I\'m attempting to follow railstutorial.org, and am currently on Chapter 7, where you start using factories: http://railstutorial.org/chapters/modeling-and-viewing-users-two#sec
Maybe you should try the new syntax (see github readme of factory girl)
FactoryGirl.define :user do |user| user.name "Michael Hartl" user.email "mhartl@example.com" user.password "foobar" user.password_confirmation "foobar" end