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If I submit a poster to ICDE, can I submit the full version of paper to another conference?
I received an opportunity to make a poster submission to ICDE, i.e. IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering. I want to know if I submitted the poster, can I submit the full version of paper, with almost the same content, but much extended, to another conference?
I found a similar question, but I look forward to a detailed answer for my specific question. That question discusses the general case for Computer Science. Its answer says for different domain, the rule is different. I hope to know the rule for ICDE, because the deadline is 4 days later and I have to make a decision on whether submitting the poster. If submitting the poster will disable me to submit the full paper to another conference, then I will cancel the submission. Otherwise I will make the poster submission.
Thank you all for helping me!

It's not clear what details you think are missing from the answer to the similar question?

@ff524 I have edited and added the detailed missing information to the question. Thanks.

If you are not sure whether poster submissions in this conference are published in the proceedings (i.e. which of the cases enumerated in the linked answer applies), check the conference website or ask the organizers. If you don't know the novelty policies of the conference you plan to submit the full version too (which also matter, as per those answers), check their websites or ask organizers. Otherwise, I don't see how that answer fails to address your question. (We don't answer questions about individual conferences here - see the [help/on-topic], bottom section.)


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No publication after doing a postdoc
I am currently a postdoc at one of Europe's universities. I have a grant that covers my postdoc position (1.5 years) and it's coming to an end soon. I have been working with one member of the research group on a research topic. Since the last year, I have been encountering many problems and I want to list a few of them here:

There is no direct contact between me and the head of our research group (PI). This makes the ongoing progress of the project very slow. This is also due to wrong decisions taken by the member whom I am working with. The overall environment is not that healthy.

Since I am coming from abroad, I'm facing a little bit of racism (not so much). He considers that we are slow and not good enough to do research. That's what he thinks! Anyhow, you know, things like that lead to lack of interest or to demotivation to work.

During our meeting to present results, the PI takes decisions to do some study or calculations, and after doing so, I present the new results and he says that such calculations are useless. It happened many times and I don't know why he requests them in the first place! In this way, I lose more time and cannot make any progress. Until last week, I worked for months on some calculations that he requested, to which he replied: "Why did you do such calculations?"

My postdoc experience so far has been really bad. To be honest, I didn't think it would be like this since I had a good experience during my PhD. Now, it's totally different. In my point view, there is no clear path for my research project in the first place. I mean, everything we wrote in the research proposal for the grant is not being implemented by any means.
Until now, I have no publication and I am concerned. Will this have a negative impact on my CV and on finding a new postdoc (a postdoc without a publication)?.
I am always doing what is requested of me, because at the end I need at least a good recommendation letter. I am really frustrated on what to do because working under the supervision of someone (that member of our research group) who is not experienced isn't really helpful and at the same time, frankly speaking, my PI is really careless. I would really appreciate your considerate answers.

There is no question in the question. It's hard to provide answers in such cases :-)

OP says they are frustrated on what to do. So I think the implied question is "What should I do?"

I think your number one priority should be finding a graceful way to get out of this group, since it is not a good fit for you. I wouldn't advise quitting without having alternative employment, so this advice boils down to... you need to find a new job. In fact, independent of the toxic environment you find yourself in, you really need to find a new job, since it sounds like you have less than 6 months before the end of your current contract.
If you want to stay in academia, then this means you should apply for more postdoc positions (or, if you feel ready, faculty positions... but it sounds like you don't think you are ready). The application season is now, so you should be applying yesterday! There is not much you can do about your publication record at this point, given your timescale. Obviously, it would be better if you had more papers, but I don't think you should assume this makes you un-hire-able, and I think you should apply and see what happens. After all, your postdoc has not been so long. In your cover letter and research statement, discuss projects that are ongoing, and how you can move them forward in a new postdoc. If you should end up interviewing anywhere, do not say anything negative about your current position. Focus on the research that excites you that you want to do.
Longer term (once you are secure in a new position), to avoid falling into this situation again, you need to develop your own internal sense of what papers you want to write and what you need to do to get that work finished. While ideally you will have a good working relationship with your advisor, especially as a postdoc, (a) your advisor is generally expecting you to drive your own research, and (b) your academic career depends on you developing a research profile that you carry with you to different institutions. Unfortunately, this may mean you need to stand up to intimidating bosses, if you feel they are giving you tasks that are not helping you achieve your research goals. It's not easy to say no to people with power over you, and it helps to also learn finesse in dealing with these situations. But, fundamentally, you need to take responsibility for the success of your research.
You may also want to seriously consider non-academic options. I'm saying this from the perspective that you should keep all of your options open, and I am not trying to imply I don't think you can get a new postdoc position. If your contract ends in 6 months -- and assuming you can't and/or don't want to try to extend it -- then working now to make sure you have as many options as possible before your contract ends, will help you make the best decision for yourself. The academic job market is finicky.
Best of luck, I know this can be a very difficult situation.

Thank you so much Andrew for your detailed answer. Much appreciated!

While I agree with most of this answer, it seems very optimistic about OP's long-term career prospects in academia, specifically the encouragement to look for another post-doc. My concern is that OP would now need a postdoc with strong track-record building opportunities, and after the first post-doc ended with a weak track record, the chances of securing that seem low.

My concern would be relaxed if there were many examples of individuals who had an unproductive first post-doc, followed by a very successful second one. In my field, I don't know any such examples.

@lighthousekeeper On the one hand, I don't want to discourage the OP from pursuing an academic career, since I read their question as implying they would like to stay in academia. If that's their number one choice, then I think applying for postdocs is the best strategy. On the other hand, I agree that an academic career might just not work out -- hence, I suggested should also consider non-academic jobs. I am intentionally avoiding commenting on what outcome I think is more or less likely, since many factors can play into this, that wasn't the question, and IMO this is up for the OP to judge.

@Naps In case I worded things too optimistically and wasn't clear, just to follow up on lighthouse keeper's comments, while I think (if you want to stay in academia) you should not give up and you should apply for postdocs, I really think you should also seriously think about applying to non-academic jobs, for your own benefit. It is very possible that you won't get a postdoc and you won't have a lot of time left in your contract to figure out what to do if you don't get a second postdoc offer, if you wait to consider non-academic positions until you get to that point.

Since "what to do" was already answered, I'll try to give a few ideas about why this could be happening. I would do so in form of an overly detailed hypothesis with little basis in provided facts, and several or all points might be untrue, but I hope you would still find it useful as a perspective different from your own.
So, let's imagine your PI expects you to be significantly self-sufficient. They say people from country X are bad workers, but that is not necessarily racism - they say it with the same intonation about the graduates of the university down the street. They know their approaches/background/habits don't mix too well.
Let us also imagine the PI has a knack for bouncing their ideas off people, so when they come to a meeting and try to figure out what to do next they throw in some ideas - however, when it comes to acting upon them, what they'd do (and expect you to do as well) is to give it a good ponder and possibly do something entirely different.
What I'm getting at is that this whole situation sounds like a gigantic communication issue, and the gut feeling tells me it comes from mismatched expectations: your PI expects you to actively exercise your creative freedom and push back on tasks you find not that fruitful after considering them for a while more than the meeting format allows, all while you seem to think your PI is your boss and you're expected to do as they say. One reason you might be perceived as a bad worker is not because a good one would do the same tasks faster but because they would ignore/refuse those tasks and do something else instead. This is well-known in the industry (customers don't know what they want or at least express something entirely different when requesting features), but in academia can get extra weird.
So my advice is: yes, quit this group, find a new one like Andrew said etc etc... But in the future, pay more attention to what the expectations are and find examples of someone living up to them. People are notoriously bad at spelling out what they actually want, and you might find that you tried to work hard but ended up being too diligent for your own good.

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(Author Date) inline citations vs anonymous references with ISO 690
I am trying to use the the Czech language ISO 690 style in the (Author Year) variant. However, citing anonymous references seems unsatisfactory. I am getting just "(ANON. 2016)". That gives almost zero identification information.
How do people deal with this?
I was thinking of modifying the style and using ("Title" Year) instead, when neither author nor editor nor translator nor interviewer is available.

ISO 690 is rather unambiguous about this (section 5.6. "Anonymous works"):

For  anonymous  works  cited  by  the  name  and  date  system  (see
  A.2),  “Anon”  may  be  used  instead  of  a creator's name. For
  anonymous works cited by the numeric system (see A.3) or running notes
  (see A.4), the title may be treated as the first element. If the
  creator's name is known, it may be supplied.

If your publication venue requires you to use ISO 690 with name-date, you really don't have any choice here. After all, consistency is why journals etc. require you to follow a citation/publication style.

As per appendix A.2, you can distinguish different anonymous works from the same year by appending letters: (Anon., 2016a) vs. (Anon., 2016b). This is standard in Harvard style derivatives.

