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Mixed-level class of undergrads and PhD engineers: grading on different curves
I teach an elective chemical engineering mixed-level class. About 30% are 3rd year and 4th year  undergrads each and the remaining 40% is a mix of Masters and PhD students.
I want the grading to be fair to everyone. Clearly the advanced students have an advantage in terms of pre requisites etc.
Wondering if others have dealt with this sort of situation before. Our grading is relative and using a curve.
Would grading the undergraduate students on a different curve be an option?
Any thoughts?

Why is it "clear" that the grad students have seen more prerequisites?

In similar courses I've taken, to get the graduate level credit, there was usually more/additional homework, papers, etc but the lectures/tests/base homework were the same as the undergraduate level work.

I don't know what it's like in the USA, but my understanding is that here in the UK PhD students taking taught courses don't tend to care much about the marks and as a result tend to get lower marks than they got in similar courses as undergrads.

@PeterGreen: here in Germany, PhD students are sent to undergrad courses because they presumably haven't mastered the subject. E.g. I know of biologists who went to do their PhD in chemistry. They had to do take undergrad exams/courses for particular subjects (related to the PhD project). The idea was to make sure they have the same level of knowledge as the chemistry students.

@PeterGreen: Yup same thing in the US. It's not that they couldn't get better grades (although sometimes that's true too, because it's not in their field), it's just that they have other stuff they're supposed to be putting more of their efforts into.

Rather than different "curves" or grading schemes for the two groups, you could teach two courses (see below) in one with different tasks and exams for the two groups. Some of the tasks could be common to both groups and some could be more advanced for the grad students. The lectures could be the same and the readings different, for example, and more challenging exams for one group.
But, curving, in the sense that for one person to get a better grade someone else needs to get a worse grade is, IMO, unethical. There should be a standard that if met results in a defined grade and the path to meeting that standard should be clear to everyone. Everyone should be able to get "full marks".
Not every group has a predefined skills distribution that the grading scheme forces on them. Few do, actually.
For this to work, however, the university would probably need to create such a split course in its records: CE401 and CE601, say with different people being given credit for different courses, even if they "meet" together. Absent that, you will have difficulties justifying such a split scheme. If a grad student gets a B while an undergrad gets an A while doing (or learning) less but for the "same" course you will hear about it, and not in a good way. Without such an explicitly split course, I suggest you get specific permission from the university, say at the "Dean" level.

I think that's a very good suggestion. I had that for one of the course during my master. We were mixed with 3rd/4th year undergraduate, with the same course, but different tasks, and extra question on coursework/exams. Specifically, our exams was more research oriented. I also TA for this course during my PhD and it seemed to work fine in term of pre-requisite and work done by the students of both groups

This also gives the option to the undergrads to earn the grad level credit if they are good enough for it.

+1 just for the last paragraph. If this wasn't done from the start you may be losing out on  extra pay for teaching graduate students. A possible alternative could be to have all the graduate students sign up for self-study courses where the classroom material is the base and additional work is assigned that would fit a graduate course. Make sure this self-study course can be used to meet their graduation requirements.

The most sensible approach. Either the material is the same, in which case their mastery of it must be evaluated uniformly, or you give them different material. If it's the same and it feels like it's either much too hard for the juniors or much too easy for the seniors (defined as grades being much too low or much too high when a uniform scale is used), the real question is why one group or the other is in the course, but that's not necessarily in OP's power to change. And if it's different, the credit should presumably be different.

I took a statistics class like this as an undergraduate; the graduate students had extra questions on the homework and exams, and more challenging projects. One suggestion I might add: allow undergraduates to try the graduate questions for bonus credit :D

I do this all the time. Grad courses that are split with senior undergrads, and open across Chemistry, Physics, and Materials Science and Engineering.
If your course is split, i.e. grad and undergrad with separate course codes, you typically need to provide some differentiation in terms of undergrad vs grad to justify having two separate but concurrent classes. You should not provide differentiation based on their background (prior courses or experience). You need to provide a consistent and fair learning environment.
When I set my differentiation for course approval, and in practice, I provide the same content for everyone, but I build in opportunities for higher order understanding for the grads. For example, if I provide a writing assignment, the portion where the student is asked to synthesize a concept based on literature is weighted heavier, or intended to be longer for grads. Similarly, when I ask an open-ended question on an exam, I expect a deeper level of answer from the grads. As long as you are clear in your rubrics about this, then it is easy to run. Just make sure your expectations are consistent and expressed in the syllabus.
Otherwise, I have two pieces of advice:
(a) do not create too much differentiation, especially not in the day to day of how the class is run or the content taught. It's better for everyone if the course is cohesive and everyone is involved in all content. If you have concerns about lack of content/context for the undergrads, what I personally do is record a couple of videos and upload it to the course Canvas page for undergrads (and really grads as well if they want), to view and get caught up.
(b) if you are allowed to, drop the curve, it's just a nonsensical way to run a course....

For open ended questions where more in depth understanding is expected from grad students I think using different curves actually makes sense.  It removes a potential grading error (evaluating a student on the wrong criteria), and allows students to more easily compare their success (ex an 75 is an 75 in either case but is a C for a grad student and only a B for an undergrad).  For undergrads planning to continue their studies it also makes it easier to know if they learned the material well enough for the advanced degree they ultimately want or need to plan on retaking it later.

+1 for (b). Grading on a curve is toxic and encourages students to see their learning (and life in general) as a competition and a zero-sum game, rather then embrace collaboration and recognise win-win outcomes.

At my institution at least, there would be two course numbers assigned for the same lecture and the graduates are supposed to do more work and show more success for the same grade. If it is officially a single class, then grading differently and even offering different assignments would open me up to complaints of discrimination.
Besides, often senior undergraduates are better prepared than first year graduate students (who might come from a different academic background).

