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Is it normal to let another person lead the writing of a project that you performed most of the analysis?
I am a final year Ph.D. collaborating with people in my lab (Biomedical) and spent more than a year on this side project which is not part of my thesis research. My results combined with some calculations (which I also performed a bit) from a colleague (research associate) can make up a story and we decided to write the manuscript. In the beginning, we agree that I can lead the manuscript and she can co-lead to help with writing.
But now, she wants something out of the project as soon as possible and feels that this manuscript may add on too much workload on me in my final year. And she would like to bring up a discussion with our supervisor that due to timing issues, she wants to lead the manuscript. It's true that she can speed up the processes as I will be busy writing other manuscripts and my thesis. The whole project does need a published paper now so that subsequential works can rely on that.
However, I feel a bit uncomfortable about letting someone else lead a manuscript (I will be a coauthor for sure) when I performed most part of the analysis. I don't mind having more workload on my shoulders but I can be slow with many parallel projects. My always states that it's a decision between me and the colleague. So my question is that：
（1）is timing a strong reason to let others take the lead in a manuscript, given that I really want to lead the writing of my own work?
（2）Shall I let my colleague lead the manuscript and take the first author in favor of time? Does the authorship ranking mean a lot? I only had one paper published for now.
(3) If I want to make the conversation, how shall I start?

Does this also mean that you would have been the first author on this manuscript, but if this colleague  writes it up that they will be first author?

Yes, whoever writes the manuscript will be the first author. But I feel like I can be the co-first if my colleague lead the writing

Why do you think that the act of actually writing down the results is so important in setting the first author. Authorship is more than about writing. Let the best writer be the writer and choose author order based on the research (intellectual) contribution. After all, you've tagged this collaboration, not competition.

I guess that the rule most people in my field follow.  It's also how people in my lad determine the author rankings.

I suggest that you work out author order before anyone writes anything and, only, then decide who is best to write it up and how the others will contribute to that - revisions and such. My preference would be to let the best writer do the writing, though they need the time for it. But the writing isn't the main intellectual contribution. And, if you are in a situation where everyone contributes equally, then use something like alphabetical order or a clear statement in an acknowledgements paragraph.

That's a really good suggestion. It's just I am a student and may not have the "big picture".  It's true that my colleague is a more experienced writer.  But I feel you can't just let the best writer always be the writer and not give chances to inexperienced students to try due to urgency.

Part of my reasoning is that there is (a lot of) value in having the best paper. Someone with a lot of writing experience is better able to produce that, other things being equal. I'm not putting value on being quick here, but only in being clear. But your point about getting experience is a good one.

@shukurra If it was your only paper I think it would certainly make sense both for your supervisor and for your own training that you insist to write all parts of a manuscript to get the experience. But you've described this as a bit of a "side project" where, even though you've led the effort, you have other efforts going on where you are doing more of the writing. In that context, it'd be okay to get help with the writing, I just don't think you should sacrifice earned authorship order for it.

Please clarify your specific problem or provide additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it's hard to tell exactly what you're asking.

I'll note that doing it "quickly" serves her interests, but maybe not yours especially if she can take over first authorship. She would need to justify that. If she wants to do a lot of the writing, but leave you as first author then that issue goes away and is easier to justify the "speedy" request. Don't let yourself get abused here. The advice of @BryanKrause is good advice.

I think it's a strategic mistake to give up first authorship on a project if you've done most of the work on the experimental side of things just to have someone else write the text. When people browse through your CV in your field, they will likely assume that the author listed first did the work, and that the last author is the primary senior person supervising the work. Any other middle author presumably had some contribution, but it's not clear how much.
It doesn't seem fair to me for someone to take over a first authorship position just by writing in order to get the paper out quicker. The balance might shift a bit if the overall time you put in to this point is not extensive (i.e., collecting data from a repository, running calculations, etc, is all important work, but may be marginal relative to doing a year of bench experiments). I think ultimately this is something you will need to weigh for yourself, as well as weigh against opportunity costs - if you're going to be writing this paper, does that prevent you from doing something else that's more valuable to you than having this first author paper?
On the other hand, I think it's perfectly normal especially in the biomedical area that the person who does the research and is listed as first author need not necessarily be the person who writes up the first draft of all of the paper. You definitely want to get some writing experience as a student, but it sounds like you're already doing your own writing, and this is just an additional project for you. You have to decide for yourself how much value you put on the additional writing experience (and mentorship that comes with revising your writing in consultation with your coauthors).
A reasonable middle ground you could propose is that you keep first authorship and draft the "meat" (methods, results) of the paper while your colleague helps with the "framing" (introduction, discussion). However, if your colleague is just trying to grab a first author paper for themselves and not acting in your best interests, this arrangement would not be suitable. Someone more senior might have a better "big picture" view of the field that is helpful in writing the introduction and discussion sections.
When discussing authorship issues with colleagues, I think it's important that you be prepared to defend your own interests - in your case, it seems those interests are 1) a first author paper is valuable, and 2) you feel it is important (perhaps especially as learning experience) to write your own work. Any negotiation should start there, and you should be careful to consider others priorities without sacrificing your own. If time is really the main concern, then maybe you are willing to sacrifice (2) but not (1).

Note that "time spent" isn't the proper measure of academic contribution.

@Buffy No, certainly not, but in most things biomedicine it's a pretty good proxy of who is the first author on a paper. It would definitely be unfair treatment to a student who spent two years doing experiments to say "well, us senior people decided the direction and trained you how to do the experiments and told you to do an ANOVA, so we made all the intellectual contribution and you can be a middle author, we'll be first and last."

Hmmm, there is "time" and there is "productive activity" which may take time. But it is possible to spend a lot of time fruitlessly, probably even in biomedical research.

Appreciate your answer. More information: My colleague and I are both early career researchers. I am a final year Ph.D. and she is a postdoc. My analysis part is not bench experiments but also some sort of modeling analysis which will be the basis of all subsequential projects.  I initiated the wrapping up calculations at the beginning but she took over that part because it's the same framework that she will be using in the subsequential projects.  My point is that given that I will be writing most of the methods and results, why hurt just letting me write the whole thing?

Now you are surprising me and I upvoted. But you seem to be describing a situation in which a person makes no intellectual contribution at all and simply works at the close direction of others. I hope it isn't like that.

@Buffy Sure, though I'd be careful about what is considered "fruitless" in biology as anywhere else, as ruling out things that don't work is fruitful and can be quite an important intellectual contribution. My point was that the scope for the effort towards "collecting data" varies incredibly in biomedical studies, and can span designing entire (pre)clinical trials to pulling some entries from an existing database. The former involves a lot of intellectual contribution "along the way" even if ultimately both approaches primarily contribute a table of data to analyze.

@Buffy From the perspective of the students it is not like that; from the perspective of some supervisors it might be.

More details: I have a good relationship with my colleague and I don't want to ruin it.  She came to all the discussions and made really good suggestions and comments while I was performing the analysis. So definitely intellectual contributions.  And I will use her calculations to make a whole story for sure.

