week’s assigned readings, before class. The vibe checks do a few different things for us: help you keep up with the reading, walk you through some initial thoughts, and generate our discussion topics for the week.

Parts of a vibe check

Your vibe check needs to have three parts:

  1. A direct quote from the week’s reading
    • Can be anywhere from a phrase to a paragraph, but usually a sentence or two is best
    • Practice scholarly citations: put the quote into quote marks, use brackets and ellipses to show edits, and include a page reference at the end
  2. A question about the quote
    • Your question might be about something you don’t understand or a related idea building off the quote
    • Good questions will be open-ended (not just yes/no) but have a concrete starting point (something particular in the quote, not just “what does this mean?”)
    • Your question should be 1-2 sentences. Sometimes you’ll want a two-part question, like in the example below.
  3. Your initial attempt to answer the question
    • It’s okay if this is super messy, confusing, or wrong
    • Remember that uncertainty is a resource
    • Even a wrong answer gets you around the hermeneutic circle the first time

Example vibe check

  1. “values influenced Colborn’s pioneering research on endocrine disruption in a variety of ways …. [H]er discovery of the phenomenon was due in large part to her passion for protecting the environment.” (6)

  2. Wouldn’t Colborn’s values lead her to exaggerating the effects of endocrine disruption? Wouldn’t it be better if she was objective?

  3. If other scientists were more objective, maybe that’s why they didn’t discover endocrine disruptors before Colborn.

How you get credit for the vibe check

Just turn it in. If it has all three parts, I’ll mark it complete, you get full credit.

How I’ll use the vibe checks

Important

This part of the course design is very experimental. I’m going to be refining it, and might even abandon it completely. Feedback encouraged!

On Monday afternoon I’ll mark the vibe checks as complete. Then I’ll download them and run them through a local LLM (large language model). This system runs entirely on my laptop; I don’t share your answers with any AI companies or upload them to the cloud.

The LLM is set up to identify themes across the vibe checks, and assign each vibe check to a theme. I’m experimenting with this as a way to scale up this process to large classes.

I’ll review the themes, and then create a shared document (maybe Google Slides, maybe a Google Doc, TBD) that we’ll use in class on Tuesday.

Your name will not be attached to the vibe checks shared with the class.