Having been an undergraduate in Computer Science who took graduate level courses, my suggestion would be to know your students and their technical capabilities.
In computer science specifically, a number of graduate students start their graduate program there without any support from a lesser degree, and in a course about analysis of algorithms, junior and senior undergraduates would have a major advantage on them. In this case what Buffy suggests, and teaching two separate courses would likely be best for both groups, and as you get to know your graduate students, you can promote them into the harder course as they prove themselves capable.
For example, in my case, on the final exam, the professor put a question on the exam asking us to do a topological sort of a graph with 7 nodes in a horizontal line that all had edges pointing right in some fashion, such that: "A, B, C, D, E, F, G" was one valid sort, and he admitted to the class that 80% of the graduate students and none of the undergraduates got that question wrong. The professor was quite upset at the level of curve he would have to give to allow for even some of them to pass. All through the course he been complaining that some students just weren't prepared for his course, and in reality all I got from his course was a nice textbook with some advanced algorithms, and a professor that I could go to when he had time to ask questions.
I disagree that it should be split between different course codes, as likely this has already been done at your institution, has it not? Is it not the case that the undergrads are taking the graduate level course as an elective? If this is not the case, then this should definitely be done if possible, though maybe your institution has problems with limited class size in this case.
If it is the case where your grad students in your field are more technical than your undergrads, while it is not ethical to let them teach as of yet, can you perhaps have them lead small research groups in a class project setting? In this way you can have different grading and goals for undergrads and grads, but still be overall assigning the same thing to both.
All in all, I honestly think it comes down to knowing your student body, and what they can individually accomplish. Build on that, and you should go farther than you would if you simply tried to force a one size fits all solution on them.

How is it fair, if two people achieve different results (like test and assignment scores) but both get 75%?
One way to handle it, institution permitting, is to "code share" the course. The Master's and Ph. D. level people register for EE542. The undergrads register for EE442.  They go to the same room at the same times and listen to the same lectures, but the EE542 people get some more challenging assignments and maybe some different exams.
Two people of different levels of experience can each get 75% in the course: one has it in their transcript as having passed EE442, the other as EE542. No monkey business took place with how their work was graded, like one being more strictly graded than the other, or adjusted through a curve; they actually did different work in accordance with what they registered for.

Not only is it entirely normal to grade grad students and undergrads on a different curve, but in fact, sometimes professors do this in mixed- and grad-level courses to 'protect' the grad students from the undergrads, rather than the other way around. (!)
There are a few reasons for this, such as the following:

Undergrads are supposed to focus their attention and efforts on getting good grades; grad students (at least for research programs) are supposed to focus on research, and are generally encouraged to not worry about grades as much. (Faculty often say this quite explicitly, though perhaps not in writing.) It would be hypocritical to say this and then expect both groups to obtain comparable grades.

Undergrads (sometimes) have lower requirements for such courses (e.g., no final research paper), and thus naturally have an advantage. Though in this case it's simply wrong to grade them on the same curve, IMO.

Undergrads that take courses intended for grad students can sometimes be especially strong in that area (sometimes even already doing research in the field and even published material on it), compared to grad students who might have only just started in that field, or even be completely unfamiliar with it and merely taking it for the sake of a requirement.

Of course, the reverse direction can be a concern depending on the course as well; there are certainly courses where grad students would have a massive advantage.
There is some judgment call to be made here, so I'm not saying this makes sense for every course by any means. However, in general: if you have reason to believe one group is likely to naturally have an advantage over the other, you're well within your rights (again, in general; I don't know about your particular institution) to grade on two separate curves. Just make sure all students understand this ahead of time to avoid needless stress/confusion/etc.

This question is proof yet again that grades are meaningless...
What is the purpose of your course work? Is it to teach the students a certain set of skills/ability/knowledge? Or is it a meaningless class that is meant to fill a checkbox?
If it is a meaningless class that fills a checkbox. You could just assign grades at random... If its not I would grade the students based off of how well they have learned that knowledge/developed that skill. Instead of grading them on a curve. If this means that every students gets an A because they are able to do xyz, then every student gets an A. If this means that every student got an F because they cannot do xyz, then every student gets an F. (*though every student getting an F means that you are a bad teacher).

I don't think this question provides any such proof. What if the purpose of grades is to motivate learning? Then it definitely makes sense to have different motivation standards for different types of students.

Grades motivate students? That is news to me... I thought that recent research proved the opposite https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1469787418819728

I think you need to reevaluate the word "prove" in describing social science research. Yes, grades motivate students. Every student who asks what will be in the exam is motivated by their grade. I'm not claiming it's the best motivation. I am confident that busy students balancing lots of demands on their time will neglect courses that they can pass without effort.

Out of curiosity did grades ever motivate you to learn or did they just motivate you to pass a test...

Hard to pass a well designed test without learning.

@BryanKrause While that may be true, its rare to find well designed tests. Academia has been dumbing down for decades. As time progresses, the correlation between higher education and cognitive abilities are declining. Though I wouldn't call grades meaningless. I would say grades do an excellent job of measuring the ability for the student to follow instructions and the level of effort they're willing to offer. They're limited as far as measuring actual mastery of the material. Grades are absolutely worthless to measure intelligence.

In the paper you link to, their methodology was to 1) Ask students whether they are motivated by grades; they found they say they are not, and 2) To compare across completely different student bodies at universities that have different grading methodologies and found that students have higher "autonomous motivation" (e.g., intrinsic motivation). They have not measured the efficacy of extrinsic motivation at all, or measured any impacts on learning, or performed any controlled experiment that would not be confounded by self-selection into a particular learning scheme.

Quote from the paper: "The two universities with alternative grading systems are small (<5000 students) primarily undergraduate liberal arts and science universities, whereas the university that uses multi-interval grades is a large (>30,000 students) research university with a wide range of professional and graduate programs."


