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Balancing between students who do homework and those who do not
This other question is about assigning videos as homework and this one is about what to do when students do not do their homework. However, there is another question to ask which is similar, but I think different, from these two.
If you have a class of 70 students and you assign some homework on which you will base the following class, and 40% of the students do not do the homework, that subsequent class becomes quite unmanageable. If you proceed as scheduled, the 40% will be lost, they cannot contribute, and eventually become distracting for the rest of the class.
If you do not run the class as scheduled, the students who did the homework the first time will see there is little benefit of doing the home and little cost of not doing it. For this reason, in the past, I have been quite strict. Students who did not do the homework get kicked out and marked absent (too many absences and they automatically fail the module). The problem with this approach is that kicking 40% out leaves me with a very high failure rate and in the end I just end up taking time which would otherwise be free for me to do as I wish and I must dedicate that time to these students who failed (for whatever reason).
So, I find myself in a difficult situation. Kicking students out hurts them but hurts me too. The problem is that I value my time much more than they value theirs so it ends up hurting me more than them. If I don't kick them out, my schedule gets destroyed.
How can one find balance in the classroom when a large percentage of students do not do the homework? Is there a way other than simply removing large chunks and failing them? Is thee a more enlightened way?
Important Note: In my modules grades are pass/fail - I do not have the option to simply lower their grade.

I must say you're not alone and I feel your pain. I have professor friends who told me the very same thing. They told the students the final exam problems would be from those homeworks. Still, more than half don't do them.

Are there possibilities to make certain tasks mandatory in the class? If so then the pass/fail will be directly affected by doing/not doing the tasks.

@PeterJansson The 'stick' I have available to me is simply to mark them absent with the understanding that too many absences means an automatic fail. The threshold is quite low so marking them absent just a few times will fail them.

If 40% of the students aren't doing their homework, and you rely upon students doing homework for your pedagogy style to work, then something is seriously wrong.
You have two options:
(1) Make homework dramatically more appealing.

Put much more effort into the homework--make it fun!  E.g. calculate strain on an iPhone screen instead of a aluminum sheet; don't have someone read a novel but rather ask key questions about it such as to list all the times some character/historical figure expressed defiance against the state.
Institute quizzes that are drawn directly from the homework.  Do them practically every day.  Staring at a blank sheet of paper and not knowing what to do is a lot more uncomfortable than hearing you babble about something incomprehensible.
Change the grading scheme so homework is most of the grade (if you're allowed).

(2) Make homework dramatically less necessary.  (Note: usually not an option for mathematics.)

Do the key problems on the board in class instead of assigning them as homework.  (Assign a similar problem as homework, possibly after you've done it in class.)  Not possible for literature review, of course.
Rely upon in-class participation instead (if you have the personality to make it work, and the homework is of the right type).
Don't make the learning environment one which requires the students to do the homework in order to understand most of the next lecture.  Lecture on the important points, review at the end of one lecture and the beginning of the next, and go on.  They might not develop their skills at doing problems, but at least they'll have some hope of following for a while.  Probably won't work with literature, but almost everything else can be quite successful.

Your point (1) is helpful but your point (2) doesn't help me much. The goal of getting the students to do homework is to progress their learning outside of the classroom. If they do not do the homework, I will spend more of the limited class time covering the basics which means less learning for the class overall.

@earthling A friend of mine read this answer. He pretty much agree with you. Point(2) is not an option for him(he is a math professor). The 2nd and 3rd bullet of point(1) are helpful. But, he had to teach much less than he wanted to. The end result was that the strong students learned less. It's a trade off between the whole class learn more vs. strong students learn more. He asked me to tell you here(he doesn't have reps to write comment.

Don't make the learning environment one which requires the students to do the homework in order to understand — I cant imagine any worthwhile class that this suggestion wouldn't make worthless.

@JeffE - It's very subject-dependent.  I can't imagine a math class where you could understand without doing a fair bit of homework.  On the other hand, I've been in several biology classes where homework helped a little but wasn't essential: the lectures were masterfully delivered in a memorable way and contained all the important factual material.

@earthling - Unfortunately, if 40% of your students aren't doing the homework and making it more appealing doesn't work, you are pretty much obligated to do (2), disappointing as it may be.  I'd love to be able to just teach the best and most motivated students; it's much more rewarding.  But that's not (usually) the job description--you're trying also to instill basic competency and familiarity in people who have the class as a prerequisite, who aren't particularly passionate but would like to learn something, etc. etc..

@RexKerr: I will resist the No True Scotsman urge.

I use online quizzes (Moodle, but other options exist) to test knowledge (multiple-choice) prior to course lectures. This applies to point (1) by making it more appealing. The quizzes require reading, and students get two attempts (highest score is recorded). Cuts down a lot on basic material I have to deliver; allows classes to be more applied and interactive.

"I will spend more of the limited class time covering the basics which means less learning for the class overall" -- just to check, you are working within the student's "time budget" for the class? If there aren't good guidelines and clear expectations how much time the class will take, then a student who thought they signed up for one hour class a week and actually gets one hour class and two hours reading, can't necessarily conjure another two hours a week out of nowhere for the benefit of more learning overall.

... basically I'm saying maybe there's a general problem that students can't (or aren't) planning their workload accurately, nothing particularly to do with the work you're giving them. You can't have all the professors competing to make their homework the most attractive so that the students skip someone else's. You all want them to do all of it.

@earthling - I think Steve's two comments above are for you, not regarding my answer.

@SteveJessop - Students typically have considerable flexibility in their schedule.  Those who work as well or are parents may not, but most can cut back on some inessential activity in order to participate more in a worthwhile class.  I don't think budgets are fixed--make it more engaging and the budget will grow (and not necessarily at the expense of other classes).

@RexKerr: You seem to assume it's impossible to reach the upper reasonable limit on inflexible time demands on the students. I don't teach at a university, but the test I applied here is just, "what if everyone said that?". Students are left with free time for a reason, and that reason is not for essential course workload. If every class is a few hours over expectation then (to over-simplify) the chess club dies. All I'm saying is to check whether the class is advertised accurately. If it says "3 hours a week" and it is 3 hours a week, no foul.

... if it says 1 and is 3 then we don't get to act surprised if the majority of students don't make the time, regardless of how interesting the material is, because we chose to pull a bait-and-switch ;-) Advertise it as 3, more of our students will be prepared to do the essential work. Or advertise it as 1 and make the extra 2 hours optional. Or if there's no mechanism to advertise time (all classes are assumed roughly the same), then stick to the university's idea of a reasonable workload per class.

Well, you've stumbled upon a key and age-old pedagogical issue, and one that doesn't have an easy answer.  I would urge you to find an "80%" solution (meaning, don't try to solve the problem completely), and then work to within the parameters of that solution.  Kicking out 40% of the class isn't tenable for your long-term job security, I assure you.  Assuming your question is in regard to a collegiate class, then you do have the option to fall back onto

this is your education that you're paying for, so it's up to you to take it seriously, which means doing the work.

As a first-order solution, you can make sure that not doing the homework will affect their grades significantly so that they do fail, and then let them know this on the syllabus, on the first day of class, and regularly.  Students who do not do the work will feel the pain when they receive their final grade.  You also have proof (no completed work) when parents and administrators come with questions.
What this solution doesn't solve is the group that

eventually become distracting for the rest of the class.

This is possibly the hardest part of the puzzle.  I have four suggestions:

Re-organize your class so that those students cannot be distracting.  If large-class participation is the issue, then start forming smaller groups, and give the participating members the ability to police the disruptions (e.g., have each group grade individual members' participation).
If possible, find a way to weed out those students before they arrive in your class--you may be able to do this via a more strict prerequisite requirement (e.g., certain classes, or certain grades within previous classes).
Make the homework more manageable.  On the one hand, this seems to be giving in to the problem, but if they're not doing the work and have a reason other than "I don't want to," then there may be a way to give different assignments that they will attempt.
Find out what classes they've had previous to yours, and ask the instructors of those classes whether they had the same issues.  You can get a lot of good information about certain groups of students by talking these sorts of issues over with other faculty.  If you do find a faculty member who successfully dealt with those students, ask for suggestions, or, even better, ask if you can observe a couple of classes to get a feel for the types of strategies that teacher uses.

Thanks for the ideas. A number of issues exist in implementation. First, the students never pay their own tuition - parents do. You'd think the students would care about wasting family money but the 'trouble' students don't seem to care.  Pre-req's are not a workable solution as this area is not under faculty control in this program. Other teachers seem to have the same problem and just give less homework. I have to think about your point (1). I'm not sure how to implement that. Anything suggested reading on that point?

@earthling Interesting.  If the parents pay the tuition, you may have some leverage to contact the parents about their children.  This may be illegal if the students are above a certain age (i.e., you have to deal directly with adults and can't discuss grades, etc. with parents of adults), but this may be a good place to start if you can.  Then again, that's more of a high school solution, not a college one.  As for the other teachers: do they give less homework because they've given up, or because they have solutions that work?

