What to say to a student who has failed? A student has failed a course I just taught. Grades were announced yesterday. This student sent me a very long heartbreaking email about how this means she will be kicked out of her program, how she tried very hard, and how she wants me to reconsider her final grade.

I'm relatively new at being a university instructor; this isn't the first course I've taught at a university, nor is it the first time I've had a student fail a course. But this is the first time I've had a student beg and plead with me, and I'm not sure how to respond.

I genuinely feel bad for her, as she tried hard and came frequently to my office hours, but I ultimately believe that she did not demonstrate on the final exam that she had a good enough handle on the course material to pass.

What should I say to politely tell her that she will still fail, without sounding insensitive?

Edit: Some more relevant information, since some have asked. The course in question is a calculus course for an Engineering program. The student has previously failed and retaken courses, but she is not permitted to have any more failing grades if she wants to remain in the Engineering program. Failing this course is essentially her last `strike'. She will still be allowed to study at the university, but in a different program.

Edit 2: Thanks for all the responses. I wasn't looking for moral justification for failing her or looking for alternative solutions to the situation. I was simply looking for advice on how to respond in a professional manner. And I certainly got that advice from some of the responses.

In the end, I essentially responded with a concise email stating essentially that, while I sympathize with her situation, there was nothing I could do in good conscience to modify her grade at this time, and that I did not believe she demonstrated sufficient mastery of the material to warrant a grade of 50% on the exam. Then I closed with "I wish you the best of luck in your future studies. Sincerely, [me]"

It still doesn't make me feel any better about failing her. :(

(I also will add that this my first time teaching this particular course, and I have certainly learned my own lessons for next time. In particular regarding common misconceptions in the material and what to focus on in the lectures. This will hopefully mitigate the chance of a future student failing in a similar way.)

Edit 3: A few comments have suggested that I might reconsider the student's exam grade. To be clear, this student had about a 50% average in the course going into the final and would have therefore needed at least a 50% on the final exam to pass the course. However, the student only received about 35% on the final (while the average for the class on the final was 73%). I could not, in good conscience, bump the score so significantly to warrant giving out a passing grade in this case.

It was clear to me that the student had failed. I was only asking for advice on how to respond to her request that I pass her!

I think that you explained the situation very clearly and sensitively in your third paragraph, and that you should send a message to the student along the same lines. All you'd really have to say is that while you of course sympathize with the student, her performance on the final exam makes clear that she did not gain sufficient mastery of the course material to pass the class.

I'll add that I think your message to the student should be clear and concise. The longer your response to the student the more likely it is that you'll wind up in a long, drawn out exchange that stresses both of you out while benefiting no one.

Every professor I had followed the "if I make an exception for you, then everyone will expect preferential treatment as well" policy. So, they didn't provide preferential treatment.

The syllabus should state what kind of preferential treatment is allowed, eg: a student that plays on a team may be allowed to take make-up exams, a student that misses a critical exam due to illness or such may be allowed to make it up in a fashion professor deems fit.

If this student failed.. they failed.

If they were under some kind of hardship during the semester, then they should have addressed it with you.. found some way to get extra credit or what-not.

I had a lot of major stuff going down in my grad semesters, from a parent ending up in the hospital to me ending up in the hospital needing surgery. I didn't dump my problems on the professor and go "woe is me, please curve my grade b/c I'm special!" The parent in the hospital issue made me have to organize and plan things in order to care for them. Me being in the hospital caused me to drop all my classes for the semester (the recovery time was putting me behind, and that just added stress to recovery).

Part of being in college is learning how to proactively deal with issues instead of just showing up to the professor at the end of the semester going "pity me and let me pass."

If she was having problems in the class, she could have dropped it and retaken it. There's just things she could have done proactively instead of dumping her situation in your lap at the last minute.

As a professor, you have an obligation to the other students to ensure people that don't make the grade don't pass. If you magically just pass this person, then you're devaluing everyone else's work and potentially their degrees. You're letting someone that didn't make the cut move on, when everyone else had to work hard for it and make the grade.

In the grad program I was in, some folks got a strange idea that professors would auto-pass everyone with at least a "C" even if they didn't do any work. So, it came as a shock to some students when they didn't pass.. and had to go back home since they were here on student visas.

Another aspect is she could be the type of person that's used to manipulating people. She may have done this to other professors. This may be her modus operandi in college. Don't do the work, don't make the grade, but then email prof's and ask for a pity party to get a passing grade.

Bottomline, if she didn't make the grade, she didn't make the grade. Tell her to go take it up with her advisor or academic counsellor so they can tell her what her options are.

You are a noise gate. Your job is to filter out the wheat from the chafe. You did your job. She needs to move on and figure out what she can do, and the university has resources for her to do that. But, she's trying to get something out of you that she didn't earn..and thus trying to manipulate her way past the filtering process.

If you pity her and give her a pass, word will get around and you'll have more students expecting the same going forward.

So, make a stand now.


Using sentences verbatim from a referee report without attribution Two part question

Part I

For a revised paper following a review by referees, to what extent is each of the following acceptable or unacceptable:

Use the exact sentence from a report without quotations or acknowledgement of the source?
Use a series of sentences (almost) verbatim from a report without quotations or acknowledgment of the source?
Repeatedly engage in 1. or 2., possibly to the point where sum total of a page in the revised draft are unattributed quotations from a report?

Part II

What the reviewer should do in case #3 above, when reviewing the revision in a subsequent round.  Should this be brought up in the report for the authors?  In private communication with the editor?  Both?  Neither?

If you are the reviewer, just let the editor know the plagiarism problem.  Hopefully this is prior to the paper getting out.

A reasonable outcome would be for the text to be paraphrased AND a more specific acknowledgment made "one reviewer for specific content in section 3".  I would gently suggest such to the editor.  "Please go ahead and take whatever action you feel best as editor, but I suggest modify the text and make a more specific acknowledgment".

An alternate outcome is to leave the text as is and become a co-author,  (If the contribution meets the threshold.  Perhaps it might on a review or theory paper.)  But I would not be seen as pushing for such an outcome and it comes with issues of its own (now you are tied to the rest of the paper).

If the paper was already published, I would still let the editor know, but I would copy the editor in charge (since the subeditor let the plagiarism of the reviewer text get by).  It's not the end of the world for the subeditor but he needs to be mildly held to account also.

All this assumes it is not some junky journal.  If it is and they don't take action, you should obviously stop reviewing for them (and shouldn't review for junky journals regardless).  If it is a conference proceedings the issue is a little trickier since they don't really have all the same systems and editorial strengths, but I would still notify both subeditor and editor of the problem.

Perhaps you (or the author, if not you) are misunderstanding the purpose of the reviewer's reports. It shouldn't be to give the author words that s/he must/should include. It is to help improve the ideas and expressions in the paper.

In most cases the author don't actually know the reviewer and the words haven't been published. But, rather than use their words, the author(s) needs to think about what they want to say and the best way to say it, taking the reviewers suggestions into account when appropriate.

However, in some fields, such as mathematics, it is known that there is, in essence, only one way to say something (equations and the like). But even there, the referee is expecting that the author will just say the right thing based on, perhaps, a new understanding that they now have after reading the referee's report.

So, in essence, it is the author's words should be to used, perhaps influenced by those of the reviewer.

But yes, the author needs to include a note thanking the reviewers for valuable suggestions.

In the case of a reviewer who objects to his/her words being used verbatim without attribution or acknowledgement, yes, the reviewer should raise the issue. The editor may need to make a judgement about propriety and that may depend on how much was taken from the report.


How can I pre-register my study of little importance? I am writing an undergraduate dissertation on behavioural economics. I am looking to run an experiment. As nobody apart from my course convenor will read my paper, the stakes are not particularly high. Nonetheless, I want to i) follow best practices and ii) prove to the examiner that I have not done any p-hacking or HARKing, in the hope that I will get a higher mark.

I am therefore looking for some way to pre-register my study and hypotheses, or otherwise prove that I did not amend my hypotheses. This previous question on Academia.SE did not have a good answer. I have also thought of writing down my hypotheses in a public blockchain to have a proof of existence, but this seems far too esoteric and I doubt my examiner will be impressed.

If you have the time for it, you could blog the entire process from initial idea through the final writing of the paper. A public blog might not be the same as a, audit but the public nature of it would provide assurance. A research notebook open to the public, so to speak.

But I suggest this since a blog of a research "journey", including all attempts and all setbacks would be, perhaps, useful for others starting out in research. The fact that, you say, it isn't very deep might be an advantage, making it more accessible to readers.

It might even make you a better writer; valuable in itself.

There are a lot of blogging platforms, of course. And I realize this isn't exactly what you were asking for.


Asking a company for permission to use website data for research I'm a researcher, and I want to scrape a website (specifically, TripAdvisor) to collect data in order to use it for a research project. However, in reading the website's terms & conditions, I found that the company prohibits the user from:

  ...copy any content or information of this Website using any robot,
  spider, scraper or other automated means or any manual process for any
  purpose without our express written permission.