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Should I get my chair a card/small going away gift although she has never been there for me?
I'm a first year Master's student that works under the supervision of my thesis chair. At first, I was really excited to work with my chair because she is known as one of the nicest people & best profs in the department. However as time went on, those rose colored glasses have come off and I have seen her for who she truly is.
While I by no means dislike the woman, I have felt extremely dissatisfied working with her as she has canceled countless meetings, made empty promises, and never follows through. She told me she'd help me with my speech for my very first poster presentation but never did. She told me she'd help me set up my poster and be there for me, but never showed up until right before I was about to start presenting. She promises me thesis edits will be made within a certain time frame but always falls through with no email to explain.
My thesis is a branch off a multi site grant study and I've had to be in personal contact with the head of the grant because she has not been present although the head of the grant is also relying on her. I've done all the preparations for the data collection although she could have definitely helped if she wanted to.
Because there's been a lull in my recruitment; instead of focusing on that, she's trying to get me to do her dirty work for a former project that has nothing to do with me. Although her former thesis student has already graduated and been accepted to a PhD program, she'll still prioritize that student over me by helping that student publish her thesis.
She's not transparent at all and never gives me her opinion (even on things that do matter), so I often feel alone in making decisions. She also doesn't know how to talk to people. Just last week, out of the blue, she told me she is moving to another state for another job offer in about 2 months but has made no real attempt to help me decide how to deal with my thesis... it's all non novel ideas (like start over) lip service disguised as help. I guess my point is--despite my dissatisfaction, she has NO clue I feel this way and would be quite surprised if she ever found out.
I'm wondering if I should fake it long enough and even get her a card/buy her going away lunch to ask her for a recommendation letter before she leaves?
I know it sounds conniving and that's normally not like me, but I am very frustrated with her and feel like that's the least she could do for me, considering she's screwed me over multiple times already in the 4 short months we've been working together. I could really use one from her since I've worked for her the longest so far, and people are telling me that's what I should do.

I have formatted your text a little, but I would like to recommend you to narrow it down. There is too much information that is not essential to answer your question.

Related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/108449/should-i-give-a-symbolic-thank-you-and-goodbye-gift-to-an-abusive-supervisor

It's not "conniving" not to dump your frustrations all over someone. Unless she asks you for your honest opinion, you are not obligated to go out of your way to share any of your feelings, especially if all the negative consequences would land on you. The professional way to handle someone you deeply dislike is with (cold) politeness.
You don't need to buy her lunch (as your superior she shouldn't accept that anyway), but do ask her to write you that recommendation letter and don't do anything to torpedo her opinion of you.

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Can a statistician become an actuarial consultant without pursuing another degree?
I have a Ph.D. in statistics and am working at a university. I plan to become a consultant at an insurance company because I found that a statistician has fewer work opportunities than an actuarial certificate holder. Also, I found that actuarial science is mainly based on statistics, mathematics, and finance. I am great with math and statistics, but I need to improve with finance; however, I will build my skills on this topic.
My question is, can a statistician become an actuarial consultant or not? To become an actuarial consultant, must I get a bachelor's and master's degree in actuarial science? I am working at a university in the Middle East, but I would like to move to other companies that focus on insurance.

In which country is this? The rules can differ per country.

In the US the actuarial exams lead to certification. A degree in math (maybe statistics) gives you a pass on the first couple of exams (note: very old experience with this) but you still need to take the others. You don't, or didn't, need any degree in actuarial science. Any large insurance company should have someone who can give you details and they will be country specific.

And, an actuarial certificate in one country may not be transferrable to another. It seems unlikely to me that it would, actually. A place like the EU might have general rules, of course across countries.

@Buffy, Thank you for your comment. So much appreciated.

Actuaries are certified by examinations in the US. Anyone can call themselves an actuary, but it is better to have taken and passed the exams. In Canada, actuaries are licensed and only people who have a license can use the title. You should consider taking the exams.

@DavidSmith Thank you so much. I appreciate your comment.

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Unrelated project during PhD
I am in my 3rd year of the PhD program in theoretical physics. Although I would love to stay within academia, my hopes of obtaining a good position are dwindling because of various factors. Given that, it seems wise to be get prepared to leave academia after I get a PhD. My work has nothing to do with coding/programming, and I have zero experience at that. If I leave academia, I want to get into the field of data science/machine learning. Is it possible/advisable/reasonable to work on a side project within physics but in an unrelated field which allows me to gain experience in data analysis and programming? Would I be able to handle it? Would it be a reasonable thing to do without upsetting my advisor? Also, if I do intend to stay within academia, would the experience of working in a different field count, even though it doesn't appear in my dissertation at all?
I do want to mention that I am certain that I do not want to change my field of research for my dissertation just because of the possibility of moving away from academia. I really enjoy working in my field and wouldn't give that up for anything. So switching to the other field for good is not an option.
Thanks in advance!
Edit: I could also work on problems that are a little more closely related with my work that involves numerical computation through which I could learn to code but I wouldn't be working with data. However, I don't know if that would help in terms of getting into industry.

Surely there must be some coding/programming project you can do that is related to your field of research.

If you have no prior experience with programming, it may require a significant investment over a considerable period of time to gain appreciable skills appropriate for professional work.  That said, what would be your game plan here?  For example, would you want to get a job in machine learning and such in the next few years based on skills acquired between now and then?

Long story short: Depends. It is difficult to answer these questions without understanding the precise details of your situation. Getting experience is always a good thing, especially if it is programming experience, and you are considering a possible career shift towards more programming/machine learning heavy field of research . However, your part-time contribution to a different scientific project might distract you from finishing your PhD: which should be, considering the year you are in your main worry. If possible, I would discuss this with your supervisor and ask them for a honest opinion: if they feel like your particular situation (expected time commitment, skills, the nature of the work...) allows to go for outside research opportunity, and they think it is good for your career, good for you. I believe that simply bringing up the subject is very unlikely to upset them: after all, their main purpose, at least from your point of view is to supervise you and advise you on starting of your scientific career. If however they express doubts about the extra project being a good fit for you at this point, you might consider focusing on your PhD and then looking for extra learning opportunities: remember that life is just starting after you're done, and there will be plenty of time for various projects afterwards. As to whether the experience would count: depends on what do you understand as 'counts'. But personally I believe that at least familiarity with programming is a skill which counts a lot regardless of the field you end up with.

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How to deal with a weak recommendation letter?
During the graduate school application process, I contacted a potential supervisor. He initially accepted me, but he requested specifically a recommendation letter from my previous research internship, because I done this internship abroad and was only almost a month. I requested a recommendation letter from my internship mentor and he wrote it. Unfortunately, he wrote a weak and short recommendation letter as he only knew me for a short period.
Should I forward this weak recommendation letter to my potential supervisor or how should I deal with such a situation?

Hi. This question is related with yours, but they have more than one letter: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/95818/should-i-submit-one-strong-recommendation-letter-or-one-strong-letter-and-one-we

Am I correct in reading your internship lasted under a month? That’s a pretty short time for someone to form an opinion.