@earthling As to ideas for point (1), I don't know enough about your class to suggest reading. You might start with a Google search for "pedagogy small group discussions" or "pedagogy turning lectures into small groups.", and seeing if you can find results that fit your class.

The teachers do not give homework because it is easier to stand-and-deliver then fight against a large percentage of students who do not do the homework. So, I would say they have given up.

@earthling they have given up.  That's too bad, but not surprising. It sounds like you're at an institution where learning isn't a particularly valued outcome, at least for the classes/students you're teaching. That said, you can buck the trend, but it will take fortitude and the willingness to make changes to your classroom that may mean longer hours planning and even more frustration. There are ways to combat institutional apathy, though, and asking these types of questions is a good start.

@earthling I've been thinking more about this -- what exactly are the ramifications if a student fails your class? I assume this would set them back somewhat? Is failing even a punitive measure?

+1 for "Kicking out 40% of the class isn't tenable for your long-term job security, I assure you."

@ChrisGregg Failing means paying a fee to submit the assignments anyway. This can only be done once. Most students have 2 chances to pass. Students who cannot submit (too many absences) only get one chance and that does require a payment. If they fail on this extra chance, they must take the subject again but they can remain with their classmates for the rest of the program, they just must re-take the failed module again (and pass) before graduation.

@earthling I see -- that may explain the apathy, anyway.

Disregarding that life is not fair, I've always found the fixed format of school unfair. Most ppl do not have a learning type that suits school perfectly, and a significant number of really talented ppl is a total unfit for the system of listening 8hrs, and then doing homework. Personally, I've always had to use my spare time to learn stuff; I've got to do it myself. Actually, this goes so far that this cost me quite a few school grades, despite the fact that this is the kind of learner perfectly suited for lifelong learning ...

... (so a perfect fit for quite a few higher-up jobs). Often, I found teachers/lectures explanations incomplete and non-saturating, plus I couldn't keep my attention up as would have been required. I am a total self-learner, and I am great on that, and in the meanwhile outperform some of my old teachers/lectures. So, from personal experience, making homework something that affects final grades significantly will sieve out too many talented ppl who need their spare time for actually learning, instead of doing homework. IMHO, sanction the troublemakers, but not flat out every non-homeworker.

Oh, and what I observe now on new students around their 30s, those who worked a few years, and now want to climb up the ladder, homework can be really bad to them, despite their potential. People 30 and older often have more Real Life problems than twens, some have children, some have parents that need help, or funeral, finance is often worse (no support by parents or state). That's of course whining for them on one hand, but factually this lowers the callable potential you could profit from.

Your approach of kicking out the students who didn't do the home work is rather draconian, and while seductive as a zero-tolerance policy, is likely to cause more harm to you than good.
Is there a (strong) positive correlation between student completion of homework and final grade for the overall module/unit/paper? If so, I suggest that you appeal to the students' self-interest by showing a plot of this correlation to your students at the beginning of your course, and throughout the course.
Regarding what to do during class, I would make frequent reference to the homework along the lines of, e.g.

"If you attempted the homework exercise, you would know why this line of the derivation follows from the previous line so I'm not going to go into it here. This sort of thing often comes up in exams.",
"The homework exercise was the first part of a past exam question relating to this topic. We're going to explore the topic in more detail now",
"The homework exercise asked you to think about why this next piece of argument might be flawed."

What I am advocating is a policy where you strongly advise students to complete the homework, so that they are in a better position to understand the material and which appeals to the student's desire to pass the exam/test.
Completing the homework is not a necessary prerequisite to understanding the material of the present lecture, but would be very very useful to the students indeed when it comes time to revise for the course.

Is there a (strong) positive correlation between student completion of homework and final grade for the overall module/unit/paper? - The module is pass/fail. Yes, the students who do the homework pass and most of the students who do not, end up failing. Those who fail sometimes drop and move to another school which they view as more lenient.

Here's one idea you could try: Have the students go to the front of the entire class, and either solve a problem on the board, or else explain something from the homework assignment.
Your goal would be to create an activity where anyone who completed the homework should have no problem completing the task, but those who did not do the homework stand a good chance of struggling mightily.
Make it an in-class game of sorts by pulling names out of a hat.
If students come unprepared, at least they will be more nervous and less casual about it. Perhaps that might increase your participation rate.
You might also do something like this: any student who doesn't turn in an assignment gets their name written down on five more index cards, which are subsequently added to the hat, thereby sharply increasing the likelihood that they will get picked in future classes. Make sure the students are well aware of that practice.

a small alteration to the algorithm: start doing this stand-up tasks after the first assignment, and only use names that have missed/failed assignments. This is sharper :)

I doubt that many will agree with me, but this is what I would do if I could:
(1) If someone can't participate in a class because they haven't done the homework, just ignore them and continue the lesson.  If they get lost, just tell them that would have been learned if you had done the homework, and move on.
(2) Don't kick people out of class if they haven't done their homework.  (But do kick them out, of course, if they become disruptive because they keep asking about things they should know already.)
(3) Calculate their grade however you will.  But allow an "alternate grading" that emphasizes midterms, finals, and other tests; on the grounds that if they get a good grade there they obviously know the material; even if they hardly show up and/or never do homework.  Those who choose this alternative should also face a short oral exam to ensure they really understand the subject matter and haven't just memorized the details without being able to show how they got there.

I sympathise with your predicament, but disagree with your methods.  One thing that strikes me as strange about this question is that you appear to be sufficiently in control of the class to be able to remove 40% of this cohort from the classroom, but you worry that you are insufficiently in control to prevent these same people from disturbing the class if they are present.  I would have thought that if you are sufficiently authoritative to do the former, then it should be possible to allow people to stay, but prevent them from disturbing others.  In fact, I would have thought that this would be substantially less effort than going to the trouble of physically removing almost half of the class.
The reason to raise this incongruity is that (at a tertiary academic level) it is generally a good idea to present the students with resources to learn, and let them decide whether or not they benefit from these resources.  It is best to grade students on merit rather than effort, and a student who is able to master the material should not fail the course simply because they have declined to learn it in the manner you have specified.  University students are adults, and they should be expected to make use of the provided resources in whatever way that allows them to learn the subject, with knowledge being the final test.
Removing students from the class means that they are denied one of the resources for learning the material, on the basis of having eschewed another resource (the homework).  Moreover, the fact that a student can fail the course via these "absences" means that a student who is able to learn the material through self-study --without doing the homework-- will nonetheless fail, even if they have mastered the subject matter.  With the greatest of sympathy, this strikes me as a case where the instructor is testing compliance rather than knowledge.
It might be worth exploring whether there are ways that you can allow students to remain in your class without letting them disturb the class for others.  This might mean imposing a moratorium on asking questions if you haven't done the homework, but even then, that is less of a loss than being required to leave (and then marked absent and possibly failing).  This approach would have the benefit of allowing students to learn from the resources that they determine to be worthwhile to them, and to be directly exposed to how difficult it is to follow your class when they have not done the homework.

Thanks for your insights. The challenge is when you design the in-class time to be based on the pre-reading and large groups of students refuse to do the reading, they cannot participate in a meaningful way. They end up chit-chatting with their friends which builds to a low roar making it impractical to have a proper discussion with the students who did the reading. It is nice to think that "there is a way" but I do not know the way (hence, my question). They don't ask questions because they know too little, having refused doing the reading. These are always the weakest students.

Okay, that is a better explanation of the problem, and you have obviously made a bona fide effort to explore other options.  If I think of a further suggestion to contemplate, I'll add it here.


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Why do people hang up papers on their doors?
This has been puzzling me for a long time, I have seen professors and other academic people hang up their research papers on their doors. What is the purpose of this?
My first guess was they were announcing some important papers related to a class they are lecturing, so students can look at them without disturbing professor. This doesn't feel right because there are not many papers studied in a typical class and there is internet to announce these things.
As the time passed I started thinking it is a way of advertising. But, this also doesn't make sense because web pages exists to serve this purpose and few people come to visit the office physically.
Maybe this practice is limited to my country, but any answer is appreciated.

Which country are you talking about?

What? I see all kinds of things on office doors but haven't seen research papers...

I heard that there is an office in my department where rejected papers of people inside that office are hung on the door... I guess that different people have different ideas about how to decorate their door

So people can read them, of course.

@JeffE maybe in case you have to wait at the door, as a passtime.

I would like to add that another reason may be that the alternative of hanging reviewers is typically frowned upon.

If you hang them on the window, they block out the light.

In addition to Massimo's question of where is this happening, in what departments?  all?  I have never seen this either.

@ff524: Indeed, and that is by no means specific to academia compared to other workplaces.

One of my professor has a photo of him in defensive position with boxing gloves and a nasty look, over which it's written Are you sure that it's office hour?

In Germany, to my understanding, this was a long-established and traditional practice for quite a long time before Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to a church door. Wikipedia cites “Oberman, Heiko, Luther, Man between God and the Devil” for the statement that doing so was “according to university custom.”

I've seen them mounted onto a board specifically dedicated to papers, but never on faculty doors.

because web pages exist ... agreed, but this custom predates the internet.  Some of us here are old enough to remember back to those days.