  -- Prohibited activities, bullet (ii)

As such, I want to contact the company to ask for permission. I've had a difficult time finding any information on how to contact the company in order to ask for permission to use data. That said, my question is, when making these sorts of requests to companies, what is the best way to ensure that I am contacting the right department/person?

Firstly, recognize that they probably placed that ToS there for some or all of the following reasons:

They want a legal basis for suing someone who tries to steal stuff from their site.
They want a legal basis for suing some idiot programmer who brings down their site because of a poorly programmed bot he wrote "for a project".
Their lawyer told them to put these ToS up because he saw them on some other large site and thought they looked good there.
...?

You likely fall in the second category (and maybe the fourth, I don't know what other things they're protecting themselves from). To that extent, you have to convince them that you aren't an idiot who will run amok on their servers. If you're aligned with a well-known university then maybe you'll have more luck, but even then it'll be a stretch... this is a for-profit company, not a research institution. Even if you can convince them that you're not a total idiot, they still have very little reason to want to grant you this permission. Your pet project will gain them nothing, and may in fact demonstrate something bad about their site that they don't want public. The "I'll share my findings" argument really doesn't go very far... companies have their own interests, governed by many things, including politics, agendas, egos, and what have you. Your powerpoint presentation that may be done in a year or two that will probably be too technical for a business VP to understand anyways won't give them any business value.

The point of all the preceding words is just to convince you that you have quite the uphill battle here.

All that said, I would just start calling every "contact us" number I can get my hands on. Definitely start with the numbers on the "Contact Us" page. Don't be afraid to send a written letter! For phone calls, I like the phrase Jack St Claire used in his comment: "I have a weird question."

Success is easy to determine. Check your mail... do you have a letter (written or electronic) from the TripAdvisor legal team permitting you to perform the research? If no, then you haven't succeeded yet. Keep trying! Perseverance will be key here.

I finally find help on ResearchGate.com. One researcher provided me some email addresses that he founds on this page and suggested that I email a request to the CEO (Steve Kaufer) asking for permission. I've emailed him a request, and I'm waiting his response. Hope this can help anyone in future.


Is ignoring emails acceptable in academia? As a grad student, I just find it tremendously frustrating when emails are ignored by faculty (both at my institution and at other places). Is this acceptable? I'd be content with a simple response with one line along the lines of "I have read this email and am busy right now, will respond in X days when I can write a more detailed email." I understand that, as a first year student in my field, I'm not really in a position to request anything of anyone, but it just seems like common decency.

Instead, I never hear back, as if my email has been jettisoned off into oblivion.

I agree that it can be frustrating, but this  is not uncommon in a big organisation (I don't think this is specific to academia). People get a lot of e-mail, and are very busy. Answering each and every email can be a lot of work in an already fully packed day. This either leads to people forgetting, or simply ignoring their e-mail to some extent. Also remember that something might be a really high priority for you, but a relatively low priority for the person you mail. So I don't think ignoring mails is acceptable, but sometimes understandable.

I think the best way to deal with it is to try and work with the system. If you see that professor X is very unresponsive to his mail, approach him in person. If a department does not return your mails, give them a call. This kind of personal approach makes it harder for those persons to ignore you, an email is very easy to ignore.

At my university professors are required to respond within 24 hours or they can get in trouble, especially if it is an ongoing issue.

Source: a previous professor told me this little important tid bit of information & I have had to use this information to my benefit a couple of times for lazy or asinine instructors.


How to find out if a paper is diamond/gold/green access? Recently I learned about open access and that there are many ways in which the publishers implement it. How do I find out if a paper is Diamond/Gold/Green access?
I guess if the paper is listed in a journal but a pre-print is available on the authors' webpage/repository then it is Green access. Is that correct?
Next how do I find out whether a paper appearing on the journal's website is gold access or diamond access? (Basically did the authors pay to make their paper open)
Thanks

if the paper is listed in a journal but a pre-print is available on the authors' webpage/repository then it is Green access. Is that correct?

Not exactly. The paper may be published under a green OA agreement even if the author did not publish it on their webpage, or the author may have shared it illegally. For a more authoritative answer, you should instead look up the journal on Sherpa/Romeo and see if it allows publishing pre/postprints.

Next how do I find out whether a paper appearing on the journal's website is gold access or diamond access? (Basically did the authors pay to make their paper open)

The journal's webpage will usually tell you if there are publication charges, and how much they are. Even if they advertise charges, these may be waived under certain conditions (for instance: agreement with the author's institution; author comes from a developing country). Ultimately, there is no way to pay if two third parties reached an agreement and waived that fee; that is a private contract between them and none of your business. :)
(Anyway, why do you care exactly? Is this to know if you will be charged to publish your future paper in the same venue? Or for a research/statistic?)

I guess if the paper is listed in a journal but a pre-print is available on the authors' webpage/repository then it is Green access. Is that correct?

Not necessarily. Green OA allows archiving of the published paper, which is not the same as the preprint. If you find the published paper then yes it is green OA.

Next how do I find out whether a paper appearing on the journal's website is gold access or diamond access? (Basically did the authors pay to make their paper open)

Access the paper, then look at the top of the first page with the copyright. If it says (c) the authors, it is usually gold/diamond open access. As for whether the authors paid for it, go to the journal's webpage and see if they have publication fees. If they don't, it's diamond.


Is it cheating if I develop some part of my MSc. thesis in a hackathon in a team? I am working on my master thesis in software engineering. I am going to present the idea of my thesis in a hackathon (startup competition), so most probably, we will make a team and develop a minimum viable product based on my thesis.

The question is:

Can I mention to this minimum viable product as the validation of my thesis?
Or it would be considering as plagiarism since i have not developed it alone, but in a team.

I believe it would be fine and acceptable as long as in your thesis writing you name who helped you and how they helped you.

I doubt anyone will think less of your thesis for having people help you. As long as it is still clear that you did a lot of work yourself... this team isn't completely doing your project and thesis for you!

You could ask your thesis advisor to be certain.

Many PhD students hire research assistants to help them code software engineering projects.

I think that if you are able at your level in your career to convince others to work on your own projects, be them academics or practitioners, you definitively deserve recognition. Let me elaborate my view:

a MS degree is NOT supposed to be research-intensive. That's PhD work.
MS dissertations typically either summarize other's people work, or provide limited original work on top of other's people work.
in case there is original work being developed, it is guided by the student's supervisor, and mostly executed by supervisor's team composed by research scientists/postdocs/PhDs.

A MS thesis is NOT an individual's homework. Even research at the highest levels is almost never done individual - I find it surprising that us faculty perpetrate the fictitious nineteenth century lone-genius narrative. I authored hundreds of papers, and the only work that bears my only name are my MD and my PhD thesis. And that's only because of the dissertation rules that were imposes to me - in a dissertation, the student is forced to relegate other's people contribution in the "acknowledgments", when they really are co-authors.

So if a MS student picks his own topic, and he/she self-assembles his own team to develop it and complete it rather than following semi-blindly the supervisor's (or her/his assistant's) direction, he/she should be highly praised. That's not plagiarism, that is leadership/entrepeneurial attitude at a very early stage.

Of course, just as in any academic work, you should refer to other people's contribution. In this case, you should make it clear you brought up the idea and encouraged others to collaborate with you, and try to assess in the most objective manner what is your own contribution, and what is not.

EDIT: thanks for the first upvote. I believe the downvotes were due to my first, short, in-your-face version of the answer. Hope my point is clear now.


Does everyone who is doing a PhD has to dabble in philosophy to a certain extent? Does everyone who is doing a PhD has to dabble in philosophy to a certain extent?

The question is irrespective of the field of research.

No. This is a misinterpretation of what “Ph.D.” means. The full title of the degree is Philosophiae doctor, technically a doctor “of philosophy.” However, this does not mean "philosophy" in the modern sense, but rather someone who pursues knowledge (“lover of wisdom”—the source of "philosophy"), not necessarily someone who studies philosophy.

It depends on what is your definition of philosophy.
In my view philosophy is a discussion of 5 elements 1) Yourself 2) The nature 3) God 4) Life 5) Death
If we go by above definition P.hd is studying on at least one aspect. If one can study and understand all above aspects then he is a philosopher.
To answer your question. No most of the phd students don’t study philosophy.


Effective open-ended student evaluation questions As we reach the end of the semester, the students in my class are being asked to do their evaluation of my teaching, as is common at most universities. As with most evaluations that I know of, I have been given an opportunity to provide open-ended prompts for the students to respond to.

I would like to craft open-ended questions for the students that will help me to improve my class/teaching style. This class was a large (~100 students) lecture, so I would like to focus the questions on how to improve myself in teaching large classes. Has any research been published showing which questions (or which types of questions) generate answers that are most effective at helping teachers to improve at teaching large lectures? If no research, is there any anecdotal evidence of "most helpful" questions?

Actually, based on my experience, it is better to ask the questions to the students at the end of the next semester.

During the semester, an average student usually concentrates on passing the course, rather than thinking about the outcomes of the course.
I think one realizes what the course gave him/her after about one semester.
And this is the time that they use their knowledge of your course to understand or pass another course.