There is probably little you can do other than to explain if and when necessary that the supervisor only knew you for a short while so can't predict much about the future.
You could try to get a stronger letter, but I doubt that would be successful. It is worth a try if your relationship is good. It might be enough if the letter actually states that they only knew you for a short period.
You might be ok as long as the letter isn't negative. The letter might not help, but it might not be too much of an issue if your application overall is strong.
I'd guess you have to wait and see what develops and deal with it when necessary. And, yes, you probably have to forward that letter or a subsequent one since it has been asked for.

Sharing a weak reference letter is better than sharing none as long as the letter is from a reputed source. Personally, I have been in a situation where I had to request for a letter from a course (in which I performed good) instructor since I was short of one. They were very upfront about it and did mention right away that the letter would be weak since they knew me only as a student and not a researcher. However, since the person was very reputed in his field that letter even if weak would have been helpful for my application.
That being said, from what I can assume if you already have the letter and know it's contents then there is very little impact that it's going to make. An unseen recommendation letter is given much more weight than a open recommendation letter in graduate applications.


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Re-applying PhD after already starting one
I would like to re-apply for PhD at top US schools, after already (1 month in) starting PhD at a good (non-US) school. The program starts with a preparatory year, so theoretically I am not committed to a specific supervisor yet.
The school I am in is quite good in several aspects, it is an 'up-and-coming' young university, with good pay for grad students, a nice atmosphere and well connected professors. However, I think that it does not have the same name recognition of US universities or professors that are exactly specialized in my area of interest.
I had previously applied to Caltech and UC Berkeley, along with the one I got accepted in as a safety school. I got an online interview for Caltech, I and I was told the reason I did not get in was 'it is a small school, and my background made it difficult to find a professor for me to work with'.
Part of the reason I would like to re-apply is that I do not want to feel like a failure down the road, which is admittedly not the greatest reason.
Regardless, I would like to know if (1) it is worth it to re-apply or should I just stick with where I am, and if so,(2) how do I ask for recommendation letters again without my professors feeling that I am wasting their time. (3)Is there a cost to re-applying again? (4) What should I change this time?

You have been rejected before, so what is different this time?

I have a clearer idea of the area I want to work in.I can apply to new schools. I know that I need to specify a professor I want to work with in advance and contact them.+ I have one more paper ready for submission to a conference.

Looks like you're considering it for the wrong reasons. The university's recognition is the least important thing about where you do your PhD and our lives are full of failures, sometimes we just need to carry on. The supervisor is the main factor for choosing the institution, so if you will go ahead with this make sure that the professor you're considering as supervisor will accept you.

Part of the reason I would like to re-apply is that I do not want to feel like a failure down the road, which is admittedly not the greatest reason.

"Feeling like a failure" when you got admitted into a good PhD program is absurd. Look at it from a broad perspective: only around 2% of the population in the US have a PhD, it's clearly not rational to consider yourself a failure when you're in the top 2%. This feeling indicates that you are a perfectionist person, which is common and a great quality in academia... unless it's excessive and leads you to being constantly unsatisfied with yourself, undermining your motivation and eventually the quality of your work. It's good that you're aware that this feeling is not a good reason to re-apply, before any decision make sure that you completely get rid of this feeling: it's irrational and has nothing to do with where you do your PhD, because what matters in a PhD is the quality of your research. Don't let this kind of feeling grow, because a PhD is already challenging enough for one's sanity.

However, I think that it does not have the same name recognition of US universities or professors that are exactly specialized in my area of interest.

There are lots of unknowns when one starts a PhD, and it's human to try to find certainty in objective facts such as the recognition of the institution. Unfortunately it doesn't work this way: the recognition you will get after the PhD has very little to do with your institution, it will depend almost only on the quality of your own work. A major factor for this is the compatibility between you, your topic and your supervisor. It's true that top institutions tend to have good academics, but this compatibility is not automatic: many PhD students in a top institution underperform, and many PhD students in non-top institutions succeed. At the end of the day, the recognition of the institution plays very little role in your own success. However your area of interest is important: if there are no potential supervisors in your institution who are specialized in it, then it's reasonable to consider moving to a "more compatible" institution.
So my humble advice is:

(1) it is worth it to re-apply or should I just stick with where I am, and if so,

Not worth for the reputation of the institution; you should consider it only if you think you're not going to be able to work on your topic of interest with a good supervisor in your current institution.

(2) how do I ask for recommendation letters again without my professors feeling that I am wasting their time.

If you decide to do it, you can ask them if you can re-use their recent letters of recommendation.

(3)Is there a cost to re-applying again?

No idea but it should be easy to find out.

(4) What should I change this time?

If you decide to do it, you should probably explain that you now have a precise idea of the topic you plan to do and demonstrate why it makes sense for you to work on this topic at this institution, i.e. make it interesting for a supervisor to accept you.


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How do professors and teachers develop critical thinking?
I'm in medical school and I am always puzzled by professors and teachers, specifically Sal from Khan Academy, due to how they can deeply understand the subjects and can understand anything. It's like they have a secret formula or way of thinking about information.
In my attempts to answer this I came to the conclusion that they have critical thinking and reading skills that I don't have and I reached this conclusion after reading a little of the book "Reading Critically, Writing well."
Am I correct in this and if I am how can I develop my critical thinking?
In addition, I think that these people have good research skills so any recommendation for that will be useful.

But just to comment one thing that you are missing that these professors have and you don't have: they have several years of experience. You should not expect to have the same level of critical thinking and teaching skills of a professor when you are in your third year at the university. :) For me much of the critical thinking I developed was not due to reading, but because I was challenged in many different ways by many clever people along the years.

Similar to what @TheDoctor comments: experience. My joke to my students is that one of the main impediments of inexperienced people is failing to understand the benefits of experience. :)  Also known as "hindsight". :)

@paulgarrett: Also: Good Judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from Bad Judgement. (Attr: Rita Mae Brown)

I hope your time in medical school will help you develop your critical thinking skills!