Does that explain the fact(?) that in some fields people just assume that the "last author" (the advisor or PI) really did all the work and all the other "authors" just ride along? I've read that in some questions on this site, and it has always seemed foreign to me, but this would explain it (if true).

@shukurra If it's primarily your project, you should probably be first author, whatever additional effort from you that means. "She came to all the discussions and made really good suggestions and comments while I was performing the analysis. So definitely intellectual contributions. And I will use her calculations to make a whole story for sure." - these all seem to be great marks of coauthorship, not first authorship.

I fully concur with your most recent comment.

In my case, our supervisor will be the last author since she wrote the proposal get the funding, and brought the whole plan. I am not quite sure what you want to comment here.

@Buffy I think it's almost always wrong to assume the last author "really did all the work", but often much more fair to characterize it as "work done in Prof Lastauthor's lab" as much as "work done by Firstauthor", when Firstauthor is a trainee.

@shukurra Sorry, I think Buffy and I have drifted off on a bit of a tangent. My main messages to you are 1) if it's your project, you should be the first author. 2) If to be first author you need to write the whole paper, then that's what you should do, even if it takes longer. 3) It's totally fine for a coauthor to write parts of the manuscript, no matter where they are in the author order, but of course it's up to that coauthor to agree to do that work while being whatever order author they are.

I agree with that. So this authorship issue bothered me a bit as a Ph.D. student. It's just it is so hard for me to make the conversation, as I feel that my supervisor always holds the big picture and prefers to do whatever benefits the whole projects.

The dividing up of the writing, with you writing methods and results (which tend to be easier and more straightforward to write in my opinion) is good advice.

I don’t see what benefit you would get for writing up the whole thing as long as you are first author either way. Writing the intro and conclusion doesn’t pass the cost-benefit test here…

@Dawn From the perspective of OP being a graduate student, I could see making a case that an important part of their graduate research experience should be writing up the entirety of a publishable paper, intro and discussion included. But, although I've suggested that as a middle ground they can propose, I doubt their colleague will go along because I think she just wants to snag an easy first author paper by offering to write a paper for a graduate student.

I think some crucial pieces of the story are missing here. As far as I understand, the topic starter collected the results, and his colleague analyzed them.

Who actually conceptualized the study and designed the experiments? Was it you? Was it your colleague? If it was one of you two - that person is a likely genuine first author. If the third party was involved, it is reasonable to engage this person now and get their input on the final authorship.

How (non)trivial were the experiments vs. analysis? Some experiments are routine procedures usually done by assistants, and others are out-of-this-world procedures. Vice versa, some analysis is just numbers pushed through the standard pipeline, and others are unique.

You should ask yourself one practical question before disputing the authorship/writing: will you ever have time to finish the manuscript yourself? You said you are in a final year of a Ph.D. So, now you are busy, but it will not get better after the defense. Will you leave academia for the industry? Go for a postdoc in another group/university/country? Neither of these places will give you time to work on the past things. So you may never actually finish the paper. On the other hand, negotiating co-first authorship now and "moving on" with other projects/jobs may be the best strategy to see some outcome. Of course, no one but the topic starter can assess the situation here.

Thanks for your suggestions! To answer the questions: (1) My part of work incorporates constructing a novel model to perform the analysis of some data. The whole idea was brought by my supervisor since she is the one who applied for funding and wrote the proposal. But the detailed plan and structure were designed by me.  (2) My methods and results can be a paper by its own but adding more calculations can make a better story. I also did the calculations at the beginning but my colleague took over it since she will be using the framework for her subsequential projects. (3) I plan to sty academi


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What is the meaning of the term: "scholarly or critical paper"?
I have come across this term at many places in graduate admissions, and I do not understand it.
For example, here, they want a writing sample that is "a recent scholarly or critical paper, 15 to 25 pages in length." And they do not explain more - which means they assume it is common knowledge what this means- but it is not obvious to me what this means.
Do they want a published paper/published review article? But then, it is likely to have co-authors so it is not my writing sample. If not, what do they mean by "paper"? A critique of a research paper is hardly a few pages, let alone ~20. For a scholarly paper I'll have my bachelor's thesis but it will be there towards the end of my bachelor's, much later than most admissions deadlines. What do such submissions expect?
When I mailed them, they replied the following which doesn't make it clear to me what is expected (or common):

The application requires a writing sample.  For our program, there are no rules regarding the writing sample so it can be a piece your own choosing.

Note: Most of my work till now has been collaborative, and my background is a STEM subject.

Just a guess, but I suspect by "scholarly or critical paper" they mean a paper you wrote for a class, something fairly common for many non-STEM majors but not so much for STEM majors. In the U.S. these are often called term papers, although for some reason the Wikipedia article seems a bit inaccurate to me. It says "over an academic term", which suggests a paper one spends most of the quarter/semester course writing, but my (admittedly several decades ago) (continued)

experience is that it is more accurate to say "during an academic term", since for many such courses one winds up writing several term papers in the course, and even when only one term paper is written for a course, it's usually at most a 2 to 3 week project for that course (not something one spends the majority of the course duration working on). Humanities and social science majors in particular write a lot of term papers during their college years, and I've known math majors (not me; I liked writing them) who avoided such courses when choosing required non-science elective courses.

The example you gave is Department of Government. As @DaveLRenfro points out, it's common for Political Science students to write term papers when they take social science classes. STEM undergraduate students usually don't do that

The best way you find out what this means is to ask, which it sounds like you did, and the response you got:

The application requires a writing sample. For our program, there are no rules regarding the writing sample so it can be a piece your own choosing.

indicates they don't really care about the specifics, they just want to be able to judge your writing. Probably the people who are reading your sample are not the same people who came up with the "scholarly or critical" label.
I'd consider a paper for a course or a review or research paper you've primarily drafted to qualify. I would not consider an example of creative writing to be scholarly or critical, so don't submit the first chapter of the novel you are writing or your screenplay or the poetry you write as lyrics for your garage band. They're not expecting or wanting you to write something specific for this prompt, they're expecting you submit something you already have in hand, so they don't want to be too specific. The point is to see a sample of your writing, not to select candidates based on which specific sample they have available or choose.
Whatever the interpretation is, though, they've clarified for you: there are no rules that they care about, you can choose.

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Examples of great PhD Thesis and great PhD Plans to learn from?
In order to understand if I really want and can pursue a PhD program I would like to see some real PhD Thesis and especially some real PhD plans from real world so I could at least approximately realize what the final product looks like (in terms of volume, structure, etc.) and what the real plan could be.
Why I'm asking:

I'm thinking about making a PhD in AI/NLP
Reading around the topic on the internet doesn't make it clear yet.
Asking for some great works - mostly because at my level I probably wouldn't tell the great from not so great myself.

If in the time of doing your own PhD (or before or after that) you met some thesis/plan that really got you thinking "oh, that's what a great plan should look like, I definitely can learn a lot from it" - that would be what I'm looking for.
Sorry if the question is too naive.
Thanks!

What's a PhD plan, and how do you expect to learn a lot from one?

Every university library keeps a copy of every PhD thesis from every PhD awarded at that institution. That's the place to start.