Of course, the questions are highly dependent on what you want to improve.
However, it is always more clear what to improve when the students have a chance to use the course outcomes without any expectation of the grade.
If a student says "I wish you underlined the importance of Unit 6. Thus I could understand XX201 better", this is a good feedback, whereas
"This course is sooooo hard." is not.

As for the questions, this is what I ask to my students after one semester. Not like a questionnaire, but face-to-face:

Do you use what I've taught you for this semester?
Are there any redundant topics that I've covered?
How would you study if you were to take the course this semester?

I will provide a no-answer (which someone can delete if need be).

It seems you are primarily looking for feedback on your teaching in order to improve. In so doing you are looking for questions to have the students provide that input. Although I admire your trust in students, it is a bit like the blind leading the deaf. The likelihood that you will receive in-depth feedback on how to improve seems small. I am sure you will get lots of pointers about many details so it is not pointless but you should probably consider one or a few other approaches in parallel.

First, consider looking into a university pedagogics course. Hopefully your university provides such courses for teachers where experience is the foundation for the teaching. Second, ask fellows to attend your class(es) and provide feedback from their point of view. Third, have a fellow video-tape a lecture from the back of the room (communicating with the first rows is not difficult but the back of the room is different).


Emailing a professor for points on an exam when you want a recommendation from the professor I recently took an exam in my master's program where I missed just enough points to change my grade from A+ to A (in my country, these show up differently on a transcript). I intend on applying to some extremely competitive PhD programs (otherwise I would not be concerned with this grade difference), and given my undergraduate background, this is a course where I am probably expected to get an A+. Furthermore, I am essentially depending on a letter of recommendation from the professor of this course.

After having already looked at the exam with my professor, and hearing him explain the grade justification, I believe I did not yet make a well thought-out argument as to why I should have been given certain points.

My question

Should I bother emailing this professor with my legitimate argument, or simply let it go? I will probably get a rec letter from him either way and while I want an A+ and genuinely think my work on the exam deserved it, I don't want to annoy my professor and make his opinion of me depreciate.

Edit: In this scenario, I feel that an error was made on the part of the test-writer where a question could've been reasonably interpreted in two distinct ways. I was told that because I was the only person to make this particular interpretation, that it was an unreasonable interpretation. I don't agree with this logic.

Let it go.

You discussed this before, he made his arguments and it is unlikely that he will change his mind. It isn't only up to you to make a good argument for the points, but the professor himself will have judged the points again when you discussed them and will now be convinced that the points are fair.

Begging even more for the points will probably not get you any more points, but may annoy the professor, e.g, because you already discussed it and you are still not satisfied after he told you the final outcome. He has neither the time to discuss this again and again, nor he will consider that he was wrong the first two times (the first assignment, then your previous discussion).

I agree with allo.

Some further thoughts:

It's frustrating when you haven't even gotten the chance to make your points, and a good university should develop protocols and procedures to make sure this is possible. This isn't always done, and depending on where you live and what expectations/rules apply, it might be risky to mount an objection. The fact that mounting an objection is likely to be a risky act is fundamentally not okay, however I'm not all-powerful and neither are you, and I recommend being strategic here. As buffy said, the recommendation letter is a lot more valuable than the grade. For the same reason that risking 10 thousand dollars for a chance at obtaining 1 thousand dollars is a bad idea unless the chance of losing the 10 thousand is very low, I do not think you should mount an objection.

And, please, if you're ever in a situation where you can influence the direction that university policies take, please please please influence them in the direction they need to go. Students shouldn't be punished just for making an appeal to fairness and offering some arguments in favor of their work, or for rebutting a weak rebuttal to their arguments. Nothing about this is okay.

For myself, I'm currently doing my 3rd university degree, and I've been teaching and grading for 10 years, I'm keenly aware of the deficiencies of the current system. More specifically, I live in Australia, and here universities make it their goal to make making the process of disputing a grade as hard as humanly possible.

I've seen so many examples of this. Here's one example:

A friend wanted his grades on a math assignment increased. His arguments were as follows:

The questions were vague and the lecturer's expectations were vague, and yet the lecturer did not respond to emails or requests for clarification, of which my friend sent many.
Some of the "errors" he had been penalized for were actually errors on the lecturer's part.
The lecturer did not give reasons for any of the grades, and there were no published marking criteria for the assignment, which was contrary to university policy.

Dot points (1) and (2) above constitute a good argument for increasing the grades, or at the very least a remark. Dot point (3) constitutes a good reason to refuse a remark until proper grading criteria have been published.

So, what happened? He met with 3 professors - the lecturer and 2 others - to discuss the issue. They essentially conceded all of his points, yet offered no grade increase, only the chance for a remark. They did not offer to publish objective grading criteria, despite that university policy required it. He explained that without such criteria, he would not accept the offer for a remark, and would only ask for a grade increase. After another meeting, they decided to decline his request for grade increase, despite a variety concessions to the effect that the lecturer had made numerous mathematical errors in his marking.

So my friend took it higher. His arguments were very strong - I would know, I helped him write the appeal. He ended up making his arguments in front of a board of university staff. A lawyer that was provided by the university union sat next to him, partly to keep notes on his behalf. At the end of the meeting, the lawyer told him that he had destroyed the opposing arguments. A few weeks later, he received their final decision. His grade would not be adjusted. Literally hundreds of scarce hours were wasted on this appeal "that could not possibly fail", at a time when the burden of difficult Master's level subjects meant that every hour wasted was a serious cost. And yet at the end of it, my friend had nothing to show for it, other than a bruised ego.

This kind of thing, I'm under the impression that it happens a lot. For myself, I never took things quite so far, and yet I too have had similar experiences. I will give the most recent:

To object to an exam grade at my current institution, you have to do a lot:

You have to work out how to go through the process. It turns out that "applying for feedback" is how you do it objection. But nobody tells you this. The phrases "object to a grade" and "dispute a grade" do not appear on the Monash website, nor on the specialized faculty subsites. Mainly what you get is endless talk of "feedback". If you email the relevant customer service team and ask them outright if this is the right way to mount an objection, you receive a cheery non-answer that specifically does not answer your question:

  Hi [name omitted]

  Thanks for your enquiry.

  If you've already completed Stage 2 of the exam viewing process and
  have further questions, you can proceed to Stage 3 for further
  feedback by completing the online application form, giving reasons to
  support your request.

  We'll go through all the submitted requests and forward them on to the
  respective chief examiners if we determine the reasons are strong
  enough for further feedback.

  Have a good day!

  regards

  [name omitted]

Once you've worked out that "applying for feedback" is the way you make such claims, you're faced with clicking a checkbox that says that if you miss your exam you viewing session, you will forfeit the right to see your exam script ever again, no matter what. It doesn't matter if your Dad died, your car broke down, or you had a stroke - nope, it's your own fault.
When you get into the exam script viewing room, you have almost nothing to work with. You get to see what answers you submitted. But often are not told what the actual question was, or what you were graded out of. You are NEVER told the reasons for the grade you got. You're not allowed to take the exam script out of the room - all you can do is scrawl your objection on a bit of yellow paper they give you. That's assuming you've worked out at this point that you need to be building a case. If you think this is just the feedback stage, and the mount-an-objection stage will come later, you're in an awful lot of trouble.
In my experience, the extent to which your comments receive fair consideration is based almost entirely on whether the lecturer likes you. If the lecturer likes you, they will consider your points carefully, and your grade will change by 4, e.g. from 91 to 95. If the lecturer does not like you, they will ignore your points, and your grade will change by 0, e.g. from 91 to ... well, 91.

I also think the voting patterns here bolster my point. In the original version of this question, I commented that universities try to make objecting your grades as hard as possible...

  ... and you're forced to put up with the stubbornness, small-mindedness
  and stupidity of human nature, essentially by design. And, though most
  professors are far from stupid, they can be every bit as stubborn and
  small-minded as anyone.

This is so true! Just look at the voting here. Because my answer offended some people, I ended up at -6, despite that my points were strong. Well, this is exactly what happens at university! If the lecturer likes you, your marks go up. If they don't, your objections are ignored. It's roughly the same pattern that plays out so frequently on this website.

Long story short, universities need to implement controls prevent this kind of thing. In my opinion, the average professor simply cannot be trusted to grade (or vote, for that matter) based on the strength of someone's argument, as opposed to their feelings about the other person's tone or character.

And, with that in mind, I'll leave the Addendum from my original post as some final food-for-thought.

  Addendum. I think the voting patterns here bolster my point. For example, note that I fully addressed the points made in Ben I.'s first comment, yet the comment continues to be upvoted and the rebuttals ignored, essentially because I ruffled a few feathers. This is small-mindedness in a nutshell, and really emphasizes the importance of my final point, which I'll repeat again: Students shouldn't be punished just for making an appeal to fairness and offering some arguments in favor of their work, or for rebutting a weak rebuttal to their arguments. Nothing about this is okay.


To enroll in to a PhD Program at the age of 65 As a retired school teacher, and to become a professor at a university. Is it okay to get into a PhD program at the age of 65 and complete it to become a professor? Or is it too late and I can’t get employed at a university?