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Academic integrity problem in PhD proposal to reuse ideas/ self-plagiarize?
Is there any integrity/plagiarism issue if I use ideas I developed/argued in my master's essays and dissertation in the PhD proposal? Can I do this? What can I do to prevent potential problems?
Edit: none of those essays or dissertation are published, if this helps clarifying. So even that they're not published, I should cite myself as I would with published work?

Cite the master thesis.

See this question about self plagiarism in the PhD thesis, and this question about reusing thesis proposal material. As also commented in the answers for these questions: ask your advisor first.

You may use the ideas for your PhD proposal. Ideas, unless patented, are free and can be passed between people, projects, institutions, etc.
However, do make sure that the source of the original idea is attributed. Particularly when other people contributed to the ideas, attribution is due (from an ethical point of view).
This might be done in the following way: 'I propose to investigate the method that was developed by my supervisor , my lab partner , and myself, described in my master thesis [reference], in the following way ...'
I would certainly advise to reference your master thesis (even if it is not publicly available), since it is a perfect source where the ideas can be found in an elaborate written form.

I don't see any problem with it as long as:

Ideas in your Master's essays and dissertation are truly your ideas. If your Master's supervisor was a substantial contributor to the development of those ideas, you could run into issues.
Your Master's ideas should ideally have been substantiated by researchers outside if your group (in the form of citations or similar work).
You've asked your Master's supervisor if you can pitch expanding on your Master's work as part of your proposal.

Best to check all the angles at this stage, than deal with a very big headache later.

Since when do you need your Master's supervisor's permission to extend your own Master's thesis? Why would you need anyone's permission to extend any published work? Give credit (cite!!) where credit is due, but I don't see the need for permission.

If you're looking to conserve academic integrity, and the PhD supervisor is different than the Masters supervisor. Extending work in a new research group based on work done in a previous group would benefit from a conversation. Citations are just the baseline and go without saying. Can you imagine if there was intellectual property issues that came up during this scenario? Sophia is just starting the PhD. There is no reason not to mention it to their Master's supervisor as a bare minimum.

Citations should never go without saying. They must be done, but people have to be told to do them. I don't see a problem with having a conversation, but most of the time, I can't see needing permission, especially for published work.

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What are the steps to establish an academic journal?
We want to establish a journal. Also I want to add the journal to various indexes. What are the main steps /guide to building an academic journal? What should be done to enter the SCI/SCIe/SSCI index. What is the difference between ISBN, ISSN, DOI numbers. I'm not interesting basic steps like deciding topic, name ,reviewers and editors of journal. It would be nice if you mentioned about the application/reference prices.
Note:This question might be broad so I can narrow this topic in the direction of your suggestions/comments

We have enough journals. It's better quality articles that would be welcomed.

I think that much more important than technicalities, like DOI, ISSN, etc, is the ability to attract articles that are of interest for your prospective readers. To get authors who can write such articles to publish them in your foreseen journal, you need a broad network in the respective scientific community, and to convince them that there is a need for a new journal, e.g. because a certain niche is being underserved.
I would say that the start of a new journal is rooted in discussing this on relevant conferences, and getting the support of key scientific leaders within the target community.


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Usage of Videos or Images from Youtube/ Google-images as data source
I'm working on a deep neural network research application Does usage of youtube videos or google images as data source cause a sharing-data, ethical, copyright or commercial problem? The aim of the usage of these data is only academic research. Maybe we can neglect google-images because of there are many free image data set. But we need youtube videos because of time and cost. Instead of sharing data in the article, is sufficient to write: "this study uses top 10(or more) search results for keyword search on youtube/google". There are lots of machine learning examples that learn from google like https://www.pyimagesearch.com/2017/12/04/how-to-create-a-deep-learning-dataset-using-google-images/

One important aspect is that both Google and Youtube search results are personalized and change with time, so others might find it difficult to reproduce your results. This can probably be solved by keeping a copy of the training set, and being prepared to share it, but it's worth considering if another source would be more stable.

@Anyon, keeping and sharing is precisely what may not be allowed under copyright law. Giving the time of access is enough to establish validity. In fact any cited reference to the internet should similarly be dated (and timed) as websites can change and you don't have control over that. If results depend on one specific data set then they have little true scientific merit in any case.

See Copyright – use of images to train algorithm

@Anyon : It is a good point. The customization of the data according to the personal search will not create a problem in terms of the study aim because the study will only reveal the theory of such an application. We are not looking for a commercial performance or standard. A few different algorithms will be compared and only prove of a working system.

@Buffy Your point about the legal matters is well taken. To what extent the specific data matters will of course depend on the details of the study, and the nature of the reported results. For sufficiently qualitative work it might not matter much at all.

I think this depends on more than what you state here. In particular, it depends on what you intend to do with the data you analyze and how you intend to present it. If you copy/replicate/publish the material, then you need to deal with copyright as anyone would. But if you are only extracting naturally anonymous information from it you should have no problem. Your suggestion that you "reference" your dataset not by providing a copy of it, but by giving (with the date of access) the search terms that generate it, you should be fine.
As an example, if you are researching how many people pass by a certain street corner on a given Tuesday, you can gather the counts without getting "informed consent" from everyone that passes. No issues there. But if you intend to publish, somehow, the names (or images, or other information) of those people then it is a completely different story. You will need to judge where on that spectrum your study lies. I think you can even categorize things in the aggregate as long as you don't label individual items with your categories. To say that "60% of the videos we examine have blue backgrounds" is benign. Even saying "40% of the videos in our sample present conservative positions" is fine, as long as you don't "name names" and point fingers. (I am not a lawyer, of course.)
If you were in the US, then your IRB would give you guidance on this. In your country there may be institutional rules to guide you. You should seek those out. But generally, the "academic use" exceptions to copyright that were in place in the past have been fading out as copyright holders try, usually successfully, to extend their control over the culture. Not a good thing, but the law can be used against you.

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Is it common for a postdoc to develop the whole commercial systems on his own for his supervisor's industrial customer
If a postdoc has strong coding technique, can he be assigned to develop commercial systems from the scratch on his own, including user requirement developing, model design, algorithm design, GUI and database design, system realization and testing, and deployment? You know, a postdoc is usually paid less than industrial employees, it results in relatively lower costs of the system than software companies.
At the same time, is it possible to publish?

Depends a lot on the exact application built. On the surface, it seems a waste of talent (but it might not be). It also depends on the funding for the postdoc, if it isn't from the software house, this could be taken as essentially misappropriation. And the result will probably be forbidden to be published by the client, and, unless it is something revolutionary, not publishable anyway.

Related: Is it ethical for a professor to get masters students to work on open source modules related to the professor's profit-making company?

As vonbrand mentions, whether the postdoc legally can be assigned to a customer project really depends on the funding source. For instance, we have recently explicitly hired a postdoc to lead a transfer project (essentially a "development project" that will hopefully end in a real product). The funding we use allows and supports this so I see no issues at all. Of course, if we used money that was given to us for some other cause (e.g., to conduct some fundamental research) it would be a different story.
However, I have the impression that the issue here is something else entirely. Notably, I suspect that the OP got hired under the pretense of a regular postdoc (i.e., on a position that is usually considered a stepping stone for a professorship) and is now pushed into what is essentially an industry development job due to her/his specific skills. Such situations are not uncommon in industry - people get reassigned to different roles based on changing company needs all the time. However, in academia, this (while maybe legal) is a rather shady move. Given how competitive academia is, there are strong career implications in working for a substantiated time in a specific role that does not progress the metrics that are typically required for the next career step (publications and acquired funding, typically).
As such, the OP should definitely discuss her/his career plan with whoever wants her/him to work on this customer project, and decide whether these career goals are consistent with the management goals of the lab. In the worst case, a move to a different lab may be a better option than working on a project that ends up a negative factor in the career progression.

You know, a postdoc is usually paid less than industrial employees, it results in relatively lower costs of the system than software companies.

I am not sure whether this is correct (I certainly make more than many entry-level professionals), but anyway it does not seem to be the important issue here.

At the same time, is it possible to publish?

Maybe? This is impossible for us to tell from the outside. But anyway, the question should not be "can I publish anything at all?", but rather "how much less am I publishing, and how much weaker are my scientific contributions, because I work on this product rather than on my science? Essentially, what are the opportunity costs in terms of scientific productivity for working in a developer role?