And, aside from the student and their committee (and maybe their mother), nobody reads them...

@JonCuster I read at least seven other people's PhD theses while I was studying for mine

Dissertations can be (not always, but can be) very well written documents-- often second drafts of already polished papers, mostly free from page limits (a very real thing in my field), and all collected with nice introductory and literature search sections.  They're not light reading, but sometimes you can find really clear descriptions and details in them.

Go online to the university or universities you are interested in and search their repository of dissertations/theses. They are usually easy to find and freely accessible. Often they are organized using eCommons or another similar database/repository. Here is one that comes up through a simple google search.
Unfortunately, I doubt anyone can point you to a specific example since most people do not make a habit of reading dissertations (except the committee that approved it).
I think it's also worth mentioning that while this will give you an idea of what a finished product looks like, you're not going to find the plan they followed to get there. In fact, the point of a dissertation is to produce a coherent product and so the finished version is going to look put together even if the road to get there was bumpy.
And, at least superficially, a "great" dissertation is going to look very similar to a not-so-great one. Most places have fairly specific formatting and content requirements (field, topic, and institution dependent) so even if you did find an objectively good one it might not be generalizable.
I think it's a fine idea to look at some dissertations/theses to get an idea of what you would need to produce. It seems like the real question is "how do I learn what specifically is expected to earn a PhD in field X", and the answer to that is to reach out to faculty at institutions you are interested in and ask them questions. See what they would be expecting, what their institution specific process is, how much support you will receive in the program etc...

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Falsely Accused of Cheating from Blackboard Tracking Statistics - How to Prove Innocence
My professor accused me of cheating on a exam I took a few months ago by accessing the exam before I was supposed to (I had arranged to take it later than the other students in the class.) His sole evidence of this was the tracking statistics feature in Blackboard which purportedly shows that I accessed the exam multiple times before I was supposed to. I know for a fact that I did not do this. I was then told by the integrity council that unless I can show that these statistics were faulty somehow that I would be convicted. Does anyone know if there are any bugs or limitations with the tracking statistics feature that I can use to prove my innocence?

Similar questions about issues with Blackboard: Accused of cheating due to the time accounted by Blackboard, Accused of Cheating during an online exam

@GoodDeeds It seems like those similar posts involve a good deal more inference, though - I suspect this will be significantly harder to argue against than those two. (Just a hunch.)

This seems tricky. Do you have roommates that are using your computer or similar? What was happening on your various devices (phone; computer) at the time of the test? Did you have the test site up on a browser for use later when you got home?

What was the reason you had arranged to take it later than the other students in the class?

I would ask how was the exam accessible in the first place, anyway? If someone can circumvent the safety features, how is it that they are logged?

Have you shared your login credentials with anyone else?  If so, and if you are absolutely positive you did not access the exam yourself, then you need a serious discussion with the other person.  Is your password on this list?

@CaptainEmacs: As a long-time Blackboard user, the default case is that the test is available generally to the whole class (e.g., incl. OP), and maybe the instructor adds a password for access after that time (distributed to a subset of students). There is the capacity to change availability time entirely for individual students, but it's buried way down in a series of menus, and very few instructors know about that (I've never used it myself). So the don't-access-early likely appears to be on the honor system to the student.

@DanielR.Collins Why would anyone make the test accessible before the time, though? Honour codes should be reserved for things that are not easy to enforce or hard to capture algorithmically. One should not lead people into temptation to break such codes by lazy setups.

@CaptainEmacs Agreed, and one could also perhaps click on it accidentally, without intending to (I am not familiar with Blackboard's UI, but in general this could happen).

@CaptainEmacs: As I said: most instructors aren't aware of the option to individualize availability start times.

I leave ~20 thousands tabs open in the browser of my laptop, many of them with persistent/automated logins, so every time I close the lid of the laptop and then open it, the pages are updated (accessing the remote side and being logged by whatever logging system is in place).
Some of them are download links, if by error I close the browser, when I recover it the file is downloaded again.
I have no idea about Blackboard, can some of this apply to it?
Anyhow, offer yourself to take again the exam as soon as possible for the sake of fair evaluations, yours and of the others.

@EarlGrey No, I don't think that defense makes sense here. The log referred to is presumably not a log of Blackboard activity in general, but rather of a clickthrough to the exam itself. This would have required action and could not have been from something like a passive browser tab reload. I'll also add that the suggestion to retake the test makes little sense; either the professor's view is that the student cheated (so a retake is not deserved) or they did not (so a retake is unnecessary).

I'm a college computer science instructor who's been using Blackboard to deliver tests for about ten years at this point (and used the platform generally ten years before that). I frequently scan the testing time logs for various bits of information on student performance.
I've never seen any outrageous time logs that failed to synch with the actual time of the test availability. I'm not aware of any system bugs in that regard, nor have any theory about how such could happen.
If your instructor has actual time logs showing such a discrepancy, then I don't see any way to argue that away.


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How Appropriate Would a Letter of Recommendation from a Hobby Project be for an Application to an MS Program?
I am applying to a graduate program in computer science. One of the requirements for applying to this graduate program is to have 3 recommenders write a letter of recommendation for me. I have been working on a hobby project in my spare time. This hobby project has a sizable number of people working on it (~15 people) and a very significant amount of work has been done on it. I am a 'team lead' on this project as well. This project also has a single guy in charge of it that could speak of the work I've done on it. How appropriate would this 'head' of the aforementioned project be as someone who writes a letter of recommendation for me?

What role is the head of this project? Are they a fellow student?

@BryanKrause The 'role' of the head of the project by all accounts is some guy somewhere in the work force. This hobby project has been developed by almost all communication being done over the internet. He is not a fellow student and neither am I a student. I graduated with my undergraduate over two years ago.

"By all accounts" seems to imply you don't really know this person? Perhaps entirely a virtually organized group, where some or all of the participants go by pseudonyms?

Is this a software development project or something else?

This is a software development project.

You want your letters to come from people who can attest to your ability to perform in whatever you are applying for.
For graduate school, admissions committees are going to get the most insight from recommendations coming from people who both know you and also know what a MS in CS requires. Ideally, that means people who teach masters level CS courses and are familiar with students who do well and do not do well. In other words, professors.
Other people, like a boss outside of academia, can also round out your application, but you don't want to rely on them primarily.
The particular example you give seems rather weak. Unless your hobby project is something well-known or for some cause that might impress people, I'd wonder why that was the best letter writer you could find. It seems closer to asking for a recommendation from a friend than a boss.
I'd probably look for other options.


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Finding Emails for Japanese Professors
I'm an American Student Specializing in history, applying for a Fulbright program to Japan. Part of that Application process is securing a letter of affiliation from a Japanese university, Professor, or research institution. However, it's recommended you contact professors directly to pitch your project. There in lies the problem, as it is ridiculously hard to find contact information for most professors affiliated with Universities. I think this is simply a cultural difference, but it makes it very, very difficult to send out the mass amounts of emails I have to send in not a lot of time.
Does anyone know better ways of finding these emails or otherwise contacting these professors? I cannot call, since I have to have written proof of affiliation.
Thank you!