Having a solid understanding of a pre-existing body of knowledge does not necessarily have much to do with critical thinking. Just because someone excels in their subfield (particularly in matters not involving their own original research), that does not necessarily mean that they are able to critically evaluate their beliefs. I would imagine that what you are probably missing is subject-specific knowledge plus possibly some general problem solving skills.

Why do you think they're so brilliant? They might be, chances are they're not. You've been watching videos and hearing lectures about stuff that was textbook knowledge when the grandfathers of those guys were students. Thousands of professors have been teaching that, some good, some badly, and millions of students have learned it, some better than others.

Narrow your post to remove multiple questions (am I correct that professionals display deep knowledge because they know how to do critical thinking, how can I learn to do critical thinking, how can I improve my research skills). As suggestions: the first question demands your own critical thinking to answer for your own satisfaction, and the third question is rather too broad to address properly.

What is critical thinking to you?
Let's call it the ability to dissect a problem or question in ways that allow you to assure that a given answer is complete, where complete means not only correct but also adequate and proper.
With this definition, I suggest critical thinking is engaged in the first three steps in problem solving: define the problem, gather the information about it, and propose solutionS to it. The first step disassembles the problem statement to every possible variation on meaning. Pictures (being worth thousands of words) help. The second step clarifies what is and is not known before starting to solve the problem. The third step step goes through logical assertions and assumptions to try to to reach a closed-form conclusion. I purposely capitalized the S on solutionS to indicate not just one but many possible answers may be proposed.
Critical thinking is the iterative process of going through the problem definition, information, assumptions, and assertions to form a self-consistent, satisfactory conclusion for what a problem means, what it has at hand, and how it could be solved. The goal at the end is to be able to stand at a mirror and say "I am fully convinced that this proposed solution is fully justified, is properly framed, and can provide a complete result!" If you cannot do this, go back and figure out why not. And when you can do this, go back and vary something ... the given information, an assumption, or an assertion. How does making this change propagate through the iterative steps of defining, gathering, and proposing? Can you still end with a complete solution even after you have made the change? Why or why not?
On hand a chosen approach, the concluding two steps to problem solving are to evaluate the approach and to report a final answer. These two steps do not engage critical thinking. We can essentially delegate them to technicians or robots or calculators.
In summary, following the first three steps in problem solving can serve to discipline you on how to think critically.

Most universities will have a course, perhaps in the philosophy department, perhaps a course in philosophical logic there that covers this. In the US, many of us took some philosophy as part of an undergraduate program.
One aspect of critical thinking in the sciences, and perhaps medicine, is developing the ability to evaluate the validity of evidence given for claims and hypotheses. Some of that is statistical in nature and is usually taught as part of a course in conducting research in the various fields.
A good starting place is at Wikipedia which has a good discussion and an extensive bibliography.
Another easy resource is a search for Critical Thinking at Amazon.
There are likely online courses as well for those so inclined.
Critical thinking is a lot about recognizing fallacies. Like any skill it takes practice. Some of the books have exercises, actually.


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Is strict adherence to a citation format really necessary in actual research?
In high school and college I remember whenever doing some research for a class, my English teacher then will look at the citation at the end and use a red pen to mark out any place where MLA format is not strictly followed. This is probably the reason that there are 106 million hits for "MLA How?" on Google.
Doubtlessly citation is necessary and very helpful, but I question over the strict adherence to a particular formatting style. But the problem is I have this idea that you must cite with 100% accuracy and adheres to a particular style. It was drilled into my head by my English teachers and professors particularly those in the arts and social sciences. Now I am in graduate school and I am faced with having to cite dozen of extremely well known literature with a very small audience in mind. Some of the authors are who works at another lab down the street or I meet everyday. In all honesty, the citation is done in the off chance someone who reads it and finds that he needs additional literature support.

By formatting style, I mean any generic formatting style MLA/IEEE/APA (https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/) or otherwise that instructs you to cite as follows:

[First Name][Last Name] "[Text]"...[Publisher][Page
  Number][Chapter]...[Web/Print/Hardcopy...][Date Accessed in m/d/y or d/m/y]...

Don't forget each [...] needs to be separated, by ; , or a dot, or comma as instructed.

For one, doing a strict alignment with a particular format a huge time waster for the author and practice feels a little bit cultish.
Secondly, if the most necessary information pertaining to a particular reference is included in the citation section, do I  REALLY need to ... align the format with a particular citation style with strict adherence? I think nowadays most people just look at the author and the book title and do an online search.
For example, is there a huge problem with writing:
A. Thomasz "Guide to IEEE or MLA format". Dover. 1999. Print.
or
Thomasz Antonie, Guide to IEEE or MLA Format, Dover, 1999.
or
Thomasz Antonie. "Guide to IEEE or MLA Format". www.guidetoieeeormla.com. Web.
Or
A. Thomasz. www.guidetoieeeormla.com.
Actually if I remember far back enough in high school you would actually need to cite another person if he speaks to you. So if I had spoken to Mr. Antonie (made up person), then I would have to cite our conversation in a particular style. "Verbatim" was the word, or "Orally", or "Presentation"? I don't think I have ever done that after high school, even in reality much of what I know is by speaking to other people, yet I never reference any of those people.
I have not yet written a research paper. Is strict adherence to a particular formatting style actually followed in practical research? Is there any big problems that would arise if a particular citation style is not strictly followed?
This question is inspired when I was exploring around and seeing how people in other countries say France do not particularly care about this issue and everything works fine. I am in the hard sciences if that helps.
Comment: looks like an American phenomenon, just so you know in American schools we are taught for the span of 4 years to manually type all citations in MLA (including the full URL link) Here's a paper addressing this interesting cultural practice

doing a strict alignment with a particular format a huge time waster for the author – only, if you are doing your citations manually, which is a huge waste of time anyway.

@Wrzlprmft Ahhh so that is how it is done. So you mean all those guides on how to do a reference properly are in fact useless and all those hours I trying to do proper citation were in fact a giant waste of time? Good to know, always felt this way, we should tell the highschool kids.

No, if you want your work published than strict adherence is absolutely necessary. I assume what @Wrzlprmft means is that many people use software to manage the citations, e.g. endnote or bibtex, but there are many others.