The internet is wide and expansive, and there is no need for students to visit the pages on which a professor might post papers that she just happens to like (as opposed to those which are actually being assigned). So posting such papers on office doors might actually garner a wider audience (at least among the student body) than just posting them online. For example, this was pretty common practice in the Physics department at my school; my favorite paper posted was the unified theory of Superman's powers.

In addition to the reasons mentioned by others, I think there may be something of the big-game trophy hunter about the practice:  "Behold, visitor, I am a mighty scientist, capable of hunting the fearsome [prestigious journal]!"

...or the near-extinct [generous funding agency].

If you have worked hard on a specific research question and finally have your peers approve of your work through a review process, would you not want to display the result? Basically, it is one way in which to show any passer-by that, yes, something is actually accomplished within the walls of the office. I have seen many variants on the topic. I have seen a world map with journal article title and abstract tied with a string to a point on the map where the work was done.
Essentially, it is an analog analogue to a web page or site such as ResearchGate where you highlight your recent publications, in this case, of course, to students and peers in the department rather than a wider audience. The main purpose is, as you also point out, better served by a web site. But, if you end up waiting to for an audience with the professor, you may actually look at the posted paper and get to know something you would not necessarily otherwise check out. So, I think the main purpose now is "just" to display something that has taken time and effort with some pride.

On a side note, I worked in a lab where PhD Students were "suggested" to keep their latest poster in some wall close to their desk, which turned to be quite useful every time a visitor arrived. Papers may not be so "visually catchy" at a first glance. On a side (joke) note, robotics departments can become cool places to visit if this kind of demos become standard, not so much for others, like epidemics research.

I've seen just the first page printed rather large so the abstract is easy to read before as well.

There's often a good reason to post something on an office door: many academic buildings have long corridors of similar looking office doors, so posting something on it helps an office stand out. It doesn't really matter what; once your students (or colleagues!) have found your office, it's easier for them to find it again, because it's easier for most people to spot visual cues like the paper titles and even just the arrangement of papers rather than the door number or remembering it's the third door.
As for why papers, I assume a combination of being proud of the accomplishment and hoping one might catch the eye of a passerby, student or colleague. The audience who sees it is quite different from the people likely to look at the list of papers on a website.

For the same reason that a house has pictures of the family living it, or a photographer who has some of its fine prints in his studio. Everyone is proud of what accomplished, so he/she displays it. Also, office walls need decoration as any other human living environment, so why not hanging the papers or the posters? They can also function as "wall of memory" or as "talking bibliography" of an academic's career.

I used to see this all the time in my undergraduate university, so I know just where you're coming from. While I never asked specifically about them, I may have an answer based purely on my experiences.
Whenever I had a meeting with one of my professors, I would usually arrive a couple minutes early and the professor would usually be finishing up their previous meeting with student/colleague/phone conversation. Obviously I wouldn't want to intrude until they were finished but I did want to be able to go in as soon as they were done, so I would loiter outside their office until I could go in. If the professor had some of their research papers up on or next to their door, I could scan the titles and quickly learn about some of the topics they were interested in and what work they had done recently. This wasn't something that I would look up on their website, it was just something I could quickly learn about them in two minutes and file away for later. If they've published on something I was interested in, I could mention it in our meeting. If I was utterly confused and had no interest, no harm done. I always thought of it as a way for professors to market themselves to students who don't see them very often and are more acquaintances to the professor or department. Or perhaps like magazines that medical offices put in the waiting room - they're not supposed to send a message, they're there to pass the time and if you're in the mood for it you can learn something.
So in short, I think the papers are there to reach out to the audience that wouldn't look at your website and doesn't know a lot about your field, but may be interested either in your work or in learning something new about your field of study.

What kind of departments?  and what country/type of school?  Conference posters I commonly see on doors, but research papers never.

The school was in the United States and I used to see papers on doors of biology, math, neuroscience, and physiology professors. The school had conference posters up in general hallway areas, but offices were tucked away from the main hallways so there usually weren't many posters. Also usually the posters highlighted undergraduate student research, not the research of the professors.

Interesting, I'm in the US (in math) and have never noticed this.  I'll need to keep an eye out.  (By the way, by conference posters I meant posters that advertise a conference a professor may have a personal interest in, not student research posters presented at conferences--indeed, those are usually just up in hallways or bulletin boards.)

It might also be worth mentioning that this school was focused on teaching undergraduates, particularly those in the health professions. The papers may also have been there to show focused students what a life in academia (versus applied medicine) was like.
Thanks for the clarification on the conference posters - I was clearly thinking of research posters!

Who can say for sure but the professors in question? It may simply be a cheap and considerate way of letting interested colleagues or students have access to a hard copy, avoiding both the inconvenience of continually being asked to provide one or the awkwardness and waste that comes with offering a copy to one who doesn't wish to read it. A habit retained from a pre-digital age, perhaps.
A long time ago in an Oxford college far away, the majority of my peers attempted to confine academic work to a couple of busy hours mid-morning, leaving the rest of the day free for the usual business of undergrads (traditionally smoking, drinking or various means of working up a sweat). The hours 9-12 were when most of the undergraduate assignments were handed in, new ones were handed out, lectures were attended and tutorials were grimly endured by all parties. To avoid constant interruption during these busy hours when they were frequently tutoring, several tutors would keep the doors to their rooms firmly shut and only communicate with the wider world via the envelopes pinned thereon. Assignments for students to collect, student essays awaiting appraisal, reading lists and wotnot, would all pass through the vertical mailbox system on the outside of the tutor's door.

My experience is that this is mostly done to communicate new publications and general scientific progress to the rest of the department.
Specially in larger departments that cover different sub fields, this is a way to externalize what everyone is doing. Posting the abstract/first page of a published paper in the communal area was encouraged and widely adopted in my previous Computer Science department.
Although most researches also post newly published papers to their website, having these new papers on their door or in a communal area (kitchen or water cooler) is a nice way to share what is going on in the department. I rarely check my colleagues' websites, but I enjoy reading abstracts or the first page of their papers when I encounter them.

In addition to the other good answers, four good reasons noone's mentioned yet:

Not every student/research partner/ visitor will have an academic login or online access to journals/JSTOR/proceedings/whatever, or in that discipline. That stuff costs big bucks.
Especially people from industry, prospective students, auditing students, people from other departments/disciplines [1], high school students, visitors, journalists, friends and family of any of the above.
Even if they have online access, they may not know the keywords to search or their correspondence across different disciplines. Huge example: the terminology in data science machine learning vs statistics is seriously not standardized. Ditto EE/CS.
Or be aware of developments in related fields, e.g. Neural Nets, SVM, HMM, clustering.

[1] For example EE and CS academics [in Europe] almost live in different universes, which is sad because they miss a lot of valuable stuff from each other. Ditto, mathematicians, statisticians.
Anyway this practice seems perfectly fine unless the degree of self-citation gets excessive/ silly/ petty/ vain. Also, it's customary not to just display your own, but your grad students'/ co-researchers'/ other key papers.
It beats the usual Calvin and Hobbes.

I agree. It sounds somewhat ridiculous and archaic. My first attempt at an answer would be pride/arrogance or desire to impress.
You know what I would do? If I were a professor on the same cell-block as the other professors, I'd deliberately not hang anything up on my door except my business card with my own personal web site address where all my papers are located.
My door would look more orderly and professional because of that.

This answer includes what you prefer to do instead of why people do hang up their papers on their doors.

Why not a QR code leading to the web site address and a calendar with the current year (currently "2015") in big print?

"Archaic" would be more appropriate if it referred to something predating the lifetimes of the professors. It seems inappropriate for merely predating lifetimes of college students.

@Trylks : because most journals and almost all conferences will not let you freely redistribute your publications. A QR code to a paywall is worse than useless.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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How many physician-scientists pursue academic tracks?
The National Institues of Health (NIH) funds Medical Scientist Training Programs (MSTPs) also known as MD/PhD programs to create a group of researchers whose work more rapidly effects medical practice. For example, they would help to develop new diagnostic tools, drugs, or surgical procedures.
It sounds good, but how many of the students actually pursue this track? Does anyone know of data about the NIH's return on investment besides the somewhat dated data about three New York programs?
Thanks for your time,
Mike

Also, this comment probably also applies to DVM/PhD programs (still NIH funded, but also sometimes NIFA (National Institute of Food and Agriculture).

@OldTroll: You're completely right. I didn't think of them, so thanks for catching that.

I have no idea how you'd find hard data on the program itself and its results, but as an idle musing I checked how many full time faculty members in the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health's Dept. of Epidemiology held an MD/PhD or DrPH. The department was chosen as a very good department in a very good school with a strong medical school that I'm not affiliated with.
Ten of the 94 listed faculty members were MD/PhD or DrPH's. Little under 11% of the faculty. And that's not including other possible "physician scientists" like MD/MPH degree holders...if you do that the number rises to 23 faculty members with an MD degree in a related, but non-clinical research department. Nearly a quarter of the faculty total.
Of course, this is only a very crude proxy for how many physician-scientists pursue academic tracks, and even the representation of clinician-scientists in research departments will likely vary wildly by said department. That being said, I've met a considerable number of them in my graduate school career, either entirely in academic settings, or balancing research with practice. It's absolutely a viable path, though not an easy one.
As another data point, here is the list of alumni for the UNC School of Medicine's MD/PhD program: http://www.med.unc.edu/mdphd/fps/alumni-1 . That should give you a decent glimpse at where those particular graduates go - it looks like a fair number ended up in research or hybrid positions.