Sending mass emails is not going to work.  Customize.

It isn't "ridiculously hard": go to https://researchmap.jp/researchers, type some search criteria, and you'll get people profiles. You'll still have to go to their homepage to get some contact info, but still it'd help much to shortlist your contacts.


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Is it unusual for UK univerisities to give tuition waivers to teaching assistants?
I've been checking the websites of different UK universities for teaching assistantship benefits. None of the websites I've visited so far disclose the specific benefits that TAs receive. So, I wonder if it is unusual for UK universities to waive the tuition fees of their TAs.

I have studied/worked at three different UK universities. I have never heard of tuition fees being waved for TAs. Usually TAs are paid an hourly rate in addition to any funding package/scholarship they may have. There are almost always restrictions on how many hours a graduate student can work at the university, the maximum amount of money you could make with these restrictions would be much lower than the tuition fees. It is also not guaranteed that you get a TA position

If a UK university would offer that, I'm sure it would be very clearly advertised. The baseline expectation is hourly pay, fullstop.

It's not unusual because it doesn't happen at all. I think you have a fundamental misconception of how funding and tuition for PhD students works in the UK compared to the the USA.
Firstly, if you are offered a PhD place in the UK, this should come with the costs of tuition covered and an annual tax free stipend (~£15,000). You never receive any money for tuition and you never directly pay tuition. That transaction goes on behind the scenes between your funding body (be that research council, department or PI) and your university. The stipend gets paid into your bank account every month like a salary. That's what you live on. It is completely unconnected to any teaching you may do.
Secondly, the concept of a "TA" does not really exist in the UK. It would be very unusual for a PhD student to teach a whole lecture or lecture course, as I understand happens in the US. The most I had to do as a PhD student was mark undergraduate coursework and exams, which took up a few hours of a single week, twice a year. Once I sat in the corner of a computer lab for a few hours helping the students with Python. That was it. The vast majority of my time was spent on research.
Doing this type of undergraduate marking and lab demonstrating may not even be compulsory for you as a student (it was for me because there were a lot of undergraduates so we all had to pitch in). Regardless of whether you have to do it or not, if you are doing it you will be paid to do it. The mechanism by which this occurs will likely differ between universities, but we filled in a timesheet and got the money along with our stipend each month. The hourly rate was excellent too, something like £17 an hour. But you'd only do a few hours so this kind of marking/demonstrating would not give you anything like enough money to live on. That's what your stipend is for.
I think this is the main difference to the USA, where you are paid primarily as a TA and those duties come first, above and beyond research.


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Is SpringerLink published under Springer?
I would like to clarify is SpringerLink published under Springer? I want to make sure its a legitimate publisher, given that plenty of fake journals are out there.

https://www.springer.com/gp/help/about-springerlink/18548

Yes, it is a service of Springer. Look at the URL and the page it links to: https://link.springer.com. There is also a link (not to coin a phrase) to it from Springer's front page.

Thank you. I have a confusion there @Dr.Buffy why SpringerLink have a different url to that of Springer?

It is a service different from their standard publishing business.


text:
How to identify a legitimate journal from a fake journal?
I know using Google Scholar metrics we can get an awareness about legitimate journals, but there are some journals or conferences papers not stated in the Google metrics. Hence I want to know how to identify legitimate journals, conference papers for field of Computer Science from the fake ones.


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GRE reqs for this year and next year CS PhD
I am looking for some advice.
I have not yet taken the GRE and was looking to take advantage of this application cycle in CS PhD programs, since the GRE requirement is waived for many programs due to COVID and I think it will only decrease the strength of my application since I am not very strong on standardized tests. I have excellent grades and research experiences.
Issue is, even if I get accepted, I may defer for a year because my family is not in the financial position for me to be able to leave next year.
If GREs will not be a requirement next year either, I prefer to just apply in 2022 for entry into 2023. Does it look like it will still be the case then too? I do not want to rush my application for this year.

Do you have programs of interest?  I am kind of wondering the same thing (though I do plan on applying this cycle), however at the stage the US is at in the pandemic (presumably, where you would be planning to do your PhD in), it is more likely to vary from school/department to school/department.
Some universities may waive the GRE altogether on a permanent basis as the result of COVID, but it would be unwise to assume this for all universities, so you are best off contacting the programs that you are interested in to get a more definite answer, both for this cycle and for upcoming cycles if you do plan to defer.


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Is there an academic major equivalent in secondary education/high schools?
I am trying to find out more about high schools that specialize in a particular area or at least allow a student to focus on a main subject overall. In tertiary education this specialization is known as an academic major, but I'm having trouble finding an equivalent term used in secondary education. I've come across "area of study" and "discipline" but neither of these appear to be used consistently across institutions.
In the US there are Magnet Schools which appear to do the above, and similarly in UK and Russia there are/were Specialist Schools and Specialized Schools respectively that seem to cater for a particular subject area. None of these though use consistent terminology as far as I could see. I myself am more familiar with the core and elective structure which doesn't allow for focusing on a specific area of study.
Is there a particular term for this or a more commonly accepted way to refer to it?

It would help to know why you're interested in such a term -- to help with a job search at such a school, to refer to such schools/majors in a paper/book you're writing, ...? Depending on the reason, a list of NCSSS schools might be what you want for the U.S.

Research for a fiction piece which features such a high school, does that help?

The UK 'specialist schools' initiative wasn't really about providing a subject-targeted education program, but rather about investing in facilities & staff development. Most of the students at these schools will be there because it is their local school, not because of the 'special' status. However in the UK education system students have always studied only 3-4 subjects beyond the age of 16, which kind of acts as a 'major' in  the sense of this question (e.g. one might choose math/physics/chemistry, english/history/french etc).

The UK does have (private) special schools for music, e.g. Wells or Chethams, and for ballet. No doubt there are other examples. I think the common thread is that these are all focussed on skills that require early physical development.

This seems to be outside the scope of this site - we deal with universities only.

The specialized New York City high school that my kids went to has majors. This web page https://www.bths.edu/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=222176&type=d outlines how majors work at this particular high school. Other high schools are likely to be different.
They list 19 majors on their web site. The school offers many really nice elective courses, which usually are only available to students in an elligible major.


text:
How to read a lot of research papers?
TL; DR: At least for the next few weeks, I'm going to be overwhelmed with reading a lot of research papers one after the other, sometimes even at the same time. How to deal with this? Are there any tricks to reading many research papers simultaneously?

I am a senior year undergraduate in Computer Science.
This semester, I took three of research-based courses in Computer Systems.

A course named "Topics in YYY"
A seminar course
A UG Research Project course [This is essentially "my" project, with a professor and a PhD student to advise and support me]

In 1, I am usually expected to read 2 papers per week.
In 2 as well, I have to read, review and present 2 papers per week.
For 3, initially there was less reading and more of brainstorming and experimentations. However, now that we're going to be writing a research paper based on our initial findings, there are a lot of "related" work papers that I have to go through.
In 1 also, initial reading was easy, but as the course is progressing the readings are getting advanced.
This is probably a result of poor planning on my part. I should have taken some programming-related or basic courses instead.
But the end result is, at least for the next few weeks, I'm going to be overwhelmed with reading a lot of research papers one after the other, sometimes even at the same time.
I could drop either 1 or 2 but that means running away from the responsibility; and my transcript will show the withdraw grade, so that's not really cool either.
How to deal with this? Are there any tricks to reading many research papers simultaneously?