More a comment - citations exist to find the referenced work, Quite a few journals have rather horrible citation format which makes it hard to find the paper in the first place. On the other, some journals have an excellent citation format. From a practical point of view, IF you are handwriting a reference, one should really care less about the format but making it as complete and extensive as possible to enable people to find the refence.  And as other people have said - for actual papers, one uses BibTeX or a reference manger plus a predefined style.

Remember, you are writing for your readers. Make life easy on them by giving as much information as possible and being consistent in how you format the information.

Even in high school, American students can use tools like NoodleTools or Citation Machine or EasyBib or Zotero, among others to format their citations quickly, without having to remember every little nuance of the formatting rules.

@ZachLipton Isn't it great to be alive in the future? Things just magically become convenient. Nothing like that existed when I went to high school and AOL was used for pretty much everything, even myspace was a new thing...we can only imagine what the future brings

Even when I was in high school (before MySpace was even founded) there were tools to use for citations. I particularly remember using BibTeX in the early 90s (had to have the right .bib file), templates with word processors (again had to find or get from teacher), and Bookend - but there were others even then

@JGreenwell From my experience, people were definitely taught how to do them manually and from looking around it seems to be the experience of many many people. I am telling you mine from going to school in three different states and taking courses in college.

Oh, they weren't taught very often, still not taught enough today IMHO, but they certainly existed

I started my doctorate 6 years ago and was one of only a few in my group (of maybe 20) who'd used Mendeley/Zotero.

Are you asking about citation practices now, or citation practices of people who were doing research back when you were in high school? You seem to be talking a lot about how inconsistent your high school experience was with respect to current practice in research, whereas the current high school experience may be very different.

@ff524 Hi I am in the process of writing a paper and I asked the question under the assumption that people were still doing citation the way that was taught in highschool. Times has changed and through some of the answers I realized there are various citation tools that can automate this process. The premise of this question is a little bit off but nonetheless has shed a light on the difference between theory and practice.

@Lookbehindyou It is not so much a difference between theory and practice, as it is between practice now and practice a long time ago.

As a READER of a paper, I care most about what results I get from google when a copy the text of a citation into the search box.

First of all, almost nobody formats their references by hand. Typesetting systems such as Latex have a tool for auto-generating references, for instance from a bibtex file (which is essentially a local database of papers that the researcher often cites). Entries into this file are also not really manual in most cases, as bibtex entries for papers can usually be obtained via a quick web search from the publisher. For instance, in the ACM Digital Library (see example entry here), you can click on the right-hand side on Export -> Bibtex and obtain a bibtex entry. Other typesetting systems, such as Microsoft Word, usually have similar plugins or features.
Now, why would your English teacher (or publishers) even care about whether you write Thomasz Antonie or T. Antonie (or Antonie, T., ...)? At the end of the day, this is not so much about understandability of the reference, but more about giving the paper a more professional look-and-feel. For journals it is important to retain their "trademark" optics. This includes obvious aspects, such as font size, column layout, or margins, but also extends to using a consistent reference style within each paper, and also across papers published in the same journal.

I just found out about auto reference tools recently. I am using citethisforme.com, do you have better suggestions? On your remark about "why would teachers care"...I was raised in an era without these auto reference tools and at an American school, everything was standardized: SAT, ACT, MEAP, TAKS, AP, and of course, MLA.

Microsoft office includes a pretty robust citation tool by default.

@mkingsbu Here is the funny thing as mentioned in http://www.parlorpress.com/pdf/walker--everything-changes.pdf, when microsoft came out with its citation tool, MLA immediately changed MLA style rendering the tool useless, and when microsoft updated it, MLA changed it again so the tool would not be used. I lived through this age. Of course I knew the citation tool existed, I also knew that it was useless because it was not the actual newest version of "MLA standard", who knew whatever happened in all those years I stopped writing essays maybe they finally came to an agreement

"…and when microsoft updated it, MLA changed it again so the tool would not be used." – is this actually mentioned in that document?

For referencing software, the standards for those of use who use word processors rather than LaTeX are Mendeley (free), Zotero (free), EndNote (your uni prob has a licence), Reference Manager (paid) and Refworks  (cost depends on uni). On Mac people can also use Papers (paid) and if you use Google Docs there is Paperpile (paid).

No.  Most people use automatically generated citations and references.  Usually I find some errors (often case errors) and fix them.  But strict adherence to a citation style is typically obtained by the copy editor of the journal, or nor at all.

There are various reasons for this strict format. It makes the reference easy to track. You want to make it as easy for the readers as possible; things that an author invests in, the reader doesn't need to - as the reader should be treated as the more important part of the game - after all, it's the reader for whom an essay is written; without him/her, it's an exercise in futility. Always respect the reader.
Also, in earlier journals space was at a premium, and a compact, yet predictable organisation of, say, a journal reference without superfluous wording (which requires strict ordering of volume/number/year to avoid confusing volume, pages, year etc.) is necessary. Space is less an issue with electronic journals, but is still an issue for paper-based ones.
As others have pointed out, the task is much easier now, due to the existence of software that helps you doing that. It's strongly recommended to use it, as it will much simplify your life.

Does it make them easy to track? Funnily enough, the "old condensed reference style" always suggests to me that the journal does not want me to look at any references in the first place. A more extensive reference would make it way easier . The number one entry frequently missing is the title, though that would be the best indicator as to whether a paper can be interesting in a reference list. The cryptic abbreviations are another bane of the publishing word as they are pretty much ambiguous.

That was to save paper space. Nowadays journals are more and more switching to including the title of a referenced paper. And the abbreviations are slightly cryptic, but you get to know them for the journals in your subject very quickly. The full names are totally redundant and make it harder to find the relevant information.

@Karl Exactly what I wanted to say. It is a hurdle for the beginner, but if you have to handle a lot of references, this becomes more convenient. DOIs do not exist for a long time, and also, you do not see the journal where it was published (and yes, if you work in the field, you know the journal).

@DetlevCM whoa, is that really common in other fields to omit titles?  I don't think I've ever seen a paper (even ones published 60+ years ago) that didn't include the title of referenced works.

@guifa Fairly common in engineering/chemistry. You get the author, year - a cryptic journal abreviation and page numbers...