I'm a student enrolled in a MD/PhD program in Canada. I don't know about NIH very well, but our experience here is that it is very difficult to continue research. I agree with eykanal: it takes a lot to be a great clinician (and being a mediocre clinician is very hard on one's conscience). 50%+ of students rethink their decision during their first year of medicine and do not begin the PhD portion of the program. Only those who begin 80/20 in terms of devolution (80 research, 20 clinician) seem to be able to continue the research path, with considerable sacrifice of their clinical skills (fewer clinical elective during both medical school and residency), as well as many more years of education.
Once done, however, the career path in academic medicine is relatively good. The PhD really helps with those jobs and their attendant excitement and opportunities, although they often pay significantly lower than a pure clinican job.
I know that in the States, the culture of MD/PhD's is more pronounced than in Canada, since there's a massive amount of NIH funds. I heard that nearly a quarter of the class in U of Pennsylvania at least begin as MD/PhD's (don't quote me). Dropping out of the PhD is harder, because you have to give up your funding. I expect that many of them are able to complete the program, but few manage to continue in the research path.
Many of the professors who are MD and PhD's often complete their PhD separately from the MD - they either had it before the MD or got it afterwards. Materially, it's a more difficult path, with less funding and guarantees, but there's less room to regret and it's easier to cut one's losses, since it's 2 big decisions, not 1.

I don't know where you'll find hard data on this, but from experience working at a hospital/university center (University of Pittsburgh, a subset of which is the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center), very few MD/PhDs end up doing full-time, or even half-time, research. Being a clinician is very demanding on one's time, and doing meaningful research requires a significant time commitment. Many of the MD/PhDs I know ended up dropping their research work due to a combined lack of progress and time.

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Is it common for advisers to have not understand a funded project?
I'm a graduate student in computer science engineering in South Korea.
My adviser (a professor) told members in my lab to write a proposal to get a fund (from government or a company). Finally, we got funded and started an R&D. In the project proposal document, my adviser has been listed as a chief of research (a director). And (unoffically) one of the lab members has been named as a chief of hands-on workers.
We have two meetings. One is a project meeting and discussion only with lab members. And another is a report meeting with a chief of hands-on workers and my adviser. In the report meeting, he reports the result of the project meeting. If there is any unresolved issue, he got mad.
A problem that I think is, my adviser has no idea of any knowledge related with the project, literally. The project requires a cutting edge theories and techniques, but his knowledge stays when he became a professor.
He just hunts a fund and if he got a fund, he doesn't care afterwards.
Thus, his anger does not help to resolve an issue. He doesn't know why the issue exists and why it is difficult to resolve. Even if we explain about it, that does not help, next week, he forgets and gets mad again. In the report meeting, we can't expect any helpful comment from my adviser.
Even worse is, when it is the time to report a result of the funded project to the funder, my adviser has to present the result and answer to questions. But as I said before, he has no idea of the project. So, we teach him about the project for a couple of weeks before the presentation. But do you think it will be effective teaching months-long R&D in a couple of weeks? No, the presentation goes bad and the next funding will be unclear.
Is all of this is due to lab members who are not smart enough? Okay, if it is a personal research, my adviser may not have enough knowledge than me. But, this is a lab project and he is a chief. Then, at least, he should have a similar, comparable level of knowledge with lab members, in my opinion.
Does this commonly happen in other labs, universities and countries.

Does he have to be the one presenting the results? Can't it be one of you?

That depends on funders. There are three cases. (1) Strictly prohibited, (2) granted with evaluation penalty, (3) granted without penalty. But in most cases, (1) and (2).

Leadership, project management and smart work cab not be found in every body and in your case they were all missing in your professor

No, this is not common in general.  See if you can find out the secret of his success in getting the funding (grant money).  Then write a grant proposal, with a different professor, whom you respect.

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No, this is not common in general. See if you can find out the secret of his success in getting the funding (grant money). Then write a grant proposal, with a different professor, whom you respect.


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Is there a problem with citing the original source instead of the source where the information was first found?
I'm writing a Bachelor's Thesis.
I found a seemingly convenient way of making my research paper successful, but I'm not sure if it counts as plagiarism.
This is mainly concerned with the methods section.
I have gathered many research papers that use the same methodology but discuss different topics (it is not about the literature review). I read the method section and take notes of how the author presented the information, the discussion raised, the sections included.
If it is relevant to my research paper, I follow the same ideas. I take the information cited by the researcher; I mean good information from experts. I do further research on good quotes that are in the research papers I read, use them in my research paper, and cite the original source of the quote, which I also read, but I do not cite the research paper where I was first introduced to the information.
Is this plagiarism?
I don't cite the research paper where I found the quote because it is irrelevant to my topic. It only uses the same methodology. Moreover, I do further research on the information and usually cite the original source or a source on research methodology.

Are you reading the papers that are the original sources of the quotes you are using? Or are you only reading those quotes where they appear as cited quotes?

Consider the following situation: I have found a relevant quote in a journal article. I search for the original source and read the quote in its context and learn more about the general idea. I do not cite the journal article but rather the original source of the quote.

Plagiarism is to make someone else's work as your own. Research is constantly building on other people's ideas, exactly as you describe. As long as it is clear what is yours and what is theirs, you are fine.

@Davidmh, Wouldn't the curation of references considered someone else's work which you take?

@Pacerier no, the same way you don't cite Google Scholar because you found the papers there (does a much larger curation of sources).

@Davidmh, So do you mean that you are against both the answers posted below?

Related: 1) http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/08interfaces.html  2) https://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/94jie.html 3) https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/71463/is-it-called-sale-copy-or-business-plagiarism-in-english-language#comment259271_71484

You are correctly citing the original source of the idea/quote (which you looked up and read in context, as you should).
You don't (usually) have to cite the paper that exposed you to that original source. The purpose of a citation is to

give credit to the originator of an idea/quote
tell readers where to look to verify your claims about that idea/quote

In this case, citing the original source satisfies both purposes and is sufficient.
An exception is a review paper, which doesn't add new research, but collects and comments on relevant sources on a subject. In this case, the curation of materials is the novel idea contributed by the review paper. If you then go on to use the collection of sources you found via that paper, it's often appropriate to cite the review paper also.
Similarly, if you use the interpretation of the original source found in the secondary source, you should also cite the secondary source.

Regarding "If you then go on to use the collection of sources you found via that paper, it's often appropriate to cite the review paper also.", so you are saying that we should cite wikipedia since it is a review paper which curates the materials needed?

Your first two paragraphs is utterly at odds with https://www.google.com/search?q=plagiarism+of+secondary+sources

Following @ff524 's suggestion, prompted by my answer to a question about whether Wiki should ever be cited ... :
It is my opinion, based first on a principle of honesty and open-ness, that one should acknowledge sources one has used. Thus, if you use Wiki or a survey paper or an expository paper to understand a primary source, and/or to locate a primary source, cite Wiki/survey/exposition and the primary source.
Note that I do not advocate citing Wiki/survey/exposition alone, and this is for more than one reason. First, one should mostly refer to primary sources... although in mathematics a primary source may be long ago, obscure, and inaccessible, so difficult to locate and not usable by many of your readers. Second, it is hard to gauge the authoritativeness (in reality, not in status) of Wiki/surveys/exposition, so corroboration is invariably necessary. In fact, the same need for corroboration applies to almost any source, refereed or not, despite various mythologies.
Nevertheless, "at this point in time", any bibliography that includes Wiki, URLs, or unrefereed material will often be stigmatized by referees and by many readers. This is not completely insane, as a hold-over from a time when a bibliography that included anything other than well-known, refereed journals was truly the sign of a crank. To my mind, the reality is much changed, and will continue to change, but, for those who find themselves in a situation demanding conformity to that old standard... well, maybe you have to do it.
This enforced dishonesty about "how one found things out" is very disturbing to me, as, in fact, Wiki and surveys and exposition are often very useful to give pointers to primary sources, to bring up keywords and people and old sources that more standard sources omit. I acknowledge Wiki and the other sources in bibliographies.
The "solution" to the problem of being both honest and conforming to an old standard would seem to dictate never looking at Wiki, or any unrefereed source. Crazy. But one might find oneself effectively pretending to do so?

You should note that it was "cited by" if you didn't go back and read the original source. You have no idea if the person citing the source did so correctly or took it out of context.  "Cited by" tells the reader that you have not read the original source, and that is important information in nearly all cases.