I often use a voice to text app to listen before selectively reading the paper itself. I rarely read an entire paper unless it is outstanding or for a review.

Part of "reading" (in academia, not necessarily in other contexts) is not reading. This manner of "reading" will help you through this problem, however bear in mind that this kind of "reading" is very hard to develop.

There probably is no way of developing a speed-reading skill on such a short notice. You could approach the papers in a structured way.
Have a table (with more rows than shown) of data that you fill out for each paper:

Aspect
Paper 1
Paper 2

Method

Novel results

You can consume the papers as a categorisation task where you look for the relevant information which you can report and forget or leave for later reading. The task of reading a whole paper is replaced with filling a table with data and moving on. Obviously this is not the same as reading and understanding a paper but would make your current situation manageable.
You don't need to fully comprehend every paper but will still become familiar with them and understand where further reading is needed.
A good order of reading a paper would then be: Introduction -> Conclusion -> Results -> Methodology. Literature review can be skipped unless you are interested in context.

My suggestion might turn out to be inappropriate to your domain of expertise but in my own area(s) it has proved very useful. Moreover, my method has nothing to do with so-called speed reading.
Many papers are published as essentially standalone entities. The authors assume a certain vocabulary on the part of the reader in a particular field, but do not assume that the reader knows very much about the sub-field in question. As a consequence, the introductory parts of the article, which might be several pages long, provide history, background and motivation for the research. Finally, after presenting the method and results, another long section is devoted to the discussion.
Basically, I skip the introduction and discussion in a great many papers and proceed instead, directly to the method and results. I know enough of my research areas to feel reasonably confident about my own assessment of the usefulness and validity of various research methods (notwithstanding that they have already survived the scrutiny of peer-review). If the methods survive my own assessment, I go ahead and read the results. Then, rather than reading what is often a long discussion that recalls many aspects of the introduction, I spend time thinking. To my mind, thinking often pays dividends that far surpass the time spent reading. To be more specific, I spend time considering whether the results pass a simply plausibility test and what kind of conclusions I can draw from the results in light of the various limitations (and of course positive aspects) of the methods.
And that's it! I'm not, of course, suggesting that you never read the introductory parts of a research paper, or the discussion. Rather, I'm suggesting that you can use your time more effectively by reading the parts of a paper that are most likely to tell you something new.
Having written this, I realize that my suggestion is perhaps least applicable to mathematics. Mathematicians seem to have a knack of getting to the meat of a research paper without too much flim-flam at the front. The results, instead, are allowed to speak for themselves.

This is good advice for someone who is familiar with the area of research. For an undergraduate student, it might be better to only read the middle of the introduction and the beginning of the conclusion, discarding methods and results.

I share with you something that I already posted in this conversation:
How to write a "Related Work" section in Computer Science?
Perhaps how to read scientific paper faster (taking into account IMRaD structure) is the article that will interest you the most. However, this is what I usually suggest to my students. You may want to start from this link to my website contains a selection of videos that can help you in conducting a related work, depending on where you are in your journey.
You also may want to consider the following tips for reading, selecting and categorizing the works that you want to include:

Not all papers are made equal: heuristics for understanding if a
paper is worth reading or you should move forward to the next
one.
Not all journal and conferences are made equal: understand how
to select good venues (conference or journal) where you can
search for good publication.
Quantity may be important: learn how to read a scientific paper faster and more effectively.
Keep your resources in an orderly manner: master the right features
in MS-Word for handling the related work and managing the growing complexity of
the task.
A literature review is about put some order in the chaos: understand how to categorize the papers that you are reading. In this way it will be beneficial for your readers.


text:
Should I mention in my Statement of Purpose that this university is my "top" choice
I am applying to graduate schools this year for a master's degree.
I've read that some universities will reject some "strong" applicants because they believe this student would be accepted by a "top" university and would rather go there.
I am specifically interested in a particular university (which is not considered a "top" university) because their profile in my area of interest is quite strong, and the location is much more preferable as per personal interests.
How do I make sure they won't reject me on the basis that I'd rather go elsewhere?
Is this not even a problem - and I'm worrying too much?
Should I mention in my SoP that this university is my "top" choice?

Related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/55072/answering-why-are-you-applying-to-our-university-type-question-in-the-stateme?rq=1

I "recommend" using "fewer" quotation marks :-)

@cag51 Not exactly academic, but still very relevant comedy sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DqoQq1zME8. Edit: it is a bit NSFW.

Yes, and you should do so on every SoP you send :)

I wouldn't phrase it exactly like that and I wouldn't spend too many words on it but it is probably fine to mention it briefly.
But if you can say why you are particularly interested in study at this university it won't hurt and might have a small impact.
But, as always, focus the SoP on what you intend to study, to accomplish in study and in your career.
The "location" being important isn't going to help you however. Certain professors on their faculty would be more impactful. Or a research seminar that continues there.

Isn't a major problem in grad school admissions estimating yield, in which case knowing the location is a plus for OP would help?

I won't say something obvious, like "I'm interested in your school because of its strong reputation in x,y,z". The SOP is an opportunity to say something really specific about how your research interests align with their school/faculty/department ethos, etc. Do some digging on each school and the professors you want to work with, and say something that demonstrates a unique and sincere connection, e.g. "Professor XXX's research on xxxxx strongly relates to my current studies in xxxx. If admitted to XXX University, I hope to xyz.... You can sprinkle in really specific details simply by looking on their professional website or looking up talks they've been a part of, etc. Also, the passion for their research should be sincere. I only include the names of professors that I genuinely would like to work with.


text:
How to judge "Impact" of Early Research
I am an undergraduate and  a soon-to-be graduate student. Basically, I am in very early stages of my research career.
I would like to know how to judge the "impact" of the research I'd be doing.
I am very "new", so I don't have much gut feeling
sort of a thing that senior researchers may have.
In particular, suppose I have multiple interesting potential projects to work on; or I see multiple possible extensions to state-of-the-art research.
How to decide research on which one of these problems will have the "most" impact in some sense?
Does it even matter, or there are more important things I should consider?
By impact, I mean impact within the field , not societal impact that this question mentions, although I work in an applied field so short-term societal impact also matters.
My question is different from What are some formal methods in measuring socio-economic impact or broader impact of research topic or individual research papers? in the following ways:

I'm not asking for measuring impact after the research is done, but of "potential" research problems so as to decide between them

I'm not specifically asking for "formal" methods, infact anecdotal answers would be better

At this stage, it's better for you to learn your trade, do good, correct science and work on questions you find interesting, rather than focusing on "impactful" problems. If your science is good, it will have an impact.