@CaptainEmacs It is NEVER convenient. Yes, DOIs are a good identifier if you need a "stable link", but in the context of reading it isn't useful at all. And the "if you work in the field" also doesn't work - not with papers scattered across 10+ journals, some just tangentially related. The fact that you have 5 journals with 5 names doesn't mae it any easier either.

@DetlevCM I am not sure we talk at the same level. I didn't intend to say DOIs are convenient. I referred to the (possibly abbreviated) references. In fact, I try to say, possibly that was unclear, that DOIs do not show the journal. Having worked through real libraries before the advent of search engines, I can vouch that a standardised compact way of denoting references is an advantage (does anyone remember reverse citation search in the good old times? Nightmare!). You may not like it, but the present tools are much younger than the citation standards, so expect some transition time.

As a READER of a paper, I care most about what results I get from google when I copy the text of a citation into the search box.   This includes a preprint coming up in google if the journal that is cited is behind a paywall.

@Ian, of course. However, the tradition of citation is older than Google; quite possible that it may change and will be looked at less strictly in the future. I tried to explain what the reason for the standard is. One should not forget that standards exist for a reason. For instance, when you capitalise non-abbreviation words, this looks and feels to the reader like being shouted at - this is netiquette standard, whether or not you intended it like that. To emphasise without "shouting", users use single or double stars.

@guifa, in mathematics, 100 years ago it was apparently very common to omit titles in citations. (And citations were most often in footnotes. There was no "bibliography".)

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


text:
When are professors most free during a semester?
You would think that profs are living the high life when lectures are over and all they have to do is to hand out the exam (in a couple weeks) and grade them. But when I tried to get a hold of the profs, they seem to be busier than ever. One prof even stopped holding office hours all together and handed those duties to the TAs.
What do profs usually do after all lectures has stopped, and in general, when are profs most free in terms of their faculty duties during a semester?

Academics are often the sort of person who will go looking for work to do and have no interest in the "high life."

As the answers below will tell you, teaching is about 1/3 of the job of a professor, with the other 2/3 being research and service.  You can't skimp on those, either.  That's why they say, "Publish or perish." To answer the other part of your question, where I teach faculty are least snowed under just after midterms.  The start of a term is awful and the end is worse.

The end of the semester particularly the period between the end of lectures and when students finally leave campus (which may be well after you've submitted grades) can be the busiest part of the semester because that's when you spend a lot of time dealing individually with students that have questions, complaints, or problems.  The reason that this is so time consuming is that there are typically lots of these students, and each complaining student can easily take an hour out of your day.
Meanwhile you may also be grading a lot of term papers or student projects and you're also busy writing, proctoring, and grading final exams.

Research and service commitments tend to continue year round- my answer is really about the intensity of teaching related work at the end of the semester.

True, although some service commitments have peaks at certain times of the year (e.g. admissions).

+1, and that is assuming that there is a time "when students (...) leave campus" at all.

It varies from university to university and from academic to academic, but here are some of the things that can keep professors/lecturers busy, apart from lectures and exams:

Doing research
Serving on committees
Preparing for the next course/semester
Advising/supervising students
Catching up on missed work

Moreover, grading exams can be very time consuming in itself.

Also, attending conferences/visiting collaborators.

Following the question, which of these tend to peak at the end of the semester? For me: all five, but especially the second, fourth, and fifth.  Committees try to get in one last meeting; students have individual issues that require attention; things like refereeing that were due during the semester finally have a chance to be finished.

Not before the exams, because they will be busy preparing exam questions.
Not during the exams, because they will be dealing with exam logistics such as finding an exam room and students who ask last minute questions.
Not after the exams, because they will need to grade the exams.
Not after grades are announced, because many students will be trying to complain about their grade.
Not before the end of the semester, since they will be assigning letter grades and responding to students who want to get a better grade.
Not at the beginning of the school year or other times when prospective graduate students are looking for an advisor.
Not on holiday breaks, since they will likely be busy with the holiday.
Not in the middle of summer, since they may have decided to use the free time to get a lot of traveling to conferences done.
Not in fall since that's when a lot of grant deadlines are due.
Not in late spring/early summer/late summer, since that's the most common time thesis defenses are done.

Generally, I don't think you can expect to find any specific time that professors are reliably found to be more available. There are usually many, many people competing for a professor's time, and together they comprise a very efficient market. If it is ever noticed that a given professor tends to be free around a certain time, everyone will immediately prioritize that time, hoping to catch the professor free, and thereby destroying the availability.
Many professors have brief, transient periods of being less busy than usual, but these are chaotically distributed in time and impossible to easily predict without careful analysis of the professor in question. Unless you regularly interact with a professor, your best bet is to just ask them when they are free.

Last year, Eszter Hargittai published an essay in Inside Higher Ed titled "How I spent Summer 'Vacation'" that provides a nearly comprehensive account of what professors do during their non-teaching time.
A very incomplete list of things that Professor Hargittai mentions that she did over a single summer "vacation" include:
Teaching and Mentoring: syllabus design; assignment and exam preparation; reading recently published materials in an area to be covered by a class; advising students on independent work; reading and commenting on drafts of papers, dissertations, etc; converting student from incomplete; discussing graduate school with potential applications; designing and conducting general examinations; conducting dissertation proposal defenses; conducting dissertation defenses; preparing for any/all of the above.
Research: IRB proposal creation and revision; catching up on the literature in one's field; collecting data; analyzing data; writing up papers; responding to reviews; writing book proposals; courting editors at presses; recommending reviewers; traveling to and attending conferences; organizing logistics for travel to conferences; preparing presentations for conferences; designing and writing grant proposals; reviewing grant proposals; interviewing and hiring research staff.
Service: researching or writing letters of recommendation; writing tenure letters; preparing tenure/promotion files; writing reviews; acting as an editor or associate editor for a journal or conference; miscellaneous work on committees including reading graduate applications, designing department wide curriculum, creating job descriptions for new faculty positions.
All of these things are much harder, or even impossible, to do when classes are in session.

Thanks for the link to Hargittai's essay; I've just put a link to it on my school home page.