Plagiarism is lack of attribution. You always need to cite your sources, period. If you are only paraphrasing or summarizing what someone else said, you only need to cite the relevant book/article/thesis/whatever. If you are citing someone verbatim, you also need to indicate the page numbers. If you do not do this, you are going to get in trouble.
That said, you are not obliged to cite everybody who has said something relevant, especially when  working on popular topics where everybody and their mother have said something. You can always write something like "see Smith 2000 and Thompson 2001, among others", or if you prefer the original source, "see Smith 2000 et seq".

I don't think this answers the OPs question

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Professor withholding course grade until submission of conference paper
I have recently been told by the professor of a particular course of mine, that our final grades will be withheld (given as an "Incomplete" which is later replaced by the final grade) until we individually submit our semester papers in the course to a conference.
This has a few issues to go with it:

I defended my MSc and passed, however without this credit I will not receive my degree this semester.
I do not want a low-quality publication on my record, especially since it appears past students in the course published in pay-to-publish conferences.
I am far, far from an expert in this field. I took the course to learn about the subject and have only been spending the last few weeks on this research paper. To give more context, I don't even have a publication in my PhD work yet and I am 2 years in.

The situation prompts two questions from me:

Is it ethical for the professor to require a student to submit a paper to a conference for a course? (This requirement is not mentioned in the syllabus.)
Is it allowed for a professor to require this? Are there any rules or regulations in the US (state school) to prevent it?

@CharlesMorisset That deadline is months away! Graduation is only 2 weeks away.

@AustinHenley I'm pretty sure you can submit before the deadline (obviously, noöne ever does it, but you can)

Or we can arrange a conference for you. Let's hereby create the Stack Exchange All-Academia Transdisciplinary Multinodal Conference for the Advancement of Humandkind. It suits your needs perfectly: multimodal means you can run a conference node in your living room if you want; transdisciplinary means we don't care what you study; and obviously, we advance humankind by providing you with a degree. Who's in?

@F'x, can we get a journal special issue for it?

Can you submit to a journal instead of a conference? In that case, I suggest this one: http://www.universalrejection.org/

This would not be allowed under our regulations for at least one reason. You need to contact the student ombudsperson at your university to find out what the official rules are and ensure that your professor know this.

@Aaron: Now they have a conference too! http://www.universalrejection.org/conference/

@AustinHenley you might be interested in this article, written by an individual whose students were facing a similar ridiculous publication requirement http://smritiweb.com/navin/education-2/how-i-published-a-fake-paper-and-why-it-is-the-fault-of-our-education-system

In case you are in computer science, you are lucky: this can help you to prepare your paper for the Journal of Universal Rejection: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ ;-)

I am a professor at a state school in the US, and American professors are currently the targets of a lot of undeserved grief (e.g. it is currently fashionable to believe that we are "lazy" and work much less than a full "business week"; that is not only a mistake but likely a dishonest, politically motivated mistake).  So keep that preamble in mind when I say:

This is one of the most unambiguously unacceptable behaviors from a course instructor that I have heard.

Let me try to count the ways (but there are so many that I may get tired before I finish):
1) One of the most basic understandings between the student, the instructor and the university is the duration of the course.  By a certain extremely public, agreed upon, well-publicized deadline, all of the coursework must be complete, and by a slightly later date that your instructor has been carefully informed of, the course grades are due.  Planning to defer submission of the course grade after this date is just not the way the American academic system works.
2) Giving a grade of "incomplete" is not withholding a grade: it is assigning a certain kind of unsatisfactory grade.  [Once in college a rather elderly professor literally did not submit any of the grades for the course I was taking.  It was a little strange -- in these days we actually received transcripts in the mail over the break so the inquiry was less immediate than it would now be -- but he apologized and submitted the grades very soon after the start of the next quarter.  That's withholding a grade.]  In order to assign an incomplete, the student must not have completed the official coursework.
3) The instructor is not suitably respectful of the obvious problem which can occur if you assign students' grades too late: you may prevent them from graduating.  Many American universities have policies to expedite final coursework and grading for (would-be) graduating students.  Moreover, in the universities I've been involved with, beyond the written rules there is an unwritten culture that as an instructor you should think twice about any course practice that interferes with a student's timely graduation.  (Sometimes it turns out the student fails your course and therefore does not graduate on time.  That's "okay", but most of instructors would indeed think more carefully about assigning a failing grade under these circumstances and feel honorbound to convey the failing grade to the student sooner rather than later.  What if their parents show up in town only to learn that the student did not actually graduate?)  This practice is not hard to understand: one of very few commonalities among American academics is that we were all students at one time, so we should have some sympathies for the student perspective.
4) This course requirement is unusual and potentially problematic, and it is not listed on the course syllabus.  I think that the whole point of the course syllabus is so that instructors cannot totally change their course requirements / grading schemes in the middle of the course, and that seems to be what is happening here.
5) Teaching a university course is not like playing a game of Truth-or-Dare: it does not give you authority to compel the student outside of the classroom and the dorm room / study carrel.  Submitting a paper to a conference is a real-world action with real-world ramifications (the OP is rightly aware and concerned about this).  It is creating work -- possibly rather pointless and frivolous work -- for other busy academics and/or professionals.  It is setting a student up for harsh critique even up to the point of ridicule.  It is also bullying a student into publishing something they didn't actually want to publish.
Okay, I got tired.  What should a student do in this situation?

Talk to the faculty member in question.

This is an in-person conversation.  You should think carefully both about want you want to say and how to behave in such a conversation.  Your goal is to convey the specific problems and hardships this course policy will impose on you.  (You don't want to frame it as an ethical or hypothetical discussion.)  Be calm but very specific.  Bring in a copy of the course syllabus and refer to it at some point during the discussion.  Bring in a copy of an academic document that says you need to have your grades by a certain date in order to graduate.  Say specifically: "I'm concerned that this course policy will jeopardize my graduation.  Can we address this?"  If your instructor says "Don't worry about it right now" then explain why you are worried about it right now.  Talk about your family's travel plans, talk about the financial implications of having to enroll for another semester....
(The point of the above strategy is this: I imagine that your instructor likes this course idea from his perspective.  Clearly he has not taken the time to think about it from your perspective.  If you make him see the negative consequences, he is much more likely to repent.)
You should not be brushed off in your meeting: this is a serious matter.  If in the course of the meeting you don't see things working out to your satisfaction, you should let him know that you intend to talk to (e.g.) the department chair about it.
By the way, apparently this took place almost a year ago.  What happened??

I agree with what Pete says. At my school (US, small, private, undergrad), the syllabus is viewed as a contract. The student, and the faculty memeber, are bound by what appears in it. So, if there's something I want to do in the course, it had better be in the syllabus or I am out of luck. Grades are due the Monday after final exams end. There is a significant process involved to submit an incomplete, and an even more significant process to change a grade. The same thing goes in our graduate programs. It continues to amaze me the things professors think they can get away with.

I never updated you with what happened 7 years ago! I spoke with the department's graduate coordinator who told me to take the path of least resistance: submit the paper and withdraw as soon as final grades are submitted. I did and got an A. (Also an update, I'm now in my third year of being faculty myself!)

This is highly suspect behavior—particularly when it is not published in the original course syllabus, or written down anywhere.
In general, however, this requirement seems highly impractical—most conferences operate on a schedule far longer than a typical semester. Therefore, it would seem that almost every student's grade would be held up waiting for the work to be accepted.
While I can understand (perhaps) the logic behind such a move, I don't agree with this. A scientific conference presentation is a serious undertaking, and should be an option, not a requirement!
However, whether it is allowed will depend upon your university's regulations. You should check first within the department, and escalate only if necessary.
(However, under such circumstances, if there are no proceedings published, and no formal record, I would be entirely comfortable leaving such a presentation off of my CV.)

It's a little odd to require something that is not mentioned in the syllabus. I understand that things can change in the course of a semester. But this is a rather draconian requirement and as such should have been specified up front in the syllabus.
If (as appears to be the case) the professor is willing to "soften" the requirement, then this entire question might be viewed as an overreaction.

Your two reasons strike me as very intelligent and responsible:
1. I do not want a low-quality publication on my record, especially since it appears past students in the course published in pay-to-publish conferences.
2. I am far, far from an expert in this field. I took the course to learn about the subject and have only been spending the last few weeks on this research paper. To give more context, I don't even have a publication in my PhD work yet and I am 2 years in.
I recommend drawing them to your course instructor's attention, and requesting him to guide you in finding a low or zero-cost relevant conference to which you could submit an abstract without spending too much time when you are busy working on your PhD.
At my university, submitting an article based on the student's research is a graduation requirement. The idea is (a) to get graduands familiar with the different demands of presenting research to a conference (probably something that would benefit you since you have moved on to doctoral studies), and (b) to get more of the Masters level research out into the research literature which in many cases tends to never get beyond the university library (something in the interest of the "knowledge economy" and also beneficial to the public image of relatively young universities struggling to gain acceptance in their own nations and in the wider international arena.
The concern you raise about some of your contemporaries taking the short-cut of submitting their work to "pay-to-publish conferences" is particularly hazardous with regard to the objective (b), and your professor may find it instructive to reflect on the wisdom of your reluctance.