It is pretty hard (read "impossible") to judge the impact of something before you have done it. If you are doing true research (examining the unknown) there isn't even any guarantee of success.
But choosing a research path based on its "likely" future impact on the field seems like a wasted life. Rather, choose a path that interests you and that you have, or can develop, some skill with. If that path is generally accepted as having been fruitful and there are still unanswered questions in it then the overall result (for your career) is likely to be fine.
My advice is not to choose something that might end up boring you just because it is currently "hot". If the open questions in the field (subfield) are interesting to you in some way then that field is worth thinking about. Otherwise, choose something that will sustain you internally over some period of time. You can always change direction when you know more. Early on (especially undergraduate) you are mostly in the "skill building" phase. That will, hopefully, pay dividends later whether it has a lot of "essential impact" or not. Seek skill and insight in the short term.


text:
What to do when professor doesn't want to work with you anymore, but you want to submit past work done with him?
During the penultimate semester of my undergrad studies, I had approached a professor with a research idea, which he approved and both of us started working on it. We made substantial progress, but not enough to write a paper.
Later, I made a big mistake. I got really busy with grad school applications, job interviews and completing my graduation requirements. The later was notoriously hard because I had backlogs due to covid-related disruptions. This led to slow progress in the research arena.
The professor became really angry that I wasn't working enough with research, but I was too busy to do anything. When I communicated, he just said that I should value research more than coursework. After this, he stopped replying to my emails and told me he no longer wanted to work with me.
Once I graduated and started with grad school (in a different country), I finished the research work and wrote a paper. I want to submit this paper now. However, the professor had substantial contribution in the work so he should be an author. When I communicated with him again, he just reiterated that he didn't want to work with me.
What can be done in such a case? Would it be advisable to submit the work under my own name; or resume the project with another professor?
Edit to update: I discussed this with my current mentor (with more details) and she has said that it'd be hard to make that paper publishable in top conferences without more inputs from that professor, hence I should just put it on arxiv, drop the project and focus on future. I have adhered to that advice, put it up on arxiv and my website for record, and moved on.

You did not make a big mistake (unless there was more going on than you describe here.) Your professor was a big jerk.

@GlennWillen My mistake was starting research when I didn't have time for it. The professor is not at fault here.

You made a minor and very common mistake. I personally started and then ghosted on research projects twice as an undergrad (once in junior year, once in senior year.) I did feel very bad about it at the time, but neither professor behaved like this about it. Your professor was extremely unprofessional in his handling of it. The behavioral standards for professors are (rightly) much higher than the standards for undergraduate students. (I ended up with an ADHD diagnosis a decade later.)

@GlennWillen I didn't know it was common. Well, I just hope he agrees to coauthor.

This may not be your most immediate concern, but I would like to point out that, in the interest of science, it'd be a loss if you end up giving up on the work you did and not publishing it just because of this complicated situation. At the very least you should ideally be able to post your work an a preprint, with you as the only author, and a prominent acknowledgement mentioning the professor's earlier involvement describing the situation (like an author contribution statement). I would encourage you to consider this, at least once you have an established track record with with other people.

"he just said that I should value research more than coursework."  And if the prof is paying you a stipend and the school is covering your room and board, you can take a few semester to do research.  But since you were an undergrad, I'm assuming you had to pay for each semester or there was a limited scholarship.  Expecting you to dump courses and delay graduation in favor of doing this research is BS.

I feel sorry for you. This post may not answer your question, but take it as a forewarning. If you end up publishing, you will have to pay a publication fee. Who's going to pay if you do not have a PI as last author? A pub fee can be several thousands of $. I had a similar situation with my PhD supervisor who suddenly moved to industry and didn't want to pay for my paper. Fortunately, the second last author agreed to pay on his behalf. If not, i would have lost the paper. Just keep it in mind.

@SimoneBrioschi: not all journals charge publication fees. This is domain-dependent, but in my field for instance (theoretical computer science) there are many very good "diamond open-access" journals where publishing and reading is free

Honestly, I am sorry you got that response. You should, as a student, absolutely prioritize your requirements to graduate over research, and I believe that professor is wrong in suggesting otherwise.
Now, to the solution: You should explicitly ask the professor about this.
Something like:

Dear Prof,
As per our previous discussion, I have now completed and
finished a paper with the work we started and that I finished on XXX,
with the title XXX, please find it attached. I would like to submit
this article for publication, and I believe you should be a coauthor
due to the joint efforts that we did on it. I understand you are not
interested in further collaboration, but I would like your permission
to add you as a coauthor on this work, or if that is not your preference,
permission to list you in the acknowledgments.
Of course, I will handle reviews and the publication
process in any case.
Best
whoisit

Ideally the Prof responds with either of those options. If the prof does not respond you are in a bit of a pickle, as you should not publish anything without an authors approval, but also not giving credit is very bad. Ultimately, if this happens, you may want to forget this project and do something else, depending on how important this is towards your PhD.

Good answer, but you give the person too much power. I suggest you reword  this sentence to be "I understand you are not interested in further collaboration, but I would like your permission to add you as a coauthor on this work, or if you are not interest, permission to list you in the acknowledgments." As worded, the former professor may hold the OP hostage.

I also disagree with your last paragraph. As long the OP makes a reasonable effort to include the former professor, that person should not get to veto or block the publicaiton.

@RichardErickson Agree with the first. My point was more on the lines "have it in writting" The second point: yeah, you are correct, but at the same time, expect possible issues in the future if the omitted professor never replies and you publish without him. Possible to do, but also giving a possibly malicious person ammunition.

That's a good point about the ammunition. In this case, it might be better for the OP to (sadly) give up on the project and focus their energy on their current projects.

Personally, I'd write it as "if I do not hear from within X I will assume you do not wish to be acknowledged for your role in this work and submit without your as co-author". The professor is an absolute douche, do not hesitate to cut him off and carry on without.

@RichardErickson I don't love this idea, but if they do agree to one or the other I suppose it's okay. I was going to say, if you're significant enough to be a coauthor, you can't just move them into the acknowledgements. All people who contributed significantly should be listed as authors on a work, and publication requires consent of all authors. Even if the authors are dicks. But if the coauthor implicitly agrees that their contribution does not clear that bar, by saying yes to being listed in the acknowledgements instead, it is fuzzily on the right side of okay.

I don't think the edit corresponds to @RichardErickson's suggestion -- "acknowledgement to submit without your name on it" doesn't make sense to me.

@nanoman feel free to suggest anything else

@whoisit This is a perfect way to handle this case. If the professor does not reply to this email within a reasonable timeframe, write a follow-up along these lines: "Dear Prof. X, As per my previous email, we are about to submit an article on our work XXX. Please let me known if you are interested in a co-authorship by [reasonable date]. In case we don't hear back from you by then, we will have to proceed with submitting the article as is. In this case, we will have to assume that unfortunately you are not interested in being a co-author. Thanks, Y". Do dare to be assertive.