The realistic answer is: you can enroll in a PhD program at age 65. However, you are highly unlikely to get a tenure-track professorship after finishing a PhD program at that age. The big reason for this is that you're already above the retirement age, and many schools do have rules about how old you can be and still advise students. Moreover, you probably wouldn't represent a good "long-term investment."

On the other hand, you may be able to obtain a position as a part-time lecturer or adjunct faculty—in other words, for positions where you are not directly supervising PhD candidates.

This may be difficult for younger academicians to comprehend: There is the adage that 'Those who can, do; those who can't, teach'. Let's say that I earn a B.S. or M.A. in computer engineering and go onto to start my own company, make a gazillion dollars, sell that company and start another. I sell that company and now have a net worth of twenty billion dollars. I'm sixty years old, I have the time and money. I've made my fortune, set up a foundation to do good works, and am now eager to explore other areas of life. I think, why not get that PhD? It has nothing to do with teaching; it's about challenge, accomplishment, and completion. And who knows, maybe some university will hire me--not because I'm young, but because I have wisdom and life experience.


How to transition from pure biology PhD to bioinformatics/biostatistics? I've been working as a PhD student in biology and currently in my last year. However I realised just a year into my PhD that I hated doing experiments, I really hated it. I think one of the reasons may be that in the beginning, most of my experiments did not work. Also, I couldn't justify spending years of my life working on a tiny protein that no one cared about, all in the name of basic science. I initially wanted to quit but it was a difficult decision because I am an overseas student and may have had to immediately return home if I did.
During this period, I did find that I enjoyed working on statistics and taught myself to code a bit, mostly at night. I'm currently taking online coding courses and I really enjoy using computational methods within my field especially in statistics. My main question is: is it realistic to switch to a career in bioinformatics and statistics, and how can I go about this immediately after my PhD?

As a PhD student in Math with Computer Science background who is working in Bioinformatics exclusively: it is definitely possible for you!

In the Computational Biology Institute at The George Washington University where I work as GRA we have PhD students, Post-docs as well as Faculty from different backgrounds (including pure biology) working purely in bioinformatics area.

I do believe you don't have to switch as much, as you think. It only takes a group that is more focused on the "informatics" part more, than on biology. But still caring about Biology to change the main daily routine of yours. And your background will be needed, as bioinformatics can not exists without biological reasoning and biological guidance / insights.

If I were you, my first step would be to find what is the most "informatics" related problem close to your current research. It might be not your group, who is doing it, but still. Educate yourself a bit about such research by reading related articles. And after that it is as simple as writing a couple of emails to PIs of respective studies and telling them, that you are very interested in collaboration on their topic. This might yield a joint publication or even a post-doc position offer from respective lad.

I wouldn't count much on pure "career" in statistics, as it usually requires more math background. But biologists in bionformatics, who at least knows how to do statistics are very hard to find. So the more you know from the programming / statistics side, the better you are off go to more informatics groups.

Apply for an M.S. in Statistics or Computer Science, this can help you get a good background. Then apply for Post-Doc positions. An even better idea is to get your M.S. in Data Science, and then find a post doc in something of that sort. Data Science is a highly lucrative field, and if you have an interest in it, Why not?


Do I need to cite Mathematica in my paper? I am in the final stages of writing my first paper, in dynamical systems. The paper is purely theoretical but I use Mathematica for some images and graphical simulations (none of the actual results depend on a computation by Mathematica). The paper will be presented in a conference, where I will show some of these simulations in real time.

My question is whether I need or should cite Mathematica in my paper somehow.

More generally - had I used, say, Matlab, or an open source python library instead, would I need to cite them?

I would recommend to always cite software that you use in your calculations (no need for LaTeX, obviously).
A screw driver will always stay a screw driver, but software is a little bit more complex.

Have you heard of the little bug that may invalidate 15 years of brain research? I think in that case it would be quite nice to know which version of the software you used.

And in your case: can you really be sure that Mathematica has not a specific bug that you haven't noticed? In Version 10, I noticed that some linear-log plots were messed up and that was fixed in a later version 10.1. It could have easily happened that I had published a wrong graph, and thus I think it is quite important to give detailled information about the software that you use.

Wolfram Mathematica is a proprietary software, that means the publisher (i.g. Wolfram Research Inc.) retains intellectual property rights and you should cite it. You can check this page how to do it properly.

Beyond the law point of view, listing specification of software may help other people to easier reproduce your results in some cases.


Renting a house to a graduate student in my department I am a professor at a US university, and I'll be away on a sabbatical for all of the coming academic year.  I would like to sublet my house while I am away, and I think that one or two of the graduate students in my department might be interested.  I'd prefer to do that instead of renting to a complete stranger.  However, since I would effectively be their landlord and they would be paying me rent, I am wondering if this raises ethical or conflict-of-interest concerns, since those students may be in my courses in the future.

(I have checked my university's regulations and they do not address this situation.  I would certainly check with my superiors before going ahead; this question is just to find out whether this seems okay in terms of general professional ethics, or presents the appearance of a conflict.)

Some possibly relevant notes:

My department's graduate program is not in my research area, so there would not be any chance of me becoming the dissertation advisor of any of these students.  However, I could serve on their dissertation committee.
The sublet would end before I would be teaching classes again, so I wouldn't simultaneously be a student's landlord and their instructor.  It is conceivable, though, if they fell behind on the rent, that they might still owe me money at that time.

At the time they sign the lease there is no conflict of interest. Further, there is no conflict of interest anticipated throughout the duration of the lease. There is of course the possibility that an unforeseen conflict arises, but this is always a possibility. You are putting yourself at an elevated risk of a conflict of interest, so it is probably worth mentioning it to you department chair. If an unforeseen conflict does arise, just let your department chair know and do what ever is needed at that point.

Bad idea.  Don't fish off the company pier.  To start with, grad students are not ideal rental customers.  Then you complicate any possible future confrontations with being work colleagues.

Just go through a rental agent and have them handle it (maintenance too, you don't want the phone calls when the toilet breaks).  You may make a little less money but with much lower risk and hassle.


Is it unethical to not able to complete a journal review within provided time ? I was invited to review a paper from a decent journal in my field. I was provided a month to review the article.

However, due to some work related commitments, I was not able to provide reviews within the stipulated time (and somehow forgot about the deadline). After 2 weeks of the deadline, I received an email from the editor for providing reviews on the article. I emailed him back that I will provide the reviews and mentioned the date and he acknowledged the same. However, on the date I had provided, I received an automated email that if I don't provide the reviews they will be forced to go ahead with the reviews from other reviewers.

I emailed them again that I have read the paper and ready with my reviews and will be uploading them within a few hours. But while filling the review form, I received another automated email stating that they have decided to move ahead without my reviews. Since it was my first opportunity to officially review a paper from a journal, the situation left me with the following questions

Was it unethical at my part to not able to provide the reviews within the provided time ?
Will it have any impact on my reputation as a reviewer in future?

Will it have any impact on my reputation as a reviewer in future?

As @darijgrinberg said in a comment, referees are quite often late with reviewing assignments. As an example, on one occasion (the only one I can remember) when I was unable to get a paper reviewed by the deadline I committed to, I sent an apologetic email to the editor a couple of days before the deadline explaining that I will be sending my report a week or two late. His sarcastic reply suggested that he found my apology very amusing and unusual, and he was in fact very pleased that I would be only a week or two late...

So, I think it’s not so much that your reputation will suffer because of this incident; rather, it’s more accurate to say that you have missed an opportunity to set yourself apart from all the other late reviewers - that is, it’s not a negative efffect but the absence of a positive one. But in any case I assume you will have many more opportunities of this type in the future, so I wouldn’t worry about it too much.

As for the ethics, again as Darij said, ethics has to do with willful acts. To forget things or be negligent or put yourself in situations where you are unable to deliver on a promise may be characterized as unprofessional (only a little bit in this particular case) and is certainly undesirable, but this has nothing to do with ethics.

..due to some work related commitments, I was not able to provide reviews within the stipulated time (and somehow forgot about the deadline).

Yes, that is unethical.  You made a commitment to do a piece of work, with a deadline attached.  The time for review exists to allow authors to have their work reviewed in a timely manner, and it is extremely inconvenient for authors and journal reviewers to have delays caused by referees who do not take their role seriously.  Not only did you not meet the commitment you made, but you evidently did not even care about it enough to diarise the deadline.  This was your first opportunity to review a paper, and you screwed it up, causing delay and inconvenience for the author and editor.

  Will it have any impact on my reputation as a reviewer in future?

Unfortunately not. In a rational academia composed of professionals, failure to complete a review within the agreed deadline would impact your credibility and reputation in the future.  However, we live in an academia where agreements to perform reviews within a timeline mean little to nothing, and so your actions are unlikely to be seen as fundamentally different from what happens in a large number of cases.


What is the correct protocol for including peer reviews that I have done in a CV? I have been advised that I should include the peer reviews in my CV, particularly when I am applying for academic/research positions.  I am not too sure how to go about this, thus my questions:

Is it ethical to include the full details?  I would imagine that as reviews are anonymous, this would be a no-no.
Should I just say something along the lines "Reviewer: Journal name"?