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Second PhD in Astro after a PhD in CMT (Physics)
Okay here is the current situation. I am entering my second year in my PhD program and most of my options of joining the Theoretical astrophysics groups are closed ( no professors working in that field and two of them who were working are leaving the university). Right now the only open option for me is to work in computational condensed matter theory which I am not sure I am interested in (But I do know that given a option between this and theoretical astro I would choose the latter) ie.. interest in Astro theory >> Interest in CMT. okay given this background the questions are,
1) what are the cons of doing another PhD in astro after completing my PhD in CMT (let us say it would take me 5 years here to complete my PhD and if I am applying to an university in UK for my second PhD I would complete it in 3 years so in total i would have spent around 8 years with 2 PhD's in my hand) cons ?
2) I know most of you would ask me to just reapply to other schools, But I am not sure how certain I am in getting an admission again and I dont want this entire two years here to go waste ( just 3 of more years I would have my PhD). So my second question is it even possible to get a PhD position in Europe after having PhD in US ?
So basically my reason for second PhD is not for a better career path, but instead to shift to my area of interest but as well as to not let these 2 years of my life go waste. Is it a good choice to make ?
Edit 1- I did read all the answers for double PhD questions but all the questions were in the line of "I want a better job/career, should I do double PhD?" mine is, "Let us say I complete my current PhD, is there any disadvantage of doing another one just because I would love to work in that field?"
PS: Yes I am working in US university right now, and yup as I am in my second year I have completed few course work and started the project. Rather than saying I "have to complete this PhD", I would put it this way - "I don't hate the work I am doing here, it is just that I would like working in the other field much more than this"
Edit 2- Thanks for the helpful answers. Let me explain my personal bias towards astrophysics. I am a math person by nature, and previously had my undergraduate in engineering.I wanted to move to physics mainly because of the rigorous mathematical structure of it compared to engineering, I self studied several physics stuff and hence wanted to do theoretical physics. But later (now) my views about theoretical physics is changing. On the whole this is what I think is the timeline chart in theoretical physics area apart from Astro) -
Experimentalists collect data of physical world
Theorists build model to explain the data
The new theory might lead experimentalists to further prob the physical world to test the theory
If it does, verify that theory, if not inform the theorist
Theorist then builds a new (or modify the old model) to explain the existing results.
So at the end of the day theorists keep on modifying their model until it agrees with all the experiments. At the end of the day, this is just model building/modifying till my theory fits the data(this creates a bound purpose to building the theory unlike mathematics). But in Astro, since there are very few experiments to verify, the set of all possible theories is large and theorists in this field actually have the freedom to keep on building theories(or models) to explain. And it is this abstract nature of this field (which is analogous to mathematics) where one needs no reason to build theory other than building it just for the fun of it interests me. These are my personal thoughts about general theoretical physics and the reason I want to move to Astro.

As answered multiple times on this forum: Are 2 PhDs a good idea? NO, NO and NO.

You can work on what you enjoy in theoretical physics and also in computational condensed matter theory, since for most computational approaches one doesn't need a full theoretical background. I know one guy who have done this, and now he has an interdisciplinary thesis in physics, he has published a paper in Phys.Rev. D single author on what he was interested in, and also with the topic he was given. However, for this you need an open minded supervisor.

@Alexandros Yup I did read all the answers for double PhD's but all the questions related to those were " I want a better job/career, should I do double PhD?" mine is, "I have no option than to complete my PhD, is there any disadvantage of doing another one just because I would love to work in that field?"

@MikeyMike In fact I was talking to one of my fellow friend who is in the same position as me, and he is sure he can be motivated enough to do both at the same time. In a scale of 10 I would say am 8-9 sure that's what at-least am going to try and do ! Just started the work with my professor and he is pretty chill, so I guess I would be able to publish pure theory too. ! (at least hope to ! )

"he is sure he can be motivated enough to do both at the same time" -- that does not mean he will actually succeed in doing both PhDs to an adequate standard

@YemonChoi I meant he is motivated to study independently both topics during his PhD tenure but do only one PhD.

Don't plan on doing two PhD for all the reasons in the comments.
Whether to stay and throw yourself fully into the best and most active and dynamic CMT group (try to be a CMT star for goodness sakes)  or leave for another university depends on being honest with yourself about your reasons for choosing one over the other. (Is it 'liking' to call yourself an astrophysicist? ) Intellectually - they are both fascinating fields. You will find the smartest of the smart in either.
You talk about losing work, but did not mention being involved in any research projects with either of the astrophysics faculty who are leaving. If you had, they likely would be already talking to you about whether a plan could be put in place to help you finish your project somehow.
It wasn't clear if you were in UK or US. In the US- those 2 years are typically core courses and preparation for the qualifiers. If so, those core courses will transfer pretty easily to any similar department, and if you did stellar in them, will probably make it easier to get into a department that matches your interests. You will not have to take the core again and in particular, the pressure will be that you should hit the ground running and  get involved in a significant way in a project (even if you have less time because you are supported initially on TA instead of RA). If you can pass the qualifier will be the main issue.
As an additional note - most faculty understand if a student wants to switch schools because the subfield of interest is not represented. They will write recommendation letters without qualms and wish you the best.

Thanks for the helpful answer. Let me explain my personal bias towards astrophysics. I am a math person, and previously had my undergraduate in engineering. I self studied several physics stuff and liked the rigorous application of math in it and wanted to do theoretical physics. But later (now) my views about theoretical physics is changing. (since it is too long for comments I have posted the reason as an edit in the question)


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Is it ethical/acceptable to give a lighter penalty to students who admit to cheating?
I am at the moment dealing with an academic dishonesty incident in a class I'm teaching (a few groups of students submitting identical code, when the class policy forbids getting help from another person on a graded assignment).
When I noticed indications of plagiarism, I emailed each affected student something along the lines of:

The code you submitted is nearly identical to another student's work. Can you comment on this?

Their reactions mainly fall into three categories:

"I made a mistake and I take full responsibility for it, I hope you will let me make it up but I understand if you can't."
"I talked about the assignment with another student, but I didn't copy anyone's code." But then when I inform them they're getting a zero grade for the assignment, they don't argue.
"I didn't do it! You can't give me a zero grade for the assignment when I didn't cheat, I refuse to accept a zero grade."

Assuming I have evidence that all of these students cheated, is there a good reason to adjust the penalty based on whether students own up to their misconduct, or continue to lie about it?
On the one hand, I appreciate honesty, and doubling down on a lie seems like something that should be punished. On the other hand, I've never heard of anyone adjusting penalties like this, so I'm wondering if there's some reason I shouldn't.
It's also not clear to me what the relative difference in penalties should be, if there is one. I thought about it and it's hard for me to come up with one penalty that's appropriate for Group 1, another penalty that's appropriate for Group 2, and a third penalty that's appropriate for Group 3.
I would very much appreciate answers based on research and/or experience with policies like this, rather than just opinion.
(My school has no official policy on the matter.)

How many students are affected? We usually summoned cheating students to discuss the matter - for education and to decide further actions (e.g. to consider student's hard personal problems).

One thing which was rampant on my university was the stealing (and sharing with friends) of assignments other students made. So there may be actually 1 student who didn't copy.

Is this an undergrad course?

This is a really interesting question, that might be relevant to many. However I can't help thinking that it is essentially very subjective and in the end opinion-based, as it is unlikely that there is one right answer, or that one can flat-out reject a well written answer on the basis of being wrong. I suggest an edit to the title, and punchline question, for rephrasing as "Is it ethical to give lighter penalty..."

This question can be spun differently: "Is it ethical to give a higher penalty to students who lie about cheating after they are caught?"  At some universities (not mine), the lie would be a second violation of academic integrity policies.

How do you "prove" who copied whom?

You should strongly encourage your school to adopt a policy. Policy is a tool which allows you to spend your valuable time thinking about interesting things rather than making everyone have to solve this irritating problem from scratch over and over again, inconsistently.

I would suggest to you that your existing policy of assigning zero for the assignment is far too lenient. Compare a student who cheats to a student who doesn't hand in the assignment at all; are you saying that they are of equal value?  The policy of the CS department at Waterloo when I was an undergrad was an automatic negative 100% on any assignment where students were caught cheating for the first offense.

This is way I think it is best that students are each interviews on their answer having to explain how and why their answer works in programming causes.   Unless the code is very long, it is very possible they did not all cheat.    They may just have read the same coding standard documents…

I seems like in case 2) you assume that the student is guilty and therefore knows arguing will not help him/her. However, you should consider two cases: First, you could be wrong, especially because the person denies sharing code, but admits discussing it. Code can be very similar after discussion (but it does not have to be; infrequent, but identical variable names are a good sign). Second, some students will not talk back to a professor/instructor, out of respect - This is no sign of being guilty/not guilty.

It seems possible (though unlikely) that the student claiming not to have cheated is telling the truth.  Alice writes some code.  Bob copies the code without Alice's knowledge (lots of ways that can happen).  Bob shares code/talks with Charlie.  Three identical assignments, one innocent student.  In high school a misconfiguration network share allowed another student to view/copy my code without any intervention from myself.  Naturally we both received zeros for cheating.

Actually, I even think it wouldn't be a very smart student after getting a punishment to still argue with the instructor: Hopefully, the instructor thought about this and will not change his mind easily. So either you escalate it or you drop it. But would point would arguing be? The instructor will only react negatively if you do not have any new facts.

@PieterB If I do not have evidence that a student copied or deliberately shared code, I can't punish the students. Here I am dealing with the case where I do have such evidence.

@CGCampbell Yes, undergrad course

@leonardo In this case, I have incontrovertible evidence of misconduct for the students whom I am giving a zero grade. (However, I don't necessarily tell them what that evidence is until they raise an objection.)