A long time ago in a previous life, I recall in somebody's acknowledgements "No thanks can be sufficient for the inestimable contributions made by professor ..." (which has a double meaning, and friends of the author knew full well which meaning was intended! )

Unfortunately I have to disagree with everybody who assumes as implicit confirmation through a non-response is sufficient. As llama says, anybody who contributed significantly to a piece of work should be listed as an author, and publication requires the consent of all authors. Even if those authors are dicks. And consent needs to be explicitly given. It is very sad that the OP is in this situation, but sadly being a dick back at the prof is not the answer. Not responding to "If you don't respond to this by date X, I will assume you consent to this" does not equal giving consent.

@penelope yeah, I agree with you on this. Someone not replying is not agreeing to anything, which is why I worded my post as I did. I am also surprised that people suggest otherwise.

Authorship is about more than giving credit, its also about taking responsibility. An author on a paper is responsible for for the content of a paper, and you cannot guarentee the truth, ethicallness and correctness of work that you did not do. This is also why authors CAN veto the publication of work they contributed to, but no longer wish to be publised. A lot of acadmia runs on trust, and this professor has unforntunately violated the OPs trust, but it is what it is.

I am afraid, it is tricky to submit without the agreement of all co-authors especially if they explicitly refuse to give this agreement. If the prof says no, you could ask the editors of the journal how to handle this. They usually have reasonable approaches to deceased or uncontactable coauthors. Adversarial coauthors may be more difficult to handle, but they may have protocols in place for that.

@penelope So what is the practical problem with just assuming consent if no answer is given? I do not see why consent has to be explicit. You could also say that working with someone on a research project is implicit consent to publish the results.

@JFabianMeier You could think that, and somebody else could think differently, and that's the practical problem. If you and the person you're working with both say that, and make it explicit, there is no problem. In practice, there are many other areas where assuming consent if no answer is given ranges from immoral to illegal, from intimacy, body autonomy, and general privacy. As they say, assumption is the mother of all mistakes.

@JFabianMeier In this specific case, since the OP was working with a professor who didn't exactly demonstrate a wealth of understanding in the past, attempting to publish this work without the profs consent, with or without the profs name on the paper, could in both cases result in the prof blocking the publication or even worse, to a possible retraction of the paper after publication. Neither of which will be great for the OP. Not saying it's likely, but it is possible.

@penelope and llama: I'd disagree. If professor refuses to be a coauthor or does not react, I think it's OK to publish without him as an author but with a visible acknowledgement of the professor's involvement, e.g., something like an author contribution statement. You can't list as a coauthor someone who doesn't want to, and you shouldn't publish work featuring someone's contribution without acknowledging it, but in this case I think it's fair? Especially if OP wrote the paper themselves: if someone contributed but doesn't want coauthorship, you can still acknowledge them.

In my opinion, if you collaborate with people on research and it leads to results, you have a duty to either be a co-author (meaning doing some share of the work, taking responsibility, and generally meeting the criteria for co-authorship), or, if you don't want to be involved, accept to let others do something with the research (and "just" acknowledge you if you were offered co-authorship and didn't accept). I'd say the situation is different if two authors want to move the project forward and disagree how, but this does not seem to be the case here.

@a3nm the fact that you needed to clarify that this is your opinion (that I mostly share) makes it clear that is not everyones opinion, and thus you can't just assume everyone else thinks the same and agrees.

@a3nm What I'm talking about has nothing to do with fair. In fact, the situation is most certainly not fair to the student. What I'm saying is that it isn't right to publish without all the authors' express permission, and it isn't right to remove a contributor from the author list either, and while it's horribly unfair, I also outline some of the potential consequences for the OP if they go down this route and their totally unfair prof decides to pursue it.

Sorry your undergrad mentor was a jerk.
You're almost certainly better off not working with them anymore.

What can be done in such a case? Would it be advisable to submit the work under my own name; or resume the project with another professor?

Talk to your current graduate advisor.
A lot of this is context dependent that cannot be captured online.
You current professor can help you see the big picture with questions such as

Is this paper the best use of your time? You might be better off just working on your graduate project. I had a PhD committee member tell me that about papers from my PhD dissertation during my postdoc. It's not personal, it's just business.
How good is your projects and how likely is the paper to be published? I have observed that many people do not understand what it takes to write a publishable paper until they have experience.
What are the ethics and norms for your specific field?

If your current supervisor feels like trying to publish this paper is a good use of your time, you could cc them on the email above and they can help  arbitrate.

@Dawn is right, bringing your current supervisor into the discussion with your undergrad mentor might be a good way forward. Depending on the details of the situation it might even make sense for your current supervisor to directly write to your undergrad mentor (e.g. if they have some previous contact).

Keep your contributions to the paper and remove any/all contributions from this professor. This might require some newly written and/or updated sections, but it is worth it. Once you have revised this paper to the point in which it reflects YOUR voice, submit it as a new solo-authored paper for publication consideration. Best wishes to you on this leg of your academic/professional journey!

From a legal point of view, if he contributed to the work, he has intellectual property rights over it, therefore it is not possible to submit the article without his permission. Most journals will ask you to confirm that you obtained the permission from all authors.
Is it possible to edit the paper substantially, so that it's your contribution only? You did not disclose much details on the content, so it's hard to understand and give advice.
From the last part of your answer, it seems that you already tried to contact him again and he confirmed he doesn't want to collaborate with you, so if you insist it might be seen as harassment (depending on your jurisdiction).
Maybe you can ask advice to someone in his department who can mediate between you and him

I'm not a lawyer but I think "intellectual property" covers the written form of the work (here, the paper), not the idea; and the writing here was done by the student who's asking. The question is about academic ethics, not intellectual property law. (I agree with you that there would be an intellectual property aspect as well if the professor had been involved in the writing.)

I am an attorney. Intellectual property covers much more than just the writing, for example, the data provided, the figures, software etc. The OP did not disclose many details about the content of the article, so why are you claiming that the writing has been done by the student only? But even then, IP is a different concept than just the copyright of the written text. I imagine that the 4 people who downvoted my answer are not lawyers.

Hi, thanks for the clarification! I agree that copyright could extend to other things like figures, code, data, etc. I guess that from the question I suspected that the "involvement" of the professor was just discussing ideas and providing guidance, with the student afterwards writing the paper and preparing the deliverables that may be copyrightable. But I agree this is just an assumption, maybe unwarranted from what the question says.

About the downvotes, I think the reason may be that your answer gives the impression that this is a question about intellectual property. While I agree there may potentially be copyright concerns, I think the question is mostly one about professional ethics (authorship, etc.). I guess the OP is more worried about potential damage to their career because they violated academic norms, not about getting sued for copyright infringement. This is just my interpretation however!


text:
Does not being able to reproduce results in experiment-based assigments constitute cheating?
At my university, in a Computer Systems course I'm TAing,
there are some experiment based assignments in which students are expected to
perform experiments, record the results and prepare a report to explain the results.
Post Assignment submission, there's a viva. They're expected to demo the experiments on the same laptops/PCs they did the assignment on.
During the viva, many students are able to reproduce results close to the ones they
reported in the assignment submission, while for others there are
large deviations.
Slight deviations are okay (and even expected), but large ones are not.
Does this constitute cheating?
Clarification:
Demo testing is not running a single instance.
Students are expected to report average, standard deviation
taken over a very large number of instances of the experiment.
On all machines where the TAs have performed the experiments, we have been able to reproduce the results with slight deviations later.
That's why I said slight deviations are okay, but
Large deviations from the reported results might mean they've not honestly reported their own results, but instead mentioned copied, slightly-modified results taken from their friends' assignments.