Also, what section of the CV should this information be included under?

I believe you may get some tips from the answers to a question of mine on this very site: “Do you list journals you have reviewed for on your CV?”

As for myself, I list the peer-reviews I have done in a “Administrative and collective duties” or “Community involvement”. Or, in a short CV which doesn't have such divisions, I put it with the broader “Other skills and activities” section (i.e. not teaching, not research projects).

What I include is:

list of journals for which I act as reviewer (“Regular reviewer for many chemistry journals, including …”)
funding bodies (NSF, private trusts, etc.) for which I act as expert (including, e.g., NSF division, but not the exact programs)
evaluation committees on which I sit

It feels obvious, but it's always worth repeating: do not include any confidential information, such as titles or author lists for reviewer papers or projects. I think it's safe to list the number of reviews performed for each outlet if you want (but I don't do it).

If you are compiling a CV for a job at a University you should make sure to include whether or not your journal entry was refereed. This adds weight to the entry.


"Institution" on submission for a former student between jobs I'm about to submit a paper where one of the authors is a past student who got a master's degree at my university a few months ago (I was his advisor). He plans to apply for PhD positions at the next deadline, but is presently unemployed. What should we write on the manuscript for his institution? "Master's graduate, previously at XXX University"? "Former student at XXX University" (this doesn't specify that he actually got a degree, though)? The dreaded "Independent researcher"?

Whenever I co-write a paper with former students of mine, based on their MSc thesis, we typically put XXX University as affiliation of both the student and me. The bulk of the work has been done when both of us were affiliated with this university, so this seems appropriate. The fact that the student is no longer affiliated with the university seems of minor importance to me.
Does the venue to which you submit demand that you specify the role of each author? If not, I'd just let it be. If so, consider "MSc alumnus", substituting the appropriate title for "MSc".

He performed the research activity while affiliated with your group. You do not need to be PhD/Professor/Dean/whatever-self-important-academic-title to submit a research for peer review. If you really need a title, it can be "scientific assistant", or "pre-graduate student" or any linear combination/contraption of the terms.
Along this note, it is clear to me that even Master thesis work is still work (you are even thinking about publishing it), even if the student is learning, so I strongly feel he/she should be compensated, however, let's not derange from the question.
Judging "independent researcher" as dreaded is absolutely unintelligent. No offense intended, it is just a sign of the time, since some independent researcher are known to be independent from their brain, then all independent researcher are to be considered so. This is the most antiscientific way of thinking I can think of.


Academic changing universities: How to negotiate start date to minimise problems with leaving previous university with little notice? I have an offer at another university.  It is late June, just got it.  They want me asap.  I have asked to not go until after the fall semester as we have an accreditation site visit as well as a faculty member coming back for their first semester after cancer treatment.  I don't want to stress out the department with a job search now and to go through the site visit without me.  I literally have my current university's contract in my hand and have not returned it.  I would like to ask them if I can accept for just the fall semester.  That would give us time to get through our very important site visit, and the fall semester.  It would also provide 5 months for them to fill my position.  My fear is if I ask they could say no.  If I don't ask, I'm not sure what if any penalties there would be.  I want to do the right thing but not sure what to do.  Suggestions?

Also look at Possible to leave a contract academic position shortly after signing new contract? [closed]

But the decision appears not yours to make from my reading of the wording of the question.

If the current institution says no to a one semester contract, then the answer is given, as it would be kind of ridiculous to keep putting off the new position (assuming one wants to accept it) for however many years the old place keeps renewing the year-to-year contract.

But lets imagine that the OP is in a position where he/she is negotiating with both sides to stay one semester. The former department has requested that they 'need' the OP just a little bit longer. Accommodate the request or not?

There is no ethical obligation to stay (how would people ever change positions otherwise?). A junior faculty in a field where everyone knows everyone and a collaborative team player reputation is highly prized, might find it a smooth move to attempt to negotiate to stay one last semester at the desperate request of the former department. (If the new place says no, well then, figuring that out as soon as possible is more important to the old department than anything else).

But, even so, I get a sense from the question that the OP feels guilty for leaving, (which is normal).  I also suspect that is it pretty easy to mistake anxiety-over-getting-out-of-project  with being indispensable. ("It won't be done the way I would have done it" is not the same as being indispensible)


Is it common for a university to remain unresponsive to queries? I'm planning to study in the u.k. I've never been to the u.k. but is it common there to remain unresponsive to the students' queries?
I've sent a few emails to the student service team for some queries. They replied me once or twice and on one of them, idk if they forwarded it by accident ot not, they sent me the conversation they had about me through emails including the answer to my query. They were complaining to each other how I email multiple ppl at the same time. I'm not sure if that's a professional way to deal with anyone even though I'm a student.
After that, I sent a few emails because I urgently need to work on my visa, and they haven't answered to any of them. It's been roughly 9days since I sent my unanswered query.
Could they be ignoring my emails on purpose?
I've been informed that an organisation is to take certain period of time to reply before when I was emailling other institutes, but never experienced this unresponsive instutue...

They complained that you've emailed multiple people; maybe that breaks some organisational hierarchy and given they are British, they might be too serious about the hierarchy thing.
You should probably send one more short email to exactly one specific, most relevant recipient, apologize for any mistake in correspondence on your part and politely share your query again while mentioning the urgency.


Is having a personal blog that addresses controversial political topics possibly damaging to an academic career? I am a Ph.D student, and I've been considering for some time starting my own blog as a hobby, to write mostly on philosophical/political topics that interest me; these are definitely not related to my field of research (at least, not most of them). As it happens, some of the topics I want to address are controversial, and much of what I would write could be interpreted as being offensive to one group or another.

Let's assume I want to look for a tenure-track position, and later on get tenure. Ideally, I hope everyone would agree that such a personal blog should not alter in any way my case for obtaining the position. In practice, I am concerned that the existence of such a blog could be used to attack my case for the position (and later on, my case for tenure) on the grounds that the opinions therein found are "offensive" or even "hate speech" (as might be interpreted by some very sensitive people in these modern times). More subtly, one imagines it could cause some decision-making persons to develop an effective bias against me, which would probably have a negative effect.

Thus my question in the title. I am looking both for personal experiences that people have had, and for some statistical data that may answer the question or a closely-related one (such as, does non-trivial political participation affect academic career? etc.)

Let's start with this: as a professor you will be in a position of power over quite a few people. Part of the job of being a professor is to responsibly manage a number of employees and respectfully interact with students. If you really did (recently) practice hate speech, then that does legitimately disqualify you.

However, when this becomes an issue you will probably never hear about it. Think about that from the position of the hiring committee: They have a number of applicants, most will be somewhat suitable for the job, but one will be stronger on one point and another stronger on another. So there are so many ways in which you can justify any decision. So when you do write down the justification, you will choose the one that will give the least problems.


PhD thesis without acknowledgements During the process of writing my PhD thesis, I was close to falling out with my adviser, the advice I received from other staff at the lab (including the director) was unhelpful at best.
I have since made up with my adviser and have successfully defended the thesis.
I now have to publish my thesis.

The department says that one can include acknowledgements. All of the theses I have seen in my lab and in my department feature acknowledgements.
Due to this special situation,  I don't quite feel that acknowledgements are called for. Yes, my adviser helped during the first half of the project but then almost completely reverted his stance. In terms of contribution, it is my opinion that he comes out at 0%.

I do not want to address any of the issues in the acknowledgements. I do not think that this is the right place. Likewise, I do not feel like thanking any of the involved people.
Therefore, I would just leave out the acknowledgements completely.
In academia, is this considered worse than lukewarm acknowledgements?
Should I actually care about the acknowledgement, because others do?

A thesis is not a place to solve grudges. It is a professional document that is eternal. As such, it should be handled professionally and gracefully.

Still, I am having trouble why you do not want to have an acknowledgement section. Do you really believe you have done the entire PHD entirely yourself? Even if your advisor did not help enough, you had some funding right? And someone provided that. Should not he be included in the acknowledgement section? Someone also proofread your thesis. You probably also had co-authors in your papers. As you see, there are multiple people that contributed to your success.

But on a more informal tone. Don't you wish to thank your family or significant other for the support? Or your PHD co-students? The people that you share your office with? You have finished a PHD and especially since it probably was a rocky one this a very good reason to celebrate. Do not spoil the moment with petty grudges. Do what you are required to do, be professional and move-on to better things.

Whilst I can sort of understand why you don't want to offer gushing tributes to your supervisor, why not include a brief statement such as 'I would like to thank the following people for their support in completing this piece of work'.

Then simply list everyone appropriate including your supervisor in alphabetical order.


Why is it forbidden by the IEEE to post 'author-submitted' papers on ArXiv? I am reading IEEE's policy on uploading a conference paper to other venues such as arxiv. Here is the current policy: https://conferences.ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/get-published/post-your-paper/.
What is confusing me is that IEEE differentiates between preprint and author-submitted paper, where it is okay to put a pre-print on ArXiv, but not okay to put the author-submitted version.