@starsplusplus In this case I am punishing students only if I can determine, based on the timeline of submissions and their actions as preserved in the logs of the lab infrastructure, that they either copied code or shared their own code (outside of the lab). Both copying and deliberately sharing code are forbidden.

@Ian I have evidence from validation server logs, etc. that these students did, in fact, cheat. Furthermore, reading the same coding standard documents would not result in students having identical non-standard whitespace, identical comments orphaned from the code they go along with, etc.

@dirkk There is no reason that discussing code would lead five students to have identical highly unusual non-standard whitespace patterns, or the same misplaced comments orphaned from the line of code they are talking about. (We are talking about some character-for-character identical submissions here.)

@RobP. In this case, if Alice put the code on the lab infrastructure first and it's possible that Bob copied it without her permission, I told Alice that if I did have such evidence she would get a zero grade, but since I don't, I am grading her submission normally.

@ff524 aw, I forgot half my sentence there. With "infrequent, but identical variable names are a good sign" I meant this to be a sign that they did in fact cheat. Of course, the same applies to the reasons you gave. By the way, did you try to find the solutions online - Maybe they didn't cheat from one another, but instead online. This would be nice as proof and to confront the students.

Just wondering how identical is "identical". After all, if you set a "hello world" task, you're going to get a lot of very similar responses. Or you'd hope so.

@ff524 - This system sounds more like the concept of religious confessions. First you do bad stuff and then repent or pretend to repent for it. Lighter sentence is a loophole.

class policy forbids getting help from another person. This sounds realistic. Why would we want developers who learn from each other when we can graduate a fleet of independent who're incapable of function in real work environments? /s

@AMomchilov In a realistic scenario I would get to fire an employee who consistently gets other people to do their work for them and don't know how to do it themselves, but I don't get to do that in my classroom. So I limit help on easy assignments that students should be able to do themselves, and encourage collaboration on big projects instead.

@ff524, Oh okay, that seems reasonable.

TL; DR: We adjust the penalty.
I sit on my department's Academic Misconduct Committee so unfortunately I see a lot of these cases. The University policy has created two similarly sounding, but different terms: academic misconduct and poor academic practice, with academic misconduct being much more severe than poor academic practice. Every student suspected of having engaged in poor academic practice is called into a meeting with the Academic Misconduct Committee. This committee looks at the evidence supporting academic misconduct/poor practice and hears the student's case which generally includes what training they have had about good academic practice, how the incident happened, and any evidence of extenuating circumstances (e.g., death in the family).
Based on this process we can come to one of 3 decisions:

not poor academic practice,
poor academic practice,
academic misconduct.

If we decide that they did not engage in poor academic practice, the incident is essentially purged from the system. If the student is called in again in the future, we do not nominally know that they had been called in before. If we decide that it was poor academic practice, the students are warned and it is documented. We are not allowed to apply formal penalties in the case of poor academic practice. If they are called in again we know from the documentation and are unlikely to give them the benefit of the doubt a second time.
If we decide that academic misconduct has occurred we can apply one of a number of different penalties to the work: no reduction of the mark, remark the work with the offending material removed or reduce the mark commensurate with the misconduct (anywhere from a 5% penalty to a 0 for the piece of work). A second incident of academic misconduct results in the penalty being decided on by a university panel and starts with a zero for the class and can go as high as a zero for the year. In this way there is a big difference between poor academic practice and academic misconduct with no reduction in the mark since poor academic practice does not count as a first offense.
Within this framework the committee is faced with how to handle the students who admit the issue and the ones who deny the issue. Those who argue they didn't cheat and have no explanation as to how their assignment matches another's work are almost always found guilty of academic misconduct since they are not willing to help us create a case for poor academic practice. More often than not they receive a 0 since we have no evidence that mitigates the penalty. For students who admit what they did, we often consider poor academic practice as an outcome since they describe what they did and realize it was wrong. Sometimes the offense is too blatant to let off without a reduction, but generally saying what you did wrong and how you will not let it happen again reduces the penalty.

We adjust the penalty. - I would agree. Look at the legal system as a whole. Plead guilty, get a lighter sentence. Not that much difference.

@WernerCD but in this case it is very different. It is not a plea bargain. It is much more like the defendant looking and sounding remorseful and getting a lighter sentence, or even being found not guilty.

I think it's very similar. Guilty, Not Guilty, No Contest, etc. First offense, repeat offender, similar offenses, etc. Those plea's determine what punishments are on the table. Plead not guilty to murder? Possibility of Death. Plead guilty? Most severe punishments off the table. Honesty and willingness to learn should play into "real" justice.

This is very interesting, especially as it might apply to students who try to cover up the plagiarism before submitting code (changing the port number, debug output like "Begin here" to "Start here", etc.)

Of course this does create the perverse incentive to admit to things you haven't done. Although most country's legal systems have the same issue

An important possibly deserving further emphasis: failure to own up to an offense de facto means the student is unable to provide evidence for the lighter sentence, which means in many ways the committee isn't applying a harsher penalty: the students are just shooting themselves in the foot.

Wow.  These are super-lenient punishments.  At my university, if you were caught cheating or plagiarizing, you had to have a disciplinary hearing, where you'd either have the entire course failed/removed or be expelled.

We have a one strike policy without any chance of being re-admitted to any program ever again.

What are the specific allowable penalties for "poor academic practice"?

@RobertColumbia none. We could not apply a penalty without also causing a second offense to be decided on by the university panel.

@RobertColumbia I think that is a good analogy, but by the time you got called in, you generally did something bad and where hoping just not to get a zero. Not poor practice was reserved for cases like I asked my roommate to hand in my paper and they copied it.

Depending on the response, you could punish subsequent lies. If someone cheats, gets a punishment. When confronted about that, if they recognize it, you don't take further action. But, if they give you a blatantly false explanation, they may get punished for it.
A (sadly) real case example: one student submitted exactly the same report than a previous one. When confronted about it, he claimed that he had done it, but when generating the PDF, it was somehow transformed in the other student's report, with only the name changed. This is being caught in a lie and try to avoid it treating the instructor as stupid.
Adding some research: Wikipedia links a paper where some subjects were falsely accused of academic cheating and offer a lenient punishment if they recognised the fact. 56% of them plead guilty to avoid the risk of bigger punishment.

The funny thing is I've seen some pretty bad PDF smashup from a Citrix server with a bad print spooler.

Here is a criminal justice perspective (I have not had to deal with such egregious situations in the classroom.)
The motivation for punishment generally falls under the philosophies of retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation & restoration. The US's penal law system is based on retribution; that is you've committed a wrong against society, and it is societies duty to exact a punishment somehow equivalent to that wrong. My experience is people tend to frame the motivation for punishment de facto in retributive terms, even if it is not really appropriate for the situation.
All institutions I have been associated with have official committees that evaluate student misconduct - and cheating is their main calling. Assuming such a committee exists in your school, you should report the students behavior and it should be clear in your syllabus that is the consequence of cheating.
It is likely the said committee will cover any retributive actions necessary to fulfill any harms to society, so the question then becomes what do you do to the students in response to the behavior? This depends on your goals of the punishment to begin with. I strongly feel your role should not be to exact further retribution beyond what the schools official academic policy calls for - so that leaves deterrence, rehabilitation & restoration. (If you even have discretion at this point beyond your schools official policy for cheating.)
Studies in criminal justice tend to find that the severity of punishment is only weakly linked to deterrence - the probability of being caught is a much stronger influence on whether the student will commit the behavior. Pretty much any sort of note to the individual student that you caught them cheating will likely prevent future cheating. Even absent of punishment, this is a strong signal that their probability of being caught is high. My limited experience just letting students know "Your homework looks an awfully lot like the student who sits next to you." - effectively ended that behavior (although your situation is clearly beyond that point.) So you need not be worried about "letting them off the hook" (especially if they have been referred to the student misconduct panel).
Assuming letting the student know they have been caught is common-place, that then just leaves rehabilitation and/or restoration. Punishments oriented towards these perspectives often go hand in hand. One immediate example that comes to mind is to have the offending students lead a classroom discussion on the material they cheated on (this would be better for only one or two students though). Others may be extra-curricular activities, especially those that give back to the rest of the class (e.g. make them host a study session). Public shaming is an incredibly strong deterrent, e.g. just making them stand up in front of the class and admit their wrong-doing, but I am not sure if this violates other privacy mandates about grades and such things. (Restorative justice on its face may seem awkward since it is a victimless crime, but that doesn't make the potential punishments I suggest here any less reasonable.)
Anyway it is preferable that in the future to be very specific in your syllabus about what will happen. Otherwise it appears ad-hoc and can be construed as prejudiced toward any particular student.