I'm confused. What sorts of "experiment"? And if they depend on data, what is the source of it?

@Buffy An example is measuring how long it takes for compiling a particular (given) C program with different compiler flags

Where is the idea that this could be cheating coming from? Your idea? The instructor's?

Do you mean that they are very slow in typing the make command with all the needed flags at viva?

I have a reasonably beefy, recent model desktop machine. I play with Python, mostly for fun. How fast my Python environment starts up and runs a program is heavily dependent on what else is running. In particular, having an Acrobat Pro instance makes my Python environment amazingly slow...

As a computer scientist, surely you realize that there are all kinds of honest bugs that could manifest like this.  Maybe the best test would be if the student is able to explain the discrepancy (but that might turn out to be a lot more difficult than coding the assignment in the first place :)

Hanlon's Razor: Never assume malice when stupidity would suffice. How can you be sure this isn't an 'honest mistake' - the student has mis-copied results/forgotten to update them after improving their code/used the wrong formula/whatever?

The clarification makes it sound to me like you are not understanding the CS issues raised in the comments/answers here. I'd very strongly suggest you understand these concepts in depth before going and making any accusations against students.

If they can't reproduce the results because they falsified the data, it's cheating.  If they can't reproduce the results because they stole the data, it's cheating.
If they can't reproduce the data because they're not good at doing experiments, it's not cheating.  If they can't reproduce the data because they're not good at designing experiments, it's not cheating.  If they can't reproduce the data because they have a confounding variable they don't know about or don't know how to hold constant, it's not cheating.

All of the above non-cheating issues are still reasons to fail the assignment.

@BrianBorchers. Can't really comment to that, because I don't know the assignment, but I know investigators who's whole careers have been writing up surprising findings that turned out to be due to confounders.

I would suggest that in the case of elapsed time as a measure of program efficiency, a single run tells you absolutely nothing, as the load on a modern computer is very (very very) difficult to control, unlike an old IBM 1130. Lots of background processes may be running with no user control (or very little).
That is why we don't measure the efficiency of algorithms in general using elapsed time to run, but with theoretical measures instead (number of comparisons, number of data swaps,...).
This might be especially true of a laptop that is started or awakened in a new (wifi...) environment. The temperature of the CPU might even be a factor. It takes my desktop almost five minutes in the morning to start my browser since it is seldom restarted and the browser needs to swap out other processes to get enough ram to run, especially since the auto-backup program also demands service on awakening.
If time means anything at all (elapsed time), it needs to be averaged over a large number of runs.
That said, if a compiler is poorly written, then the compilation time might differ wildly on similar seeming programs.
So, no, in itself, a slow run in a viva means nothing in itself. But it might indicate lots of things that require further exploration.

To say something explicitly about cheating, I doubt that it is a valid indicator, especially given that the student knows about the viva that will occur. There would be little point and a lot of risk in trying lie or fake something in the written report in that scenario. It might indicate other flaws in the program or the experiment, of course.

Indeed, the assignment is poorly designed at best...

It does not constitute to cheating in and on itself, but it does raise questions in my opinion. The students should be able to explain to you why there are such large deviations, and if they're unable to, it might be worth looking into their work further if you still suspect cheating.
I'm not sure why deviations are expected. (They might be, I'm just not sure what experiments you're conducting.) In my experience, setting seed values for RNGs works very well to ensure that results are consistent across multiple experiments.

experiments are not based on RNGs (e.g. measuring how long it takes for compiling a C program with different settings)

@whoisit In that case, are you accounting for power plans? If a student times the compilation at submission with their laptop plugged in but does the demo on battery power, there could be significant changes in performance from that alone.

I'm trying to recall where exactly I got this example from. It may have been in "Code Complete" by Steve McConnell but I don't have a page reference, so I could could be wrong.
The story is, the famous author was being asked to debug a timing issue with a menu system in a major software product. At times it would load quickly, meeting the timing requirements. But at other times it would take ages to load. After some investigation, including using a debugger to crawl through the code, he discovered it was a swap-out issue. If part of the code was not called for a certain time, the system would swap it out of memory. Then, to call the function, the swapped out portion had to be swapped back in. This meant that many meg of code had to be found on the hard drive, swapped into RAM, and then used. And depending on exactly what was swapped in and out, the amount of RAM could vary quite widely. So, getting the File menu to open would, under the "perfect storm" conditions, take 15 seconds.
So you need to be careful about using timing as a metric on code. It requires careful thought to be sure you are not running into such issues. And the reason for changes in timing may be entirely NOT obvious.

That is called "thrashing" actually and it is a common issue when memory is a bit tight as in most small systems.

@Buffy No, sorry, it's not thrashing.  Thrashing is when there are competing calls for the same resource from multiple clients. The system begins to spend undue time switching between the clients, and diminishing time actually fulfilling the client requests. This was a single app that got part of itself swapped out.

My OS class taught me that this is called thrashing.  Terminology might have shifted since I was a student, I suppose.

@BobaFit, here the resource is RAM (or equivalent) memory and the "clients" can actually be different parts of the same program. It isn't always possible to load the entire image into the allotted memory.

@Buffy But there was only one call for the resource, from the menu system. there were no competing calls. And it didn't take a long time because it was competing with anything, just because it took a long time to load a big chunk of disk to ram.

@BobaFit Your definition seems far more narrow than the one at e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrashing_(computer_science) - yours would be but one example case.

@BryanKrause Note that the definition you linked talks about excessive page faults. The example I gave involved ONE page fault. It's not thrashing.


text:
Mentioning "failed" research in CV/SoP
I am an UG senior year student, now applying to graduate schools.
One of my research experiences was in Theoretical CS.  Although I find TCS quite tough, I approached a professor for working with them.
Considering that I was "new", most of my work involved literature review, and even though we
had a few problem statements - we were unable to make any substantial progress
towards any of them, despite working for almost two semesters.
This experience showed me I was not made for TCS, and I moved on to approach professors in other areas of CS.
I have 3 other LoRs, which would be stronger than if this professor writes one, so they cannot address this issue.
My question is: Considering that this is indeed a research experience but one without any kind of "results": Should I mention this experience in my CV or SoP, and if  so, how?

Yes! You definitely should. That was a valuable research experience. Make sure to include all the tasks you did with the supervisor. No need to mention the outcome if there is none meaningful

Let me recommend that the CV is the place for this, not the SoP. Make the latter entirely forward looking: what you intend to accomplish and your short and long-term goals. The CV is about the past. The SoP about the future.

@Buffy Some universities ask for that in SoP. For example, UIUC says this about the SoP : "It is good to include any past work history, your interests, and reasons for pursuing a graduate degree in computer science."

But only in so far as they support the future goals. If you make it about the past you lose an opportunity.