Is the following understanding of the rules correct? One is allowed to upload any version of the paper to ArXiv except for (1) the version submitted for peer-review, prior to any changes being made to the paper, i.e., before addressing the reviewers comments, and (2) the final version of the paper, which is different from the accepted version, as it undergoes final styling and copy-editing.

Also, on a meta level, what is the logic between allowing preprints, but not author-submitted papers, and how much difference does there have to be between the two versions to not count as the same?

what is the logic between allowing preprints, but not author-submitted papers?

There is no logic behind this. It is part of the culture of publishers who want to restrict access as much as possible, so they can profit from selling closed-access research.

If it were just up to publishers, I don't think IEEE would allow preprints, either. But they make an exception for arXiv because the culture has changed such that people want to make their papers available there. Additionally, note that it is valid to post any version of your paper other than the final copy-edited version online on your website.

(Note: if you ask IEEE, they might come up with some reason for it. Perhaps they treat submitting to arXiv as a competing submission, and since you can't submit elsewhere while a paper is under review, you shouldn't be able to submit to arXiv either. But I don't think this objection holds water, because arXiv and posting to a personal website have similar effects. Also, I don't think it is the real reason, which is that their business model relies on limiting paper access to some extent or another.)

  What is confusing me is that IEEE differentiates between preprint and author-submitted paper, where it is okay to put a pre-print on arXiv, but not okay to put the author-submitted version.

It's worth pointing out that many researchers do wait to publish online until a paper is accepted. The idea is that papers go through lots of revisions, and the title, narrative, and main results of a paper could change after it goes through the publication process (possibly being rejected a few times). So, you may not want people to read the draft version and get a bad idea (or wrong idea) about where your work fits, and you prefer to make only the most impressive and clarified version available.

  how much difference does there have to be between the two versions to not count as the same?

There is no rule here, as far as I know. It could even be the same version, but that probably means you ignored the reviews, which is a bad thing. Often for my papers, there is also zero difference between the preprint and the "final" version, other than it having a new template and formatting to look pretty, which doesn't really matter. (And I prefer to treat the preprint as the real "final" version.)

Well, by your own words, they want your paper to go through their peer-review before being unleashed on the world. On the one hand, they think it will make Arxiv, and the world, a better place. But more than that, they want to prevent headaches, drama, and confusion, whereby a hypothetically crummy version of your paper co-exists in this universe with a superior version that IEEE published. Imagine the bad version gets scores of vitriolic comments on reddit, which will never be forgotten by the Internet.

If the IEEE were 100% evil (as suggested by the other poster), they'd only let you publish the pre-review paper on Arxiv, to try to make Arxiv the repository of bad, unreviewed papers.


What are the major ethical concerns with private tutoring? I'm currently a computer science graduate student on a low stipend, and have started spending a few hours per week tutoring undergraduates to help make ends meet. I love teaching and want to be a help to students, but I also want to make sure that I don't personally cross any ethical boundaries in doing so, or be complicit in students doing so.

Some obvious transgressions are tutoring for a class for which I am also a TA (conflict of interest), and writing code or otherwise outright doing work for students (plagiarism), but what other ethical considerations do I need to keep in mind to remain above-board in doing this?

Students sometimes ask me questions about their assignments. How much help is too much help? If a student is asked a "trick" or unclear question, is it appropriate for me to clarify it? If they're having trouble debugging a program, can I help them localize the issue to a few lines of code, or do I need to remain very general about things? Can I review code they've already submitted to help them improve by, for example, showing a better way of managing memory in C, or showing how to optimize or shorten their programs? Can I write short code snippets illustrate a point in a lesson?

I've also noticed that some questions on homework assignments are very basic. For example, in our systems course, the students were asked "True or False: a register is a small location in RAM". The answer was in the lecture slides. It makes me nervous to not be able to distinguish a request for a basic fact from a request for a homework answer. The assignments are only visible to students during the term, so I can't tell unless they show me (as was the case here). Should I give an indirect answer like "I can't just tell you that; did you review the lecture notes on CPU architecture?" as I did this time? Was doing that unethical?

You seem to have a pretty good ethical sense based on your question, so I think you won't go far wrong following your instincts.

But if you have the opportunity, it is a good idea to go visit the prof teaching the course for which you are tutoring and ask for any additional general guidance.

It is usually a good idea to answer "trivial" questions with other questions. "What do you think the answer is? Why? Explain your reasoning." That sort of thing. Often the student will get a flash of insight. But if you can point to a flaw in reasoning you help the student without giving direct answers.

Good professors when asked questions by students seldom give out complete answers unless it is in the context of a continuing conversation. Instead, a "minimal" hint is given to get the student over a block and which lets them proceed. If a student repeatedly has problems with the same issue or block, an additional exercise will be given that tries to give the student practice with the reasoning.

But the technique of asking for an analysis of any issue that leads to a block is a good way to diagnose the student's thinking and help them get over it.

Giving students general problem solving strategies is also good, but probably less useful, as it doesn't usually have a diagnostic element. But even "Where did you look for an answer?" can help. Especially if followed by "Where else could you look?". You could then suggest other sources if appropriate.

I'll note for completeness that some students are misled by the resources that they use. Some of those resources are wrong and some may be written poorly leading to ambiguity. I've had students get in terrible jams by using perfectly rational thought processes applied to bad input data. That is rare, but it can occur.

Another feature ... When you become a private tutor for someone, then you are in a superior position.  That means any romantic relationship between the two of you is not allowed.


Is it normal in Europe for graduate courses to be all in the evening? I have been looking into master's programs in Spain. 95% of the Spanish programs I've been seeing tend to meet in the evening, with times like 3-6 PM or 6-9 PM. It's not clear to me whether this is particular to the courses I'm looking at, or a national, or international phenomenon. I only have educational experience in the Americas -- in the U.S. and Chile, in which places class meetings were nearly always in the morning or early afternoon -- and had never heard of this before. I hazard a guess that it's a European norm, but this is the vaguest of suppositions.

In which fields or areas are late afternoon graduate courses normal? I can guess that this makes education more accessible to the employed, but the disadvantage to parents is significant.

Europe is not a country, but a continent. There is a lot of variability inside Europe. So no, it is not a European thing.

All Bachelor's, Master's and PhD courses I teach (in Germany) are between 10:00 ad 16:45. About 15 years ago I taught a course (in the Netherlands) in the evening for a part-time Bachelor's program aimed at people who work besides their study. For obvious reasons those programs tend to organize their courses such that they happen in the evening. However such programs tend to be the exception rather than the rule in my field (sociology) and the countries I am familiar with (Germany & the Netherlands).

At the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, we have some courses that start at 8:00 AM. So I suppose it depends on university, course, semester. I prefer evening courses rather than early ones. But I don't know how are the schedules in USA.


Is it a bad idea to buy plane tickets before the conference schedule is announced? I will be attending a conference to give a presentation
in approximately two months.
I would like to buy plane tickets to and from the conference location,
especially because I am living outside the US
and the conference is in the US,
so travel to the conference is not an easy thing.

Unfortunately, the conference organizers
have yet to confirm and announce the conference schedule.
I do know that the last possible presentation session ends at 2 pm on Tuesday,
so if I wanted to book plane tickets now,
the earliest flight that I could catch would leave at 4 pm.
However, if my presentation is on Monday,
I might prefer to book a flight that leaves early on Tuesday morning,
skipping some of the sessions at the conference.

Question:
Should I book my flight tickets now at "safe" times?
Or should I book my flight tickets,
leaving early on the last day,
hoping that I don't get scheduled for the very last presentation slot?

Response to answers/comments:
I don't need to leave early.
I have just often observed that
at every conference which I have attended in the past,
the attendance at the last few sessions is rather low,
and it just seemed to be "normal" to leave early.
Based on the answers/comments,
it seems that just because many others leave early
doesn't mean that I need to when I can stay at the conference,
learning things and meeting people.

First, I would ask whether you think you really should skip part of the conference---you're going such a long way, and presumably it's a community that you care about, so are you sure you want to abandon part of it?

If you really do want to skip, though, I would recommend a third path that I have often seen work: contact the conference program chairs, let them know your travel dilemma, and ask them if they can schedule you on the prior day.  If they are likely to be flexible, this will let them be flexible now and let you book; if not, you'll know they're unlikely to be flexible at other times either and thus know that it's not safe to plan to skip until the schedule is announced.

Send an e-mail to the organizers, and ask for your talk to be scheduled on Monday because you need to leave early on Tuesday. Apologize for the trouble, and cite personal reasons or whatever you feel appropriate to divulge about the motivation.


Why wouldn't a professor allow a student to record audio of his lecture? I am a master’s student in a public university in the state of New York. I do not consider myself to be disabled in any form but I do find it difficult to concentrate in class. I lose focus too often and have difficulty recalling concepts taught during class. So I find resources such as recorded lectures to be very quite beneficial as whenever I lose focus while watching them, I can simply rewind back.

I am currently enrolled in a course where lectures are not recorded. I like this subject and I want to do well. So I want to ask the Professor permission to audio-record his lecture (by just keeping my phone on my desk and not using any distracting piece of equipment). I don't know the professor well but he definitely isn't one of those overtly friendly ones who (you'd think) will surely give you permission.