In terms of relation to "admitting a wrong" - this philosophically should not have any bearing on the punishment that the offender receives. It is unfortunate a few conflations are being presented here in terms of plea bargaining - which is really a negative externality of the criminal justice system and the need to triage. When you plea bargain you concede to receiving a punishment for a lesser crime - you don't even have to admit you did anything wrong (e.g. you can plead "no contest").
The significance of admitting a wrong though is often placed on the other end of the system. It is often a requirement of parole that the offender admit their wrongdoing in front of the board before they are granted parole. In terms of restorative justice a key event is often just placing the offender in front of the victim and having the offender admit their wrong-doing. (Cooperation tends to be higher for offenders than you might expect - typically victims have a lower rate of cooperation.)

All institutions I have been associated with have official committees that evaluate student misconduct - In my university, a specific range of penalties (localized to the course) may be imposed by the professor at his/her discretion without involving the academic dishonesty committee. The student can then appeal to this committee if they want.

Same here, except that I am also required to report all infractions in my classes to the committee (to detect serial cheaters, and as a sanity check against egregious penalties).

A more international perspective based on criminal justice: here in the UK, it is an accepted part of criminal sentencing guidelines that sentences are reduced for an early admission.  Our system is more based on punishment as a method of encouraging rehabilitation rather than for retribution, and admission is taken as a sign that the process of rehabilitation has already begun.  That it also simplifies the job of the courts is a (somewhat intentional) side-effect of this.  We don't have plea bargaining, nor do we allow "no contest" pleas.  I believe this is somewhat typical of most of Europe.

@Jules - prison itself is only associated with retribution (rehabilitation is associated with specific treatment(s) - prison not being one of them). I wouldn't claim to be an expert on international penology, but on its face the thing that most separates the US system from its counterparts in Europe is the length of sentences, not any bureaucratic label for the motivation of punishment.

@AndyW The UK specifically introduced the notion that prison is intended to be rehabilitative quite a long time ago now -- in fact, it is one of the earliest divergences between UK & US legal history, having been introduced by the Penitentiary Act 1779.  See: http://www.politics.co.uk/reference/prison-rehabilitation

@Jules - we may be talking at a bit of a crossroads here. How exactly does prison encourage rehabilitation?   The Pennsylvania system could be said to be motivated by rehabilitation - but there was obviously no evidence of its efficacy (and plenty since to suggest solitary confinement makes people insane). I don't doubt you can find references to rehabilitation on paper, but that does not make it representative of reality. This is getting a bit far-flung from the original question though at this point.

I don't like this practice for two reasons. These concerns are based on my experience serving on an academic honesty committee; for reasons of confidentiality, I will not go into further detail about this experience.

You are creating an incentive for an innocent student to falsely confess, if they believe that they will be found guilty in any event.  False confessions are much more common than most people believe, and a student in an academic investigation is under pressures similar to a suspect being interrogated by police.
You raise the question of whether you are taking the confession into account in a fair way. If students contest your actions, the issue of whether all cheaters were treated equally will arise; each factor you consider in making your decision will make this more complicated.

+1 The fact that the "justice" system penalizes honesty by encouraging and rewarding false confessions is no excuse for doing so in other contexts.

This is a good reason why your process needs both fairness and the appearance of fairness. If students don't see any hope of a fair outcome, they will act in terms of pleasure/pain (e.g. confessing because they have no hope of proving themselves innocent, or on the other hand denying every allegation because they know that being found guilty is near-impossible) rather than engaging honestly with the process.

@RobertColumbia Some people will tell the truth regardless of consequences. They lose out badly in a system that rewards confessions.

You need to be absolutely sure who the parties are and exactly what their involvement is.  Having two (or more) identical papers is often not enough to know who cheated.  Further, sometimes the shame involved is not enough for someone to confess in order to try again.  Finally, as we've learned from other areas, sometimes people will confess to things they never did just to try and get past the problem.
My approach in the situation where I suspect cheating is to do the following:

Call each student in for a review.  This should be back to back, but behind closed doors.  Preferably where each student didn't know the others were also there; although that may be difficult.  I'd recommend having two people present during the review in order to try and be unbiased in the analysis.  Take notes and discuss after you have heard everyone.
Have them discuss the work with a focus on how they arrived at their paper.

For anyone that was successful in defending the work, I'd give them normal marks.  For anyone that was unsuccessful I'd give them a zero and a warning.
I wouldn't ask any of them if they cheated.  However, if during the course of the review someone confessed then I'd ask for the full details.
If they attempted to blame others, it would still be a zero.  If they took full responsibility for their actions then I'd give them 24 hours to complete the assignment themselves with an 80% being the max possible grade.  If it ever occurred again then I'd escalate it per university guidelines.

That's a really good question, that I generally often wonder about myself when dealing with plagiarism. As such, I don't have a fully fledged answer, just some thoughts.

Assuming I have evidence that all of these students cheated, is there a good reason to adjust the penalty based on whether students own up to their misconduct, or continue to lie about it?

AFAIK, most courts are supposed to lower the punishment if you plead guilty of a crime, so there is certainly precedence for this. That being said, looking at court practice also gives a feeling of the downside of this. In general, people accused of a crime tend to plead Not Guilty as long as they see a reasonable chance of getting away, and plead Guilty if it is clear that they will be sentenced anyway. Pretty much the same thing also tends to happen for plagiarising students - they will deny until presented with sufficient evidence, at which point they own up.

On the one hand, I appreciate honesty, and doubling down on a lie seems like something that should be punished.

I don't know. The honesty thing basically flew out the window when they were trying to cheat the first time, right? I don't see a huge difference in honesty levels between either of the three cases. As discussed above, I don't consider somebody smart enough to recognise a lost case as significantly more honest than somebody who has a strategy of denial.

It's also not clear to me what the relative different in penalties should be, if there is one. I thought about it and it's hard for me to come up with one penalty that's appropriate for Group 1, another penalty that's appropriate for Group 2, and a third penalty that's appropriate for Group 3.

I see the same groups of students in my cases of plagiarism, and for now I generally treat them the same. I am open to good counter-arguments, though.

The honesty thing basically flew out the window when they were trying to cheat the first time, right? - I do see some non-trivial honesty e.g., when a student says "I copied X's code without his knowledge and without any intent on his part to share it with me, please don't blame him because my code is the same as his"

@ff524 Yes, but then you wouldn't change that guys punishment, only the punishment of the person he copied from, right? At least that's what I do in such cases.

It's just an example of the kind of honesty I'd like to incentivize. Currently the penalty system does nothing to reward this, or to punish the guy who just denies (possibly throwing the guy he copied from under the bus in the process). In fact, the denier benefits if I can't prove who copied from who (or whether the source deliberately shared the code) - I would have to let both students off then.

@ff524 In my experience, existing social structures are generally sufficient to incentivize not throwing your peer unjustly under the bus. I see your point, though. However, I currently do not change the penalty in any way for being honest after the act.

"I would have to let both students off then." I don't do that. 0 points for both in that case.

If X and Y submit the same code, either could (technically) have copied from the other without the other's knowledge, and both X and Y deny wrongdoing, I can't punish either unless I have some evidence that one or the other copied or deliberately shared the code.

In my experience the offending student will almost always throw the other student under the bus. We almost always have to resort to looking at previous drafts of the work to determine who did the work.

@StrongBad Ok, I have the completely opposite experience. Might be a localised thing.

This is a fine answer - but most courts are supposed to lower the punishment if you plead guilty of a crime is not correct. You may plea-bargain with the prosecuting attorney to a lesser sentence, but that isn't the court (which I take to be synonymous with the judge in this context). Plea bargaining is really a negative externality of the system (a necessary triage). There is no underlying philosophical motivation for plea bargaining in terms of the motivation for punishment.

@Andy W -- that's a US perspective.  Other countries do encourage courts to reduce the sentence if the crime is admitted.

At my uni, almost every assignment has to be orally defended in front of the T.A. after it was submitted. This defense proves that the student understood the assignment and has acquired the necessary knowledge from it.
When students cheat, this can be found out before the defense (by reviewing the assignment) or at the defense, due to insufficient knowledge demonstrated. In one case or the other, the T.A. decides on the actions taken. In most cases, the offer is standard "If we continue/begin with the examination, and I arrive to the conclusion that there was "cheating" involved, I'll take it up with the Academic Committee. However, if you admit and explain now, I'll fail you the assignment this term and you can redo it yourself for the next." Of course, the exact circumstance wary based upon the conduct, manners and attitude of the student.
Keeping this in mind, my friends roommate, took the homework from some student which took it from some other, ... etc the result being that for that term ca. 5 identical versions of the same assignment were handed. When the defense came, he had additionally the bad luck that the professor himself was examining. The course of the initial conversation went something like this:
"Did you do this by yourself?"
"Yes, of course."
"Did you borrow your code or granted insight to other students."
"No."
the professor takes 3 identical copies under different names from under his desk and lays them on the table
"Would you care to explain this?"
"I have no explanation, my assignment is my own and has nothing to do with these"
"So it's just a coincidence then?"
"I guess so"
Then the professor proceeded to examine him, which lasted for more than 40 minutes (instead of the usual 5-10), but did not fail the guy in the end, because he took effort to learn what was going on in the assignment and what was required.
In the end, the professor seemingly valued more his knowledge and confidence than the fact that he took someone's assignment and blatantly and shamelessly lied his way through the examination.
This story also points to the obvious pitfall in the above approach, i.e. to prove from which of the students the assignment originated, as he requires special treatment in any case and can't be punished ad hoc.