Your question is missing the following info. Obviously, you have approached the professor and talked to him about the specific issue you are facing: your paper is ready, you could submit it to a conference, but what you really want is to be able to get your degree this semester. There is no reasonable expectation that, if all the work is done, you should just postpone your degree waiting for an upcoming conference.
So, the missing information is: what did he answer about your specific issue?

I was looking for a more general answer to the question of ethics and that requirement being allowed. What he basically said about it: don't worry about it right now.  :) But I am freaking out!

Why are you freaking out then? The requirement is to submit not get published per se. I know of professors who have this requirement in certain courses as well. Its meant to be a good thing, not a some punitive measure.

@Shion It isn't that I think the professor is bad or doing anything wrong, I am just new to this idea and trying to get others feedback based on my intuition that it is unethical.

Agreed. Ethics has multiple cultural norms and definitions. IMHO, I don't think that this particular requirement is unethical. I am sure others will beg to differ and they have that right.


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What do I need to ensure my presentation will go smoothly?
From a technical stand point, what do I need to show up to a conference with (in general) to ensure that my presentation will go smoothly?
Two things I can think of:

Presentation remote
Equipment to connect my laptop to the projector

The remote is simple enough, it just needs to work with my computer and be reliable. Connecting my computer to the projector is not trivial since a lot of laptops don't come with DVI or VGA output any more (mine doesn't!). What kind of output do I usually need, DVI or VGA? Do I need something like this which supports all output methods (seems like over kill but might be a good investment)?
Is there anything else to make sure I am prepared to deal with the technical aspects of a presentation?

If you have the time, try connecting your computer to the projector at least once before you do the presentation. Even if you have all right adapters, there's always something that doesn't work and could have been fixed by simply invesing a few minutes beforehand.

This book will prepare you..http://www.amazon.com/Life-Is-Series-Presentations-Influence/dp/074326925X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1366663663&sr=8-1&keywords=Life+is+a+series+of+presentations

I give most of my talks using only chalk on a board, then the most important point is probably to pick the right, readable colors chalks before the talk.

@BenoîtKloeckner I have never heard of a conference providing chalk boards.

@AustinHenley: you probably never heard of a pure math conference (except ICM), I guess. My comment was half a joke (I now it is not very relevant to the current question) and half serious (to remind people that different field may be wildly, weirdly different one from another).

From less esoteric to more (I've seen all these things happen):

Make sure you know how to "send the image to a projector". Not all laptops do this automatically, and I'm surprised at how many people don't know how to do it. I've also seen people be confused by the mirroring feature on Macs.
Verify that there's a power outlet or some place to plug in your laptop. Driving a projector eats power, and you don't want to drain your battery during the presentation
Turn off screen savers. at the very least it's annoying, and sometimes the screen saver does wonky things to the projector display.
Turn off your notifications (mail, facebook, twitter, skype...). It's amusing for an audience (but not for you) if during a job talk they all get to see a subject header of the form "Interview at University X" where X is not where you're at :)
Make sure you have the right display converters. Usually something that converts your laptop to a VGA is standard. Macs are particularly difficult in this regard.
Watch out for resolution issues. Most laptops are smart enough to drop resolution to deal with a projector, but sometimes they're not.
Keep a backup copy of the slides in a portable format (PDF or PPT) on a usb stick. In the worst-case you can always borrow a laptop (from the previous speaker even) and load up the slides. Dropbox/a web page is ok but not great because it requires an internet connection.

And above all, as David M. R. says, check the setup beforehand if you can. Even that doesn't guarantee a smooth presentation, but it eliminates a lot of the potential problems listed above.

Or you get Skyped by a friend during a presentation (I've seen this happen).

Re point 4: several modern OS's have a "guest mode" or "guest account", where none of your programs will be configured to poll for notifications. This looks like a good occasion to use them.

Re: #7 - I would also make sure to have at least one hard copy of the slides, and I'd keep a copy on Dropbox (despite the warning).  If the projector breaks and your laptop dies, etc., you can always present from the hard copy slides.

@ChrisGregg Really? I can't remember the last time I saw an overhead slide projector at a conference.  Do they really still exist?

@JeffE -- True! I guess I wasn't clear; you could give the presentation from the slides as in you could talk from the slides.  I don't know how effective it would be, but at least you wouldn't stand there and say, "um, well, let's see...we worked on this..."  Although I could easily give my elevator speech extemporaneously, I'd be hard-pressed to give a 20-minute talk without some notes, especially on a detailed topic.  Either way, this would not be my first choice for giving a presentation...

Also, with the rise of widescreen laptops AND widescreen projectors, it can be impressive to have multiple versions of your slides ready for different aspect ratios. For beamer, use the aspectratio option set to 34, 169, or 1610 (this last one is the aspect ratio of a Mac Widescreen monitor, for instance).

I haven't seen too many widescreen projectors though.

Also: use high contrast colors on all slides - otherwise the slides may be hard to see on the projector.

@TomA: But not too high-contrast, or the visual clutter will overwhelm the content of the slides.  Test your slides on multiple projectors beforehand.

Re #7: is ppt a portable format? I regularly see borked presentations because they are being shown on a laptop with a different version of Powerpoint. Not to mention machines running OpenOffice and/or Linux. My advice would rather be convert your ppt to pdf for presentation, always. In most cases you lose nothing, in some you lose only the slide transitions (which is a positive thing in my eyes), and only in some minor cases you lose actual functionality.

In addition to Suresh comprehensive answer, and understanding you are referring primarily to the technology, would add the following which concerns the presentation:
Do not include media (video, sound etc) in your presentations unless absolutely necessary. If you do, make sure in advance (before the conference or some time before your talk that everything will work. This is particularly true if you need to switch platform from whatever you use to whatever the conference might run (unless they let you use your own computer (which is rare).
Make copies of your presentation in alternative formats. for example. if you make a presentation in PowerPoint, save it also as PDF (and make sure the PDF looks ok). Moving PowerPoint files between Win and Mac can be far from trivial. Not even PDFs are fool proof, particularly if media players need to be involved.
To add a technical item:
Be aware that older projectors may not resolve the color space you have in your presentation. This may render certain colours invisible and make other look identical. Therefore be careful and avoid choosing too many similar colours in plots etc.

Good point about the colors. that's often a problem.

+1 for "Make copies of your presentation in alternative formats." I would also suggest having those copies in multiple places. Have your .ppt and .pdf on your presentation laptop, AND on external storage, AND in dropbox.

The other answers are all great. Also keep in mind:

If you don't know what kind of room you'll be presenting in, keep all the vital info in the slides on the top half or top third of the slide. You never know when you'll get a room where the screen is at the same level as the audience seating. When that happens, no one behind the first row will be able to see the whole slide.
When microphones are provided, do a sound check before your presentation starts. Use the microphone.
Be prepared to present on a machine other than the one you bring. Have your presentation materials on an external drive AND in the cloud.
If you created your presentation on a mac and you'll be presenting on a pc, or vice versa, try to do a practice round on that operating system. Even if both OS's are running PowerPoint, certain features or slide transitions might not be supported.

In addition to Suresh's and Peter's advice, there is one other unlikely scenario to consider. Be prepared to give your presentation without the assistance of technology. Depending on the venue, if the projector fails, it may take longer to get a new one in place than you have to speak. If the talk is for an interview, being able to seamlessly switch to the low-tech version is a big plus for you. If you are at a conference, then the attendees at your session will still get to hear about your work. If the presentation is your thesis defense, then you absolutely must be able to continue in the analog fashion.


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How to focus on a single area during PhD?
My PhD supervisor says that I am overly curious and spend too much time studying lots of different area. However, he does say I am generally doing well and on the right track.
I am usually keen to meet new researchers, and I also spend time helping other PhD students to understand papers, even if they are not directly related to my field. I tend to keep studying a topic until I feel I fully understand it.
This has led my supervisor to believe that I am not working up to my true potential and just moving among areas too much. I have asked him directly and he says I just need to focus on one thing at a time, which I have started doing. I am just curious as to whether it is normal for PhD students to change and be immersed in different topics frequently, or am I just thinking too much? What strategies can help with staying more focused?

As a side note, I think everyone suffers from this to an extent since working on a new problem is fresh and exciting. You are not alone!

@AustinHenley This is an important point. In general, scientists tend to be curious. One of the disadvantages of this is that new, (for you) unexplored topics often hold more allure than learning all the ins and outs of a single topic. Yet this is what you need to do to get a PhD.

The main point of a PhD is to learn how to be a scientist. Involved in this is to focus on the work that needs to be done but also to pick up the necessary skill to solve the problem. As an advisor, I would get nervous if a student kept moving into new areas without a plan as to what these would be useful for. So from that perspective, if a student made good progress on the research, diversions would not be a concern; without progress, it would be a problem. Where you stand in this is not for anyone to say except based on a discussion between you and your advisor.
During my own PhD, I spent a fair amount learning tools that were only of marginal use in my own work. I am now very happy I did because as now a long-time faculty member, I have come to realize that the time I had as a PhD student to immerse in topics, is hard if not impossible to recreate after the PhD. I therefore advise PhD students to use their time wisely since the tools they learn during their PhD make up the core of their future toolbox. Contacts with other researchers and research directions is a similar issue in my mind. BUT, I always had in my mind that I needed to show progress and stay with my own research tasks as a priority. Balancing between the core work and forays into other areas is a necessity.
From your question, it does not sound as if you have a good balance and I therefore think you need to discuss the thesis work more with your advisor to make sure it is clear and structured to you. Only then will you be able to see your won progress and judge when you are on track.