What I want to know is if he were to deny me, what could be his reasons?

I think I have just one shot at this. So I want to go there prepared.

A vaguely similar (but not the same) question has been asked before.

Update: I asked the Professor if I could record and he simply smiled and said yes.

This is a subjective question, but common reasons I have heard (and reasons I would have) include:

Fear of students editing records to manipulate what you said
Fear of having a mistake you made taken out of context and spread widely
Concern that it encourages students to not pay as close of attention
Concern that students will not feel they need to attend class if they have acceess to the lecture outside of class.
Concern that students in the class will not feel as comfortable asking questions or contributing to discussion, since they are also being recorded
Institutional concern about a course's lectures being widely distributed online, when in fact these lectures are for (paying) enrolled students--a type of "intellectual property" concern

Edit: Also, you might want to be aware when bringing up problems getting easily distracted in the class, a professor could take that somewhat personally. Many committed teachers go out of their way to try to make their class as interesting and engaging as possible. If a student asked to record lectures because they are getting distracted or zoning out during class, one may not hear: "I am trying to do this to improve my learning;" but rather: "I am trying to compensate for your short-comings as a teacher". Not all instructors will feel this way, but that's just something to keep in mind as you broach that conversation.

Edit2: There's a lot of discussion in comments that my last comment about socially navigating the question: it is very true that many teachers may not care. However, trying to frame the request more explicitly as "this is a thing I am doing to improve my learning" could be beneficial in making your instructor agree.

I'm really surprised that nobody has mentioned accessibility yet.

During my time at university, I struggled heavily with 'dyslexia', most notably the inability to write and listen at the same time due to the level of concentration I needed to write coherently.
I was given a voice recorder, and access to software so that I could record lectures, and simply make notes on the timings or certain explanations/sub-categories.
There's also the point to consider that you have paid (in my mind) probably an extortionate amount of money for these lectures.

TL;DR - you should always be allowed to record a lecture for your own personal use, as otherwise would discriminate against those with learning difficulties. However you have no right to upload it to anywhere or share it with anyone else.

EDIT: I realise this doesn't answer the question at all, but rather I answer a different unasked question. Oops, this is my first posting sorry!


Is it acceptable to use non-English references in a computer science paper? I am currently reviewing an interdisciplinary computer science paper which is heavily based on previous works in logistics and process engineering that have been unfortunately published only in German (18 out of total 30 references). The overall idea is sound, but as the logistics structures are in some sense a basis of the paper, I have a strong inclination to reject the manuscript as the research cannot be followed and reconstructed by a researcher that does not understand German.

On top of that, virtually none of them are available online, or otherwise easily accessible.

I was going to hit the "Reject" button just a few moments ago, but I still have my doubts: I know that in humanities and also in mathematics people often cite publications written in other languages, but I have not yet seen something like that in computer science. Also, if it were one or two references, but 60%? The journal reviewing policy does not help me in this case.

I was thinking about proposing the following workarounds:

Extending the paper - this is probably not an option as the journal imposes quite a strong page limit, or
A supplementary report - the vital parts of the non-English text could be made available as an Technical Report or an on-line publication (I was thinking about arXiv) and this can be referenced in the manuscript.

Is it fair to reject it? Has anyone experienced something similar? What was your decision?

Having many non-English references is absolutely no valid reason to reject a computer science paper.

If a reader wants to follow up on the references, they can learn some German, find a translator, etc. But this is the responsibility of the reader, not the author.

I would not go for a reject for this reason.

As a reviewer, wishing that authors provide more background from foreign language papers is acceptable. I would do so in this case.

Like, in normal case it is straightforward to assume that the reader can inform herself on previous techniques from earlier papers and you present the state of the art more to highlight what you have done differently.

Here it is not like this. So, the authors might be required to present a better/broader overview of the related work and state of the art. As a reviewer I would basically ask them to retell the essence of the foreign-language papers, so their paper is understandable and makes sense even if the reader cannot read the foreign language references.

As a side note: where it mattered, translations were published. You paper authors might not be aware of them, but they might be out there. I know that some Russian math journals were routinely translated in English during the Cold war. It's another issue how to cite such works in an English paper...


Why do students go for a PhD even when chances of getting academic jobs on its completion are slim? This is in reference to my question: How to do a PhD to equip myself for a job as assistant professor.

I was told in the answer of the above linked question that chances of landing a job as an assistant professor in Mathematics are quite slim. Very few people will actually get a permanent position in academia.

An article of 2014 shows only 0.5-3% of PhD graduates will actually get a job as an Assistant Professor.

But I have two questions:

  Why do so many people still apply for a PhD in some reputed institutes in India even knowing the harsh reality? I found there are 1500 applications for four PhD scholarship positions.

  One answer says that people move to industry, but I still don’t understand how after doing a PhD in suppose differential geometry or algebraic geometry one can do a job in industry if he/she gets no position as an assistant professor.
  Will one be satisfied to do some managerial work in some Consultancy firm after doing a PhD in Mathematics?

  Are people jobless after a PhD?
  Completion of a PhD requires so much effort. So why is there no value after doing it?

NOTE:

In the most up-voted answer below it has been said that many who enroll for  a PhD don't even wish to pursue an academic career.

I have been asking my seniors who are currently pursuing a PhD or are in the verge of completing their degree or who have completed it.
They said that they all want to be Professors in some Universities and want to be involved in research because that is the dream job for them.

I am obviously talking about PhD in Mathematics

The issue is that the frame of your question is wrong. You’re assuming that the purpose of a PhD is to get an academic job, when that is not the case: Many people who get PhD’s have no desire for an academic job, even from the time they apply!

The number of academic positions is indeed insufficient to absorb all the PhD’s. But there are lots of other “landing spots”:

Industrial research and development
Start-ups
Non-university government research institutes (like the US NIH or DOE lab system, or the Max-Planck-Instituts in Germany)
Finance and consulting
Administrative and Supervisory positions in other disciplines.

Overall, PhD’s have a lower unemployment rate than non-PhD’s. It’s all a question of where they want to go.

As for doing a PhD, the basic skill it teaches you—the one that makes you valuable to lots of people—is the ability to learn new fields quickly and become an expert in those fields. You don’t always need specialized knowledge in your PhD topic to get into an area.

But ultimately the reason for doing a PhD is the love of research and discovery. People pursue research careers because that’s what they want to do.

It's cool :-) I would get a Ph.D. just for fun if I had time and money. It's fun (for many people including me nothing is more fun than getting to understand new things), it feeds you dopamine (some people use gambling for this, some do sports, some prefer to explore), and makes it much easier to get people respect you which is extremely ego-pleasing :-) And there is nothing wrong in pleasing your ego as long as you do this consciously and don't let it cloud your reason.


Do newly hired professors have to take a drug test before they start? In U.S., Canadian and European universities do new professors have to pass a drug test before starting their career?  Or is it only required when they are promoted to full-time tenure professors?

Is this a serious question? I would refuse to work anywhere where my employer would require me to do such a test. It is simply none of their business.

I am actually not aware of any (European) university that would require anyone to take a drug test. In fact, it would be illegal in many countries to do this (or at least, there are very strict rules about the circumstances in which it would be legal).

In the academical sphere, I never heard any similar. I know only Middle Europe, but multiple countries there.

Its reason isn't that the Profs here would be addict, but its exact opposite: it is unthinkable on such a level, that nobody thinks it would be needed.

The wider context:

The long-term mental harms of drugs would make you probably ineligible to fulfill a full-time academical job.

Most of the drugs have a time until they are emptied from your body. You can google for that on the net. After that, the test will be negative. But it would be much better if you wouldn't need such tricks, i.e. you could simply pass the test without any problem.

Employers often have similar traditions, for example they can wish some papers from the police that you aren't an offender.

Considering things like these are in our cultural circles nearly unheard, it is really no more as a tradition. Maybe it could serve as a little positive psychological effect to show for everybody, that your university/company is perfectly "pure". Although knowing, that everybody laughs on this little ritual behind your back, can cause maybe more harm.

I suggest don't play the idealist liberal, allow them this show. They need it for the feeling that they are "clean", it doesn't cost for you anything, and they are your employer. There is no real reason to reject the test.


Is there hard evidence that the grant peer review system performs significantly better than random? Funding agencies in academia use peer review to assess the quality of submitted grant proposals and to decide which proposals should be funded. I have some doubts that this system actually works based on the following findings:

A recent study in PNAS "found no agreement among reviewers in
evaluating the same application".
We have by ourselves performed boot strapping on reviews provided
for the same proposal submitted at multiple calls in multiple years
(yes, the guidelines allowed this) and obtained on average almost exactly the overall average acceptance rate of the calls.

My question is now in the opposite direction ... Given that the grant review and panel system is quite costly: is there hard evidence that the grant peer review system provides results significantly better than random?

E.g. Do studies exist where e.g. 50 proposals were funded based on the standard review process and 50 random proposals were funded at the same call and then 5 or 7 years later the number of high profile papers, citations or similar was counted? Or do studies exist were re-evaluations show the same outcome as the original evaluations of proposals?