Oh, they are busy... Let me give you an insight to my professor's and my own schedule (I'm lecturer, not yet regular professor as I am still lacking the habilitation thesis).
We have a short meeting every working day at 7.30 to organise the daily business and schedule big meetings for big issues.
After that there is always enough to do: Those who lecture always have something to prepare: Writing or correcting scripts, correcting theseis and exams, preparing slides, organising participants for congresses (or participate themselves) and prepare talks for such events. Many professors and lecturers also hold talks outside of university, so there's also this stuff to prepare.
Then there are commitees. Mine has to organise a major congress in March 2015, we are already very busy now: Contacting possible participants, reading through all the literature the participants wrote on the topic, preparing our own papers and talks in response to it, etc.
My working day starts at 7.30 and normally doesn't end before 7 to 8PM. Just yesterday I attended a congress from another commitee and including the dinner (where you also keep discussing) I spend my saturday at university from 7 in the morning until 11pm...


text:
Turning down an accepted tenure track for a better one?

Nota: This question specifically scopes the issue in an academic context.

Context
I am currently on the job market for a tenure track. I assert I should get a position in a bottom-of-the-first-tier institution.
Consider I accepted such a position, and that I then get an offer for a top-3 institution. (Obviously, I won't be their first choice, so I should receive their offer after I had to answer to previous lower-range offers.)
Issue
As far as I am aware of the job etiquette in the US, you are not liable to your future company as long as you've signed no contract. So you can eventually change your mind, even if you already shook hands. Of course, you discredit yourself with the given company... but there are plenty of fishes in the sea in the case of industry. This is not the case in the academia, where you will rub shoulders with the colleagues you dumped for a few decades.
Questions

How bad would it be for my reputation/career to turn down a medium-position I accepted for an all-star one, in the case I verbally (phone call or email only, no contract signed) accepted the former ?
Idem, yet with a contract signed (as long as it is permitted in the contract to resign)?

Could you tell us a lil about your field? It seems the gap between top and bottom schools is not that big!

@TheGuy I would prefer not to. But let's assume it's a field in which only a brain  is required for doing research (i.e. no specific device, hence no significant difference between universities apart from the subfield they are specialized in)

Two years ago to the day you asked this question https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/81376/ in which you said you were about to receive your master's degree and wondering whether you should spend three years doing your PhD.  Only two years later and you are applying for tenure track academic jobs with a chance at getting a job at MIT, Stanford or Berkeley?  Wow.  (Is it not common to do postdocs in engineering?)

@PeteL.Clark Good catch (yet a bit creepy)! Both are questions I am/was genuinely looking for answers for at the time they were asked. They are pretty close to my personal situation, yet might have been asked in a way (use of first person, described context) that makes them more generic, and thus valuable for me and others. I'm glad to share with you the pleasure to hold a PhD for a short while, though.

Because of the way the academic schedule works, if you accept a job you are expected to go to that job for an entire academic year.  This is different from other kinds of jobs where hiring happens all year round.  As a part of this, you are expected to withdraw your other applications when you accept a position.  Anything else will usually be seen as unethical behavior by most people.  This can get complicated in some corner cases (eg you take a temporary job but then get offered a permanent job, where the usual ethical move is to delay the start of the permanent job for a year, but often there’s no hard feelings if you just drop the temporary one, especially if you’re nice about it), but it’s the standard ethical rule.

Thank you for your insight. Note that I expect both offers to occur within a 2 months interval, a few more months prior to the 'assumption of duties'.

What you can, and should, do, is tell the chair anywhere you’ve interviewed about deadlines at other places where you have offers.

I've asked this question around me too. Here is the story I've been told: A candidate was offered a position by A, which they accepted. Then B, a more famous institution, offered the candidate a position too. They decided to accept the second offer, and called A to withdraw their agreement. What happened is that A called B, which then withdraw its offer. In the end, the candidate had no more job offer, and got blacklisted on the market. Bottom line: stick to your word.

@ebosi That's even more unethical by A. Nasty vindicative move.


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How to politely tell the PI I'm working with to use the vector format for images
I have been working on a paper that is now ready for submission. I put a lot of time into polishing my figures in Illustrator, which are very detailed bioinformatics visualizations. I sent the figures to the main responsible PI. The PI has now sent me a draft of the manuscript, with the suggested arrangement of the figures. All in JPEG format. A scrutiny of the person's publication record implies that this is also likely to end up being the case for the final product. I realize that the paper has the potential to go fairly high in terms of impact, if appropriate work was put into the presentation. To be frank, none of the more respectable journals today will accept figures presented in this fashion, and if they do it would demand a lot more in terms of the underlying science than some PDF-using competitors might get away with. So, with a reasonable fear of triggering certain latent ego issues (which appear to be quite common among PI:s in academia), how would I go about convincing this fairly established and high profile PI (as an unsignificant Phd student) to fully switch to vector based figure layout?

The canonical and rather obvious answer would be "send them a neutrally worded email suggesting that they export their figures in vector format, and include a link to an editorial policy page of one of the journals you are referring to in which they specify what formats are permissibe for figures", but the fact that you are asking the question suggests the underlying ego issues are somehow too severe for this approach to work. Can you maybe give us a hint what you expect to go wrong with such an approach or with other similar approaches, to help us brainstorm the issue?

Can't you just reproduce their arrangements using your formatting model?

Asking for an opportunity to reformat all the figures would likely be interpreted as saying"hey, you've been doing it wrong your entire career, let me show you how it's done." Although, It could have been a good option if I was the one who would be uploading the manuscript for submission in the end.

Ok, I might be overstating the potential backlash that might follow. Maybe I get some mean looks for a while and then we get over it. More importantly, how do I maximize the chances of convincing the person? A higher impact paper is the end goal here. After a decade of absorbing the frequent rejections that are likely associated with the JPEG approach, the person must at some point have been informed on the issue. That implies that attempts to convince the person might are likely to meet instinctual resistance, and even a neutrally worded email is likely to fail.

I struggle with this everyday. Same with convincing people not to use PowerPoint to make professional figures. What worked best for me was to show example of papers where the images were blurred or did not zoom well on PDF. This got my point across. Not sure how well it work with a PI with ego issues though.

It sounds like your PI is somewhat insane, so I'm at a loss. Try asking the question at cogsci.stackexchange.com, there are psychology experts there