In terms of ways of keeping focused, I think it's important to keep in mind that it is your job (as in, full time employment) to produce a cohesive block of research. Learning other things is also part of the job, but a smaller part. It might be helpful to allocate specific bits of your time to different tasks you need to do - eg spend some mornings reading new stuff related to your thesis, afternoons on doing the actual research, Friday afternoon reading whatever you're interested in (I'm not saying this is the right balance, just an example).

There's nothing wrong with being curious - that's crucial for being a successful research scientist. Your supervisor telling you that you are overly curious is with respect to completing your PhD studies in a timely fashion.
You have started to discipline yourself and to concentrate on one topic at a time. There is a potential problem of finding interest in a number of topics on first look, and superficially getting involved, then getting attracted to something else before completing something substantial in your previous topic. As Peter notes, the PhD is the formal process of finally demonstrating your capacity to be a scientist. Part of that is dedicating yourself to a topic, addressing it with all the skills expected of a professional scientist, presenting your results and drawing a suitable conclusion. You need to do these things. I think your supervisor is concerned -- rightly -- that you are unlikely to do this if you continue to allow yourself to be distracted.
Strategies - Discuss with your supervisor a topic that you agree is mutually interesting and shows promise for research. Have that topic more in the forefront of your mind as you go about your work. Write it down and stick it to your computer monitor. Ask yourself if what you are doing is more or less likely to further your progress towards achieving what you need to do to be awarded a PhD.

During the first or second years it's fine to do that, venturing around for areas.. this is important as this is the literature review phase. But towards the final you must focus on your experiment and write up. And focus towards that. This includes deactivating your Facebook or delaying checking email until you write something in your thesis.

deactivating your Facebook seriously?

why not? it's kind of a distraction too


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Methods for finding graduate programs for specific areas of research
What types of methods are available to students today who want to find a University for a Master, PhD, or postdoc program that supports the student's obscure/specific area of research?
For example, I am looking for PhD programs that specialize in software engineering metrics analysis and process improvement.  I have looked at the websites of about 15-20 universities that offer PhD's in Computer Science.  Sometimes, I'll find "software engineering" listed vaguely as a research area, but as I research the publications and activities of the faculty, there will be just a single faculty member who does work in an obscure aspect of software engineering, like applying CASE tools to data modeling, validation of aeronautic systems, etc.

in an obscure aspect of software engineering — Careful!  Almost by definition, most researchers work in obscure aspects of their fields.  (That's your goal, too!)  If a topic isn't obscure, it's probably too well understood to be a good research topic.

http://academia.stackexchange.com/a/455/213

Look at affiliations in papers.
When I was looking for a PhD position, I systematically did an extensive literature survey. I didn't really read the articles, looked mostly at the abstracts, but I particularly looked at affiliations. At the time, I simply wrote down all academic institutes I found that were in Europe. In a more extended version, one could somehow assign a score based on the number of papers coming from a certain institution and the impact of each paper.
The big advantage of this is that one will find mostly groups doing active research in the field. Whether we want it or not, published peer-reviewed papers are (at least in my field, atmospheric sciences) the method for determining impact. I won't find groups that fail to publish using this method, but I probably don't want to do my PhD there anyway, so nothing is lost from my perspective.
For my PhD I ended up staying exactly where I already was, but now I'm about to do the same for finding institutes with a post-doc. It's one degree more complicated now because of the two-body problem, but even there: my significant other and I both make such a list, then we'll plot them on a map and look at pairs that are close to each other. But it all starts with:
Look at affiliations in papers.

I've tried it but with little success. As: not being deep into field yet means not knowing many related areas (and publications), affiliation changes with time, not every institute has open positions, and when I don't know any common contact, (sadly) the answer is usually lukewarm. So - to learn institutes: yes (hence +1), to be considered there - it might be not a sufficient condition.

Papers have affiliations?  Wouldn't it be better to google the authors directly?

Papers have authors and authors have affiliations. Surprisingly, not all academics are easy to google. I've had occasions where I wanted to find out the current institute of the author of a 10-year old paper, and finally found it only by looking at a new paper he co-authored; google didn't tell me the answer (and I'm not bad at googling).

Surprisingly, not all academics are easy to google — At least in computer science (the field in question here), if you can't find someone on google, you really don't want them as your advisor.

@JeffE Hard to google ≠ no web presence, as they might just have a common name or be the victim of a search-engine-unfriendly university website (incompetent webmaster teams exist). But the OP asks for a list of institutes, then why go paper → author → google → institute if the institute is already listed with the paper?

To quote Piotr: "affiliation changes with time".  And if a CS professor relies on a search-engine-unfriendly university website, you really don't want them as your advisor (or their university as your affiliation).

It does, but quite likely (1) the institute will still exist even if the author has moved on and may still be of interest, and (2) if the author is still in academia, the systematic literature survey will find his newer papers and therefore the newer affiliation.

As for your second point — in my field, many famous scientists (P.I. of big projects, prize-winning nature publications, etc.) maintain no web presence at all. If I try to Google one I happen to know, I get Wikipedia and many items in online news sources, but the institute website lists solely a phone-number and e-mail address. Most scientists I know don't take the time to maintain a personal webpage and don't pay someone else to do it either. I think they should (and I do for myself), but I'm in a small minority. I guess it depends on the field.

A surprisingly effective method (I've tried it) is mailing the people working in your field of interest, something like: "I'll be applying to grad school, I'm interested in areas X, Y and Z. What places for PhD studies can you recommend?" At worst, your email will get ignored [1]. Often, however, you can get quite detailed answers even if you don't know the person you're writing to. Esp. if you are specific in what area you'd like to work in - some people are eager to help prospective grad students.
[1] To avoid being tagged as "spam", send the mails one-by-one even if you're mailing a larger group of people at once ;)

I do this method, but not in email. I ask on the relevant subreddit, and you will be surprised by the suggestions.

In the CS field, Microsoft academic search, google scholar and DBLP are good resources to give a general overview of different pioneers in the field.
 Also, look for the research interest of the faculty members and the research groups in the department.
One last thing is: follow with the top conferences in your area (i.e. ICSE) and see who's doing something interesting to you. Then search for them; see how their past students are doing.

Is it better if we look for plenary talk or keynote speakers?

I have just been going through what you are describing. There is no specific way to go about it. I will be painful and daunting when you don't start from any specific point. I can tell you what I did:

Location: if you have certain preferences that might help you make some preliminary decisions. For example initially I decided on certain countries/cities and looked at all major universities there. Then I extended the range to locations that were not a preference. I did find some nice programs , for example in Alaska, but I could not force myself to apply there, I just can't imagine living 5 years in Anchorage.
Publications and google scholar: I am in ecology so what I did was going into google scholar and type certain species with which I would like to work and a few other keywords "conservation", "GIS", "spatial modeling", etc. I read the abstract and the authors affiliations. I also limited the search to the last 5 years because people change affiliation and also I want to look at latest research. Then I only investigated the ones that were in places/universities where I want to go or interested in.
Specialist groups: not sure how this translates into computer science (even if I am a computer scientist myself), but there are special groups that work with certain species, that was another great source of people.
Job posting websites: this came in later but I did manage to find a few positions that were related to what I wanted to do. For example the ecological society of America as a bulletin with PhD position advertised by university directly, nature.com, findaPhd.com.
Ask people in the field about good research labs, they should know a few.

I know these are mostly related to ecology but should give you some ideas. I also wasted time going through school's websites one by one and unfortunately there was no way around that.  It was time consuming and not the most productive way but I didn't want to have any regrets or places I missed. Also, I know have a personal database of labs I like for my future career and I will have to do minimal research for my post-doc, etc.

The relevant professional societies may maintain databases of graduate research.
For graduate programs in chemistry in North America, the American Chemical Society maintains a database of graduate research.
The database is searchable by faculty name and institution. However, there are fields for specific topics in the faculty search. If you leave the name fields blank, you can search by topic. For example, a search of "repeating sequence copolymer" gives one hit - my PhD adviser.
If you are looking for a very specific project in chemistry in North America, you can find it. It's not perfect. A search for olefin metathesis doesn't find Robert Grubbs, who received a Nobel Prize for his work in it.


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How to physically handle hundreds and hundreds of papers
I have a bit of a meta-question about academics.
I am a graduate student and teaching assistant.  I often find myself flipping, organizing, and searching through stacks of hundreds and hundreds of sheets of paper, whether I'm grading, reading, or doing research.
I seem to have an issue where my hands get dry quickly, and I find myself licking the tips of my fingers to get better friction.  Sometimes I have to do this quite often, and I am wondering if there is a better way.  I tried using hand moisturizer, but that wears off.
Are there special gloves, lotions, or anything that can help with flipping through huge stacks of paper?

unless you have acquired a particular liking for the taste of paper (or your finger), I suggest you use a digital library manager (preferably one that allows you to categorize and keep track of your lecture notes as well)

@posdef this would not be useful for when you are grading papers, since they are seldom submitted electronically.