No such study exists.

You have to realize that the current model of funding research through grants is rather recent. Fifty years ago, research was funded with recurring credits: a lab/researcher got a fixed amount of money each year to do research as they saw fit. Only applied researchers got industrial grants to develop precise new applications, but this wasn't the core of their funding.

The current system arose due to the combination of two factors:

The growing hegemony of the neo-liberal ideology in the 80s-90s and the commodification of society as a whole. According to this ideology, research as a whole is supposedly more efficient (for an ill-defined notion of "efficient") if researchers compete with one another on the global market of research funding. They will "naturally" tend to research what works in order to keep their funding.
Politicians' will to govern research. Research, and especially fundamental research, is a notoriously difficult thing to govern: you never know where an idea might lead, or what new ideas will come up along the way. You don't know what will work and what won't. You don't know what will be applicable and what will remain a nice theoretical idea. Otherwise it wouldn't be research.
But rulers want their word in this: they want to tell their voters that their policies improved lives in a very direct way as a result of such and such decision they took. This is why words like "governance" and "steering" are becoming more and more prevalent in modern academia: administrators are not in the business of just helping researchers carry out their research, they are in the business of ensuring that researchers are researching what they are supposed to. And how do you force someone to do what you want, short of physical violence? Through economical violence.

Of course, this yields absurd situations, such as the fabled year when the French National Research Agency spent more on administration than on research. And such thinking paves the way for short-term research with zero long term goals, and especially not goals reachable in more than five years (the usual length of "long-term" grants). But these decisions are not driven by rational thought; they are driven by ideology.

I do not know your definition of "hard evidence". But if it has any clause about anything needing to pass peer-review then you should think twice and realize the catch 22 in this situation.

Anyone trying to publish such a thing, do you think they would be afraid of not getting grant next time, maybe? I would not expect them to get renewed grants anytime soon as what they are trying to publish is undermining the influence of how the grants work.


How to cite oneself as co-author without all names, for resume or presentation? My questions regards the format of citation.
For the context: I am a student, presenting my work (with slides) and referring to the publications in which I am co-author (never in the first three authors).

It would be nice for my name to explicitely appear, as I also refer to other publications in which I did not take part.However I do not want to list all the authors (more than 10 for some papers).

Should I use (recommendeed by my advisor):

  A.Smith, M.Myself et al. "Marvelous publication"

Or

  A.Smith et al. (including M.Myself), "Marvelous publication"

My concern is not to appear as being the second author, which would feel like a lie, while keeping a compact formatting.

Is there a common way of doing this ?

Thank you.

For a presentation I would use @Jan Kukacka's answer. Say in the presentation "This work was published in our 2015 paper".

For a resume you've four options as I see it:

List all the authors (put yourself in bold).
List the first x authors (where 10 is a common value of x) then put et al (several journals/funding bodies use this format). Choose x so your name always appears
List all the authors up to and including your name, and then put et al.
List just the first author. As the papers will probably appear in a publications section on your resume, its fairly clear that you are going to be an author.

Which ever you choose, it might be worth including a very short sentence that described your role in the work.

I sticked to the Smith et al. scheme but used a different text color for papers I co-authored together with an explanatory sentence at the beginning.


Doing a PhD at a famous football school: how can I ask for time off to attend games? Consider a famous football school in the U.S., for example Penn State, Michigan, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Auburn, and Ohio State.
I am doing a PhD in a STEM field at one of these schools, and on 6 or 7 Saturdays of the semester, there is a home game for the football team, and I'd like to attend the game and be a part of the tradition.  It's likely an all-day affair, pre-game, going to the game, and more festivities after the game.
My research advisor isn't into sports — at all.  And the expectation is that we're doing work on these Saturdays, while our football stadium nearby is filled with 80,000 or so fans cheering on our team.
Would it be reasonable to ask my advisor for Saturdays off, so that I can participate in our school's football tradition?
How could I go about saying this to him, without upsetting him, or coming off as "unfocused"?
Clarification: Plenty of communication takes place on weekends. My advisor is very intense, micromanages almost, but that style suits me well, and I find his dedication really admirable. But I don't want to miss out on football either; I'm not in graduate school for very long.

It’s a tricky situation and you will want to filter any advice given here (including mine offered below) through your own understanding of the details of the situation and the personalities involved.
That being said, my tentative guess as to the best strategy for handling it is to do two things:

Don’t mention to your advisor your football game attendance plans. It’s your private business what you do on weekends. Simply go about your private business as a normal person does. (And for heavens’ sake don’t “ask for Saturdays off”. You don’t ask for what is rightfully yours.*) Any work can wait until after game day festivities are over. You’re a grad student not an indentured servant.

Work hard and be productive and responsive to your advisor during normal work hours/days (including non-game weekend days if you feel like doing work on those days).

If you do the combination of those two things, I suspect (but cannot be certain) you’ll be fine and your advisor will be completely happy with you, perhaps after an initial adjustment period where you might have to deflect some questions from him about why you didn’t answer some email right away on a Saturday. If that happens you can just say you were busy, had an event to go to, or, if sufficient trust has had time to develop between the two of you, simply tell him the truth (but make sure to state this as a statement of fact, not a request for permission or validation, and not stated in an apologetic tone where you volunteer unnecessary details about why you want to attend football games as you sort of did here).
*
If this is a problem, I’m sorry to have to tell you but you’re in an abusive relationship and you likely should be expecting much bigger problems in your relationship with your advisor than a conflict over attending football games.

This is up to you, I went to a university which had saturday attendence requirements, so one would have to apply for official leave. Probably this is not the case where you are, but I agree if everybody works on Saturdays, it is not good not to come. Personally I would talk to the supervisor tell him you want to see the games and if it is ok to come in on Sunday instead.


A paper I received to review has (independently) duplicated work that we are writing up. How to proceed in light of peer-review confidentiality? I did some research with some collaborators, and we have been writing an article ("paper A") describing the work.

A few days ago I received a request to review an article ("paper B") that covers most of our work. The authors of paper B have clearly worked independently on the same topic and beaten us to submission. (And fair play to them.)

This leads me to a number of related dilemmas:

The first, and I think easiest to resolve, is whether I have a conflict of interest in reviewing paper B. I think I can write a fair review, but I intend to tell the editor and allow them to decide whether I should proceed.

The other dilemmas arise mainly because I am bound by peer-review confidentiality. I should note that paper B is not available as a preprint.

Can tell my co-authors about paper B? I am convinced that confidentiality forbids me from showing paper B to them, but can I tell them that it exists and what it covers? My feeling is that the answer is 'no'.

But then, if I cannot tell my co-authors about paper B, then it seems I have to allow our paper A to proceed to submission even although I know of the overlap with paper B.

I am extremely uncomfortable with this, although one can take the view that since our work was independent, our paper A could still be published.

Furthermore, my first impression is that paper B is not suitable for the general journal to which it was submitted, but that I would recommend acceptance to a high-quality specialist journal, such as the one to which we intended to submit our paper A. This raises an unpleasant prospect: if our paper A proceeds to submission and publication, the authors of paper B might believe that I had rejected their paper and plagarized their work (a situation discussed in this question). This situation could arise even if I turn down the review request. Naturally, I want to avoid this.

How should I proceed? Could I ask the editor for permission to inform my co-authors about paper B?

Your question raises several quite serious ethical questions - thank you for posting it!

From the last part of your question it looks to me that you actually do have a conflict of interest, since you are afraid that what you write in your review may impact your future relations with this research group. I think it is best for you to withdraw from reviewing this manuscript, and fully explain your decision to the editors. I would even consider sending them a draft of your manuscript, if this does not violate your arrangements with other authors.

I am not sure your own paper can not be published. In my area it is not uncommon for two groups to produce similar results almost simultaneously (the second paper is submitted before the first is printed). This does bring some hard discussions sometimes, especially if the ideas are published on arXiv or presented at conferences. However, this does not stop papers from being published. Of course, you should not use anything from paper B to improve your paper A.

To summarise: In my opinion, it's best for you not to study paper B in too much details, withdraw from reviewing it, explain this decision to Editors, and continue working on your paper A.

This is a crucial issue with peer review. These are some suggestions, which are much pertinent in an era of open peer review and ongoing accountability.

First, DO NOT REVIEW the manuscript. Whatever your final decision would be, you could be strongly criticized for your revision as you cannot provide an independent review. In addition, your ongoing research project would be tarnished irremediably.

Second, proceed with submitting your work as it stands or doing whatever you now deem appropriate to improve it, but remember that you will always be liable to criticism by the authors of the manuscript (in the ideal scenario you should have turned down the invitation without even reading the abstract).

Third, do not tell any of your colleagues. I know this is largely unrealistic, but this is what the authors of the other manuscript would feel appropriate and demand.

You were indeed unlucky, but eventually the scholarly literature will reward the best paper. My more personal suggestion is though to aim for a mid-tier journal, in order to make sure your paper is considered and published well before the other has reached the scholarly literature.