I had a roommate steal my assignment once. It was for a Technical Writing class. My tech manual was in color, his was in black and white. His girlfriend stole it too. They both received a 0 for the assignment. I received the actual grade. This was after the professor told all three of us to come and admit who actually did the assignment and she will give the person the grade. I started password protecting my files after that.

This seems tricky to answer but I'll try put some thoughts out there ...

Assuming I have evidence that all of these students cheated, is there a good reason to adjust the penalty based on whether students own up to their misconduct, or continue to lie about it?

The objective part of the equation boils down to you incentivising honesty and deincentivising dishonesty. You will set a precedent that "owning up" lightens the punishment so folks are more likely to "own up". If students owning up increases the effectiveness of your teaching/course administration, then that's a win.

It's also not clear to me what the relative different in penalties should be, if there is one. I thought about it and it's hard for me to come up with one penalty that's appropriate for Group 1, another penalty that's appropriate for Group 2, and a third penalty that's appropriate for Group 3.

On the other hand, you have to balance leniency with punishment: if a student just needs to "own up" after a crime to mitigate any punishment, then you are not deincentivising the original cheating enough any more. The punishment should fit the crime: thus you need to decide the severity of the original crime versus the claims of the different groups.

I would very much appreciate answers based on research and/or experience with policies like this, rather than just opinion.

The principle is identical to why people plead "Guilty" in court. They get some leniency in return for simplifying the courtroom process. So maybe there's something in the legal literature that could give you an idea (random search result).

Anyways that was the abstract answer. To give a more concrete suggestion ...

Assuming I have evidence that all of these students cheated

... you could tell the students that you have proof that they cheated and tell them that they will get 0 marks for every assignment until they own up. This seems like a nice way of matching the crime for the punishment: the longer they continue to lie and cheat, the more they are punished.

tell them that they will get 0 marks for every assignment until they own up - I would never do this.

I'm curious. Why not?

This comes across to me (from student's perspective) as "I am powerful because I am your instructor. So I am going to keep giving you zero marks on assignments you actually did, because I want to hear you say you were wrong and I was right." (Not to mention, if somehow I am mistaken, this encourages students to lie and admit guilt in order to avoid excessive punishment, just as the plea bargain in the legal system does.)

You said you have proof of them having cheated so,  by definition, they cannot lie to admit guilt. Your question asks about differentiating punishments for continuing to lie. The most generic punishment for an instructor is to dock marks. The most generic variable to differentiate punishment is the length that the lie continues. The factor need not be 0, it can be anything from [0,1].

I was thinking more along the lines of differentiated punishment for the single assignment they cheated on, not for every assignment that follows!

... well you can dock them x marks from y % of the grade for every day they continue to lie. The principle remains the same. Any effort to differentiate the punishment (the premise of the question) could be interpreted, as you say: "I am powerful because I am your instructor. So I am going to keep giving you a more severe punishment, only because I want to hear you say you were wrong and I was right." The motive for a more severe punishment is precisely that, no?

I guess I answered my own question re: "wondering if there's some reason I shouldn't" :)

Well there's always the other side of rewarding honesty rather than punishing dishonesty ... which is a bit more motivating. :)

If the students have cheated then I would have thought this is a disciplinary matter and there is probably a disciplinary procedure which you should follow which will decide on what should occur (e.g. set marks of assessment to 0). The severity of the punishment will depend on whether the students are repeat offenders and this could only be determined by some higher level process outside the course itself. On the other hand if you wish to make it an academic rather than disciplinary matter you will need to build it into you assessment scheme (e.g. 50% own work means 50%xmark).

@John the school policy gives me a range of actions which I may choose from at my discretion. Hence the possibility of different actions for different groups of students.

My academic stance is that I assess the student only on their contribution. If the work submitted is only 50% theirs they only get 50% the mark they otherwise would have. This is objective and clear. Owning up is subjective in that students may own up to some cheating but not the whole thing and it then becomes a quagmire that I am not prepared to get involved in.

@John if I delete even 1 percent of a perfect program the resulting program will likely not meet any of the requirements and get a grade much much less than 99%

In relation to the literature in criminal justice, it might be expected that the incentive to confess will produce a proclivity to false confessions. This is especially worrisome for younger students (who still have not reached cognitive maturity) and the disproportionate position of authority the professor and institution holds over them.

@AndyW, again, the question states "assuming I have evidence that all of these students cheated". If there is proof that the students have cheated, by definition they cannot be wrongly forced into a false confession. I am confused as to why this point has been commented on twice and upvoted. It's a moot point: if there isn't proof that the students have cheated, then the whole premise of the question vanishes because the students should not be punished at all. :/

@badroit, I find that to be an incredibly naive perspective. By that same logic no police have ever forced a false confession, as they always have evidence to suspect the individual and interrogate them to begin with. Now your analogy with court and pleading guilty is erroneous, and I have attempted to address that in my response.

On a further note, intentionally creating a situation in which plea bargaining exists, which has a plethora of associated negative externalities within the criminal justice system, I find to be a perverse suggestion. There are no constraints on resources that prevent students from receiving a fair trial if the educational institution allows it. This is the point of the external boards that handle student misconduct. I don't believe the role of the professor is to exact any sort of retributive punishment. I discuss in my answer other forms of punishment with a rehab. or restor. focus in mind.

@badroit, proof comes in multiple degrees: circumstantial, falsified, irrefutable, incorrectly interpreted, etc. It's not black and white. Just because there is proof of something does not mean there is not proof of its opposite. You seem to be assuming that the proof referenced is irrefutable, where that has not been demonstrated or claimed by the OP.

I am not a law major, but from an ethical standpoint I say same crime same penalty, anything else would be unethical. The motivations for the offense, likewise the reactions after being caught is irrelevant in the eye of the fact that the student in question did cheat and s/he did know that it was unethical.
What you can, and IMHO should, adjust is how to handle these students afterwards. The students who were sorry for having cheated or had some understandable reason for having to cheat might be given a chance to prove themselves. You can, for instance, have an extra session where the material at hand is reviewed lightly, focusing on the questions which baffled the students the most. In that way, they still get a chance to learn the material (that is the main motivation in giving assignment in the first place, right?).
In the end we are dealing with adults who should have a sense of reasoning, and consequences of their actions.

Ever heard of plea bargains?

An answer for the specific case of multiple students / student groups submitting the same plagiarized solution:
I would do the following (assuming 2 submissions by 1 student each):

Withhold the assignment grade.
Summon each of the people involved to my office.
If one of them comes in, I tell them "Look, you and student X submitted the same assignment. I've checked it, and graded it, once -
  and those are the points the two of you get for it. you can decide how
  you want to distribute them between the two of you, and let me know.
  Also, remember that if you don't do the homework yourself you won't
  get a good grip of the material, and you'll probably fail the exam and
  have trouble with subsequent courses, so it's purely your loss
  anyway."
  If both of them have come in - use the same spiel; it only makes
  things faster.
If they reach an agreement - I file the grades accordingly.
  If they don't reach an agreement - well, actually, this never
  happened to me, so I haven't decided what to do in this case.

The most important benefit, in my experience, of this method is that it allows people to "confess without confessing". If one person says "give him the credit", s/he's essentially confessed, without saying the words. And indeed, this is almost always the result I get. If the student who actually wrote the code is the first to walk in (very rare, they usually come together with the plagiarizer), they'll go consult before giving me the answer, and when it's the other way around, the plagiarizer has never turned out to be that much of an asshole to try to stick it to his/her benefactor.
This scheme has a few additional benefits:

Delinquent students get an increased sense of fairness by participating in the decision of what to do.
Instils a sense of "cheating is useless, it can't change anything" - that is, you can try whatever you want, the results, points-wise, will be the same as in the non-cheating case.
Completely non-retributional, reducing resentment of the delinquents.
Supports fractional punishment - reflecting partial work and partial delinquency among multiple students
If students insist, you can always pass them on up to the default university-wide disciplinary mechanism

Note: Following a discussion in comments, it seems that in at least one university in the world you may be forced to handle each potentially-offending student separately. I think that's kind of nuts, but I have to add the caveat that you need to check the binding rules on handling student violations of ethics, before deciding what to do.

Formally I am forbidden from doing this. Academic integrity accusations are FERPA-protected educational records. As such, I cannot reveal to anyone (except university officials and the accused student) that I am accusing someone. In particular, if I suspect multiple students cheated together, I am required to handle each student’s case individually, and I am forbidden from revealing to each student whether I am accusing anyone else for the “same” offense.

@JeffE: I'm not from the US, and don't quite get it. So, you are only revealing your accusation to the accused. It also does not make sense to handle a single case of multiple people separately for each person. Can you elaborate, or perhaps link to some document which requires this?