@ArtemKaznatcheev true, I had not thought of that... However, one could scan those papers to a single PDF (easily doable on most office-grade multi-function printers), then annotate/review/grade the papers, and print out the PDF. If there are really so many papers so that handling them is a significant problem, digitalizing them is a viable option

We are looking into converting our assignments into more electronic-friendly versions, but we aren't there yet, and there are many, many papers to grade in the meantime.

@posdef: Just getting that many papers into a scanner will require a lot of handling.  All the bulk scanners I've used have a nontrivial jam rate.  And in the case of things like exam papers that will only be handled one, I doubt that digitizing will be worth the time.

@posdef: You're suggesting exactly the opposite of the grading workflow I find most effective: Print out the electronically submitted files, mark them up by hand, and then scan them back in (which is easier because they're all on the same paper stock).

You ask for a tool that would make flipping through papers easier, but you could greatly reduce the need for this tool by eliminating shuffled stacks. Use folders and filing cabinets or boxes (sometimes called "banker's boxes") and group related papers together, and you won't have to flip through as much. Also, papers in vertical folders tend to spread out so that they are easier to flip through and retrieve.

Some 20 years ago before all the electronics changed our ways of dealing with stuff, post and bank employees who had to deal with piles of paper (or banknotes) throughout day used a device which was essentially a piece of a wet sponge in a small bowl. They had this on the desk and whenever were about to touch paper, they would simply brush their fingers through it. Something like that could help you... To construct it, I would use a plastic travel-soap container and a small sponge for dishwashing.
Later edit: Indeed, this is what I had in mind.

An alternative to walkmanyi's wetting solution would be to employ rubber finger tips.
On the plus side:
They protect from drying out of the natural oil from your finger tips, and protect against paper cuts.
On the negative side:
Well you are wearing little caps on the tips of your fingers and you lose some tactile feedback. I imagine it would take some getting used to.


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How to get a TA for a thesis
I’m writing an academic paper for a B.Sc.
We only have the professor and a PhD student from another university plus random friends and volunteer collaborators helping us. We were not specifically assigned a TA for our project. I think that it would be much better if we had a PhD student as a TA who could help us instead of only meetings with the professor.
My professor has eight groups in the course and a TA maybe wouldn’t have that many groups. Can I just write to a PhD student in the faculty and ask for help? I was already rejected once when I asked another professor.

"We were not specifically assigned a TA for our project." - is that the usual thing that happens in your department/at your university/in your university system, that students writing their B.Sc. thesis get assigned a TA?

@O.R.Mapper Not that I know, but I think it would be logical part of Ph D work and also time-efficient so that we can speak with a TA instead of the professor.

Well, tutoring BSc theses is a part of PhD candidate work in some places, but in that case, it's usually the PhD candidates who devise the BSc thesis topic themselves rather than the professor. Thus, I am not sure describing such an apparently rather different situation would be helpful as an answer to this question.

With that said, didn't an earlier version of this question refer to the BSc thesis? Is this about a paper within the BSc now, or about the BSc thesis?

@DjDac Time efficient for you and maybe the professor, not for the TA. (Speaking as a PhD student who spends way more time taking care of bachelor students than the "TA time" which is actually assigned to supervision of a bachelor student for our groups budget.)

While I was trying to find out your localisation by checking your profile I realised that it actually includes a link to your bachelor thesis. Which confuses me even more. Have you already finished your thesis? Is this a draft (which I would advise not to publish in this way)?

@skymningen Yes it is a draft with deadline this week. What is it that you don't agree with?

I am in no position to agree or disagree, I just would advise (me, as a person, not based on law) not to publish a bachelor thesis draft online. Hearing that, with the deadline being this week... it might be too late for you to search for an additional reader, as it is way too little time to read and comment this for the first time for someone who has probably a lot of other work to do. Which might be the actual reason why they turn you down.

@skymningen We wanted comments and got very good suggestions. I have restricted the access to only invited collaborators now who already started commenting and making suggestions. We had help from three Ph D students and the professor but I would have liked to have a meeting or two with the Ph D student instead of the professor because the Ph D students are very knowledgable.

Where I work there is actually some part of what you want implemented.
Professors have assigned teaching duties for their group, which usually include supervision of bachelor and master students.
This means we have to supervise X students per term to meet the requirements for our group (I have no exact idea what happens if we don't, but I think it will end in a reduction of our budget.)
Compared to what we "earn" for teaching a lecture of one hour per week, the assigned points we get for supervision of one bachelor student though are ridiculously low, basically accounting for less than 20 minutes spend per week. Also, if we have more students (which we usually do), we do not get additional budget assigned.
How much time you spend with a bachelor student depends a lot on the stage they are in with their thesis, but also on the needs of the student and the type of project they do. It has always been more than 20 minutes for me. I am not sure, how you would account for this with a TA. Also, they would not necessarily have the in-depth knowledge of a topic that is needed for good supervision.
Quite often, universities offer short courses or even "counseling" hours for the general writing and organizing you work part of a thesis. You might have to look out for that if that is what you need. Sometimes there are even senior students setting up "bring your work and we will all talk about the problems you have" hours for bachelors (or people having trouble with academic writing in general, also before starting their thesis work).
Because re-reading your post, I think you are actually doing your first writing (course report, academic homework, something we would call  "seminar work") and not your thesis.

Certainly there would be many benefits to having a TA assigned to assist with your project, and in a perfect world that would be great.  The main problem is most likely: money.
TAs need to be paid, and typically a university allocates assistantships based on the number of courses that need to be taught.  TAs for independent studies are almost certainly not in the budget.
You might argue that the cost would be offset by savings in the professor's time.  Ah, but professors are salaried, and very often they are asked to supervise independent studies on top of their regular teaching and research duties, for no additional pay.  So that savings in time may not translate into any savings in money.
You can certainly ask a graduate student if they would like to help you, just out of the goodness of their heart, but unless your project is exceptionally interesting, I think they'd likely say no.  Grad students have lots of  responsibilities that are directly tied to getting paid and staying on track toward finishing their degrees, and your project isn't one of them.
If there is a grad student with particularly relevant expertise, you could ask to have just a single meeting with them.  Requests like that are more likely to be accepted, when a limited amount of time is involved.  Or, you could offer to pay them by the hour (out of your own pocket), as for private tutoring.
In any of these cases, before requesting any kind of help from a grad student, make sure the professor advising you knows and approves.  They may give you guidelines on how to make sure your work remains your own, and that your consultation isn't considered to be cheating.


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Why one must score 75 % just to pass the course
I take a computer hardware course at KTH Institute in Stockholm in Sweden. The exam is day after tomorrow. The score required to pass is 75 %. I'm used to passing at 50 % and I wonder why the score is set so high to just pass the exam? Is it arbitrary or some method?
Update
You can find the exam if you google for "KTH IS1200".

Perhaps they want you to learn the material covered in the course.

Your instructor is the best person who can tell you what her or his methods are. We can only guess what her or his motives are. It may be that it is a multiple choice exam and the instructor wants to correct for the chance that someone who answers randomly finds the right answer.

Surely you knew the grading criteria when you signed up for the course? Why is it suddenly a problem? Has it been changed just prior to the exam? If not, then you have to grit your teeth and get on with it...

Because the teacher has decided that 70% is too easy and 80% is to hard. If they set the threshold to 50%they would ask more hard questions. I am not sure what more explanation you could hope for.

@JonCuster BTW I scored 85 %. First attempt.

Congratulations!

The passing percentage for a course is fundamentally arbitrary, and different countries and institutions have different traditions.
It should be clear that it's meaningless to talk about the passing percentage in isolation, since it's a percentage of something.  An exam with a passing threshold of 75% isn't necessarily harder than one with a threshold of 50% - the difficulty also depends on the questions, the amount of time given, and so on.

+1 for "it's meaningless to talk about the passing percentage in isolation", which one would think is too obvious to have to say, but maybe not. (I say "maybe not" because I was expecting to see something in the original question about why this specific 75% is so different from the other 50%'s, and didn't.)

@DaveLRenfro: I would think so as well, but that hasn't been my experience. I once witnessed an online discussion where (high-school aged) students from different countries realized that their countries had different thresholds for A's. The were a lot of comments along the lines of "I would have gotten an A if only I'd lived in such-and-such country" or "wow, it must be so hard to get an A in your country if you need to get 90%", but no one pointed out that the exams might vary as well as the thresholds.

This reminds me of the high school to college transition where (in North Carolina, during the 1970s) in high school you had to score at least 93% to get an A, but in college you only needed to score at least 90%. I seem to recall some people saying this was because college tests are harder . . . (Yes, but lowering from 93% to 90% didn't come anywhere near to closing the gap.)

At the end, I scored 85 %. My friends didn't make it.