See http://studentcode.illinois.edu/article1/part4/1-403/ (Paragraph a.6: "Multiple students")  I disagree with your contention that this doesn't make sense; it's just more difficult.  In particular, if the evidence eventually implies that student A copied student B's work without their knowledge or consent, student B should not be told who copied their work, because disciplinary records are confidential.  (In practice, student B almost always figures it out immediately.) As far as I know, this policy is specific to my university; every US university has its own policies.

@JeffE: 1. This is an internal document of a single university. 2. It only says the sanctions should be decided separately - not that all interaction with the accused should be separate. 3. It uses the word should, not must. 4. Has any court or university body found against an instructor which engaged in a group deliberation and decision of sanctions? 5. It's not even entirely clear whether that code is supposed to be binding for members of faculty.

(1) I never made any claims about any university but my own!  [Remember, there is no American university system; there are only American universities.] (2),(3) My explanation is also informed by discussions with various department heads, undergraduate program chairs, and members of the committee that handle appeals of academic integrity cases in my department. (4) Yes.  The sanctions were thrown out. (5) It is.

Your first comment seemed to indicate this is is prevented by law. Sorry, I misconstructed. (2.) (3.) So how do they address these two points of mine? 4. Link please. 5. I hope faculty is at least made properly aware of this fact.

To ethically impose an additional penalty for denying cheating you need to be 100% certain that the students' work environment is such that copying could only have be done with the help of the person whose work was copied.
Without that, you risk imposing the greatest penalty on a completely honest victim of copying who refuses to lie. A less principled copying victim still gets the penalty for cheating, but not the added penalty for refusing to admit cheating.
There is also a temptation on the "prosecutor" to depend on coerced admissions to avoid the burden of proving that each individual broke the rules by either copying or permitting copying.
The original question does not explain how the OP can be completely sure copying was only possible with the aid of the person whose work was copied. If that proof is lacking, the OP can know that at least N-1 of a particular set of N students cheated, but not that any specific individual cheated and should be penalized. That would be a very frustrating situation, but I do not think coercing possibly false admissions through higher penalties is an ethical solution.

Is it naive to propose a solution along these lines?
If everyone denies cheating i.e. situations 2/3 you outlined (which may all be lies, or one guy/gal having their work copied by the others, with/without their permission) 0% for everyone. They get the opportunity to submit a new assignment but with a cap on the maximum mark say 70%, or a mark rescaling e.g. they get 60% but their mark is rescaled from out of 100 to out of 70, so their grade reads 42%.
If an involved party owns up i.e, situation 1 you outlined, the involved parties get 0% but the opportunity to submit another similar assignment with no mark cap/rescaling.
I am not sure of the relative workload for you the assessor of having a few 'extra' possible assignments available for this kind of circumstance, but as I see it, a solution along these lines accomplishes several things:
1) Cheating/collusion when inappropriate is punished heavily, either resulting in 0% or a lot of extra work to try and make the marks back. This will act as a strong dissuasive influence for cheating both on individual and group levels.
2) The genuinely penitent (perhaps those who had something else on their plate and are otherwise diligent, one-time offender types) will have an opportunity to 'right their wrongs' and achieve a maximum mark (in theory, in practice they won't have as much time to do the assignment as it will overlap with other work, so their mark will likely be lower, again acting to dissuade a repeat offence as they struggle with the time cost).
An alternative, harsher implementation of such a solution would be to allow no resubmission if no one owns up, and submission for a lower cap/down scaled grade for honesty. This results in lower workload for you as the assessor, while still clearly rewarding honesty, strongly punishing cheating and being more balanced than just awarding 0%.

I don't think the punishment of a particular student should depend on the actions of others.

@Davidmh it is already dependent in these cases e.g. when it was copied without permission. In principle I agree, but in practice it would be more absurd to have the honest copier be given a chance to resubmit without penalty and the copied party have to submit with a mark cap (when, absolutely speaking, they are speaking truth when they protest that they haven't copied anyone).

my statement was badly worded: I don't think it should depend on the confession of other people, on their actions post factum. You are right it depends on what other people did to cheat, and be careful not to punish the unauthorised copied.

That is horribly unnecessary.
There is no need to play some kind of morality police that to commit an offence and admit to it is better than committing an offense and no. Like some kind of parent.  Stressing them out with an interrogation.
A wonderful response is a professor at my uni did. He said "You have the same program as this guy, you just changed XYZ to bluff me. I will give you each half so you share the mark between you!".
That's enough of a disincentive to copy if you only get half the marks.
What had happened really was the whole class had copied off each other.. There were only about 2 proper ones going round. But two copying students posted theres in a little bit late together, one copied off the other, not making many changes, and after he had already collected the bulk of them and not picked out any plagiarism, it was easy to spot the copying in those two.  He was very good natured about it and didn't stress the two students out.
Also in those days, the grades in the first year didn't count. (eventually one guy intentionally failed all the exams in the first year, because he said there's no point. And they changed the rules the next year and made the first year count!)

That's enough of a disincentive to copy if you only get half the marks. - Actually, if you don't know how to do the assignment or don't have time, it's worthwhile to copy (and possibly get half credit if caught) then not do it at all and get zero credit.

@ff524 the person that does the work is not going to be so willing to pass his code around.

In the incident that prompted this question, several students were, in fact, willing.

@ff524 as can happen before a penalty, and as happened in the situation I described. but the source person won't be so willing(to pass around the code he hands in!), after getting caught and  sharing his mark with the other guy.


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Junior professorship (W1) in Germany without full German proficiency
I am a Computer Science PhD student aiming for an Academic career. One of the options I am considering after I receive the degree is to apply for a W1 professor position in Germany (Junior professor).
My question is very specific to Germany. Is there a chance I can become a Junior professor without being fluent in German? Most of the job postings I come across are actually written in German. Some of them do not mention German knowledge as a requirement, but it could be that it goes without saying.
I know that many courses, particularly in master programs, are taught in English. So I am sure there is a capacity to teach in English. But I am wondering if there is a culture of preferring and only accepting German speakers. Because if that's the case, I should start putting back up options.
Obviously I could work on my German. But my question is assuming I did not reach the required level of German until the time I start applying for Junior professorship.

I've seen it happen that someone with only very basic command of German got a professorship in Germany, but I guess you have to be their first choice by far to get the position.

You can certainly apply. I don't think German language proficiency will have a major impact on your chances, as long as your research record/profile is good and you are able to at least understand some German in case a student asks in German. Computer science students usually need to be able understand at least some English...
I disagree with earlier posts that you would be "expected to give undergraduate-level lectures". On the contrary, they would usually prefer you to give smaller (=specialized) classes until you have some more experience... Sometimes, you can find this in the advertisement.
However, German academia is very competitive!
We do not have a lot of professor positions, and it appears quite common to take 6-12 months to fill a position (make that 12-24 months for full professor positions)... according to Times Higher Education, Germany has the worst student-to-professors ratio (source). You may say, the German system is very efficient. We have few professors, yet we have a very high output of very educated people!
As far as I can tell, you need to:

be the best match for their plan
have had some third-party funding
have a strong track record (papers in top venues, awards, 100+ citations)
have been at different universities
have some teaching experience
convince them in person

So don't be surprised if you don't hear anything back (not even an invitation to present) on your first applications. Maybe you will get a negative reply after a year or two, when the new professor has arrived at his position. Maybe not even that. So, do not wait for an answer when you apply. Continue sending applications and making backup plans.
There is a reason why Postdocs ("Mittelbau") complain a lot in Germany (according to a recent study, even 50% of Junior Professors consider quitting academia because of the lack of perspective - most junior professor positions are currently not tenure-track). They do a lot of the work (both in research and teaching) and usually have only up to three years of work contract.

"You may say, the German system is very efficient. We have few professors, yet we have a very high output of very educated people!" I may say this certainly made my day!

You may also say the German system is very inefficient: Both in adding new positions, as well as in filling the existing positions (it seems to always take at least one year to fill a professor position). But either way, academic output is good. KDD2014 had acceptance rate by country with Germany being a positive outlier (it's clipped, because it was the add-later surprise) - so we do have quality.

It depends on the position, but in general full German proficiency is not required for German professorships.


text:
Is it common to not send rejection letters?
I have been applying to some summer programs for undergraduates recently and I am seeing that some of them do not send rejection letters or emails, and instead only notify accepted applicants. I was wondering how wide spread of a practice this is in academia, meaning do graduate schools do this, do grants do this, et cetera?

ESA does this as a policy, for all levels of recruitment (even if you get shortlisted and interviewed). They claim they have too many candidates.

Based on rumor, it is quite common not to send rejection letters at American universities.  I would expect that this happens at a substantially higher rate for undergraduate summer research programs because they have an exceptionally high ratio of applications to funding.  At many universities, the summer research programs are more competitive than the PhD programs but have zero administrative staff.  PhD programs, postdoctoral positions, and faculty positions also may not send rejections.  For some jobs, one will also find that nobody was hired at all.
Some Australian universities have an official no rejection letter policy.
I definitely recommend sending rejection letters, particularly if applicants paid an application fee.

This is common everywhere. Reasons may vary, for instance, the institution may be interested in keeping candidates warm until everything has gone through (e.g. if the selected person decides to jump board in the last minute, or new openings can be created on the fly). Of course, I agree, if the applicant paid a fee (never heard that before, BTW), they could expect to be at least told that they haven't been selected.

All graduate programs with which I have been associated do send rejection letters. The same holds for all grants I have sought or reviewed. Paper submissions also receive rejection letters. The only exceptions I am aware of are some contests, such as the Royal Society Publishing Photo Competition.
tl;dr My problem is that I receive too many rejection letters, not too few.

Thank you! Honestly, that's a relief. I can deal with rejection, it's the hope that hurts. :P

Tenure track selections often just ignore you :)

@FábioDias Can confirm. For every TT rejection letter I have received, there are 2 that just never answer.

Frankly, I'm surprised that schools are not sending tenure track rejection letters. At my institution we are careful to do so. Letters to those not on the "long short list" (about 30 people) go out immediately. Letters to those on the long or short short lists go out once an offer is made and accepted; we want to be able to revisit those candidates if the position is not filled.

Yes it is common. Unfortunately universities need to deal with rejections in a  politically correct manner (to don't get sued). Believe it or not, giving rejection letters is very hard for universities, and mostly need to be deal with or go through human resources. So because there are limited resources at the human resources department to deal with internal and external issues, sometimes the rejection letters are not sent, or just simply ignored somewhere in the pipeline.
I recently applied for  two jobs at Cambridge and one at Oxford, and I did not receive any rejection letter.


text:
Independent Research and institutional review boards?
If I am conducting independent research (ie no university affiliation), do I need to worry about institutional review board (IRB) approval, if I am working in a field where it is normally required?

Have you asked your IRB? Also, if your project doesn't have some sort of institutional ethics approval, you may have trouble getting it published.

@NateEldredge: If he's not affiliated with a university, which IRB is he going to ask?

@aeismail: I may have misunderstood. I thought the asker was affiliated with a university but is doing research on his own time.

This issue actually got some press recently with the case of uBiome, a citizen science startup that raised over $350,000 in crowdfunding.
This startup received a lot of negative attention for not getting IRB approval before raising the money. You can read some of this criticism here, here, and here.
A statement from the founders of uBiome says they were advised that they don't legally require IRB approval if they aren't receiving federal funding, don't plan to publish, and don't plan to apply for FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) approval:

Before we started our crowdfunding campaign, we consulted with our advisors at QB3, the startup incubator at UCSF, and the lawyers they provided us. We were informed (correctly) that IRBs are only required for federally funded projects, clinical trials, and those who seek publication in peer-reviewed journals. That’s right — projects that don’t want federal money, FDA approval, or to publish in traditional journals require no ethical review at all as far as we know. (No, that doesn’t sound like a great system to us either.)

In the end, they went through a private IRB firm (Wikipedia says it was this one) and got their protocols approved. The founders say:

This is the same institution that works with academic IRBs that need to coordinate multi-site studies, as well as private firms such as 23andme and pharmaceutical companies doing clinical trials.

This incident raises the question of what you plan to do with your independent research (assuming the kind of research you are doing is generally subject to IRB oversight):

If you plan to publish your research in a traditional peer-reviewed journal, you will usually need an IRB review
If you plan to develop pharmaceuticals that will require FDA approval, you will need IRB review
If you plan to get federal funding for your work, you will need IRB review. If you plan to get other funding for your work, it'll be hard to get without IRB review.
If you plan to create a startup around your research, you may not require IRB review, but not having it can engender quite a bit of criticism (as per uBiome's story)

Do you have any more info about the publication side of things?  Do you mean that there is a legal requirement for IRB approval if publishing, or just that most individual journals' policies will lead them to reject submissions from independent researchers who don't have any kind of IRB?

I mean that most journals require IRB review if the nature of the research warrants it, whether the researcher has an affiliation or not. And journals have retracted papers for IRB issues. See Fujii papers, this Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery paper, and more.

I'd add, as a side thought, the question of whether or not a private IRB firm can be expected not to try to "please the client" with an approval. While I imagine they intend not to do so, I can see that being difficult.

@Fomite Yes, the uBiome founders had something to say on that subject as well: "We agree that it’s kind of weird to pay for ethical review, but that is the current system, and the only option available to us." They go on to suggest some ideas for IRB 2.0 - it's an interesting read.

This really depends on if you are planning on publishing the research. From my understanding many in house studies in industry are not subjected to an IRB process.
Publishing is a different story. Amdur and Biddle (1997) found that 47% of biomedical journals had policies about IRB approval. While I don't have any data to support it, my guess is this number is higher now.
The FDA guidelines for IRB say:

IRBs may agree to review research from affiliated or unaffiliated investigators, however, FDA does not require IRBs to assume this responsibility.

Many university and hospital IRBs will not approve studies from unaffiliated individuals since approval often limits the liability of the PI. There may be some university and hospital IRBs that approve studies from unaffiliated individuals and there are definitely private companies that specialize in this type of thing.

As an independent researcher myself, who has taken a less traditional route of publication (in an open access journal versus a peer-reviewed journal), I am of the understanding that IRB approval is not required unless your study is being featured in a peer reviewed journal.  With that said, I think that the participant protections that I put in place to protect my subjects are much more stringent than any IRB requirements.  Mine was a case study with two participants and both agreed in writing that they felt adequately protected.  They also agreed when reading the study prior to its publication that while they themselves could tell what each part represented, the nonuse of their names, the fictitious place they were said to have grown up, a couple of minor alterations to their stories, which did not change the results or themes, but furthered their anonymity made it so that they were certain that no one could identify them.

Please don't confuse open access and peer reviewed. You can have pay-walled/open-access content that is/isn't peer-reviewed.

“the fictitious place they were said to have grown up” – So you published a paper with false information? It may not have been relevant to the study, but then, why mention it at all?


text:
How do I best present my skills when switching fields from electrical engineering to earth sciences?
I am currently doing my PhD in the US. I am studying electrical engineering with a focus on magnetic sensors and signal processing. I am doing theoretical work (developing a model) and also developing software (mostly MATLAB and LABVIEW) and building hardware for my measurement system. I am also conducting measurements to validate my model. I find the research to be relatively interdisciplinary. I have a few papers (5) in applied physics and engineering journals. I should be graduating soon, within a year hopefully.
I have lately been looking for postdoctoral positions, and I find myself getting more and more interested in earth/atmospheric sciences, particularly analysis of remote sensing data, and also building sensors for remote sensing.
I feel like I need a change of field, as I like to broaden my horizons. I need a fresh perspective.
My question is: how do I present my skills in a way that increases my chances of getting a postdoc in that field? Wouldn't a candidate with a PhD in earth sciences be preferred over me?

I'd look at LDEO. Lots of magnetometer work, and strong Earth Sci. department. Also maybe apply for the NASA post-doc fellowships. They appreciate someone with strong hardware / sensor skills.

Yeah, I was looking at the NASA post-doc fellowships. A lot of them seem like nice work.

One problem you will need to think about is if you aim for a research job within earth Sciences of a more technical job. The latter may be easier because your knowledge is certainly in demand. The former will be more difficult since you lack an Earth Science background. Note that I do not say impossible.
Will you compete. The answer is definitely not an easy no. But, the position you will be looking for will need to be heavy on, for example, signal processing to make you of interest. Usually working on data is followed by interpretations of the data in terms of Earth Science applications. You will of course have a definite disadvantage there. Having some documented understanding of Earth Sciences will be beneficial.
I would encourage you to find a meeting where you could meet specialists and discuss opportunities and also just see what is done out there. If you are in the US then attending the AGU (American Geophysical Union) Fall Meeting in San Francisco (December) would be a good option. In Europe the EGU (European Geophysical Union) meeting in Vienna (April) will be good. There are also more specialized meeting on Remote Sensing. A good way in could be to strike up collaborations where your expertise adds to the mix.
Building sensors. The remote sensing sensors are built by electronics experts such as yourself and not by earth Scientists within the earth Science community (departments). Earth Scientists will provide input to what specs a sensor would need but that is usually the dividing line. So the answer to the possibilities lies outside Earth Science, you most likely would be looking at space agencies or physics departments.
On the whole, I would say that your expertise is valued in Earth Science but the total lack of documented knowledge in the subject(s) will make the opportunities smaller. I need to add that Earth Science, in its widest sense is a very broad and covers many different departments/subjects which is why trying to find some persons with research profiles that attract you a good venture.

How much do you think a potential employer would care if I took a class on remote sensing that would appear on my PhD transcript?

I really do not know. I think trying to get in touch with researchers in the field is better. You should of course try to get sense of what are hot topics in the field and how you can contribute, so from that perspective a course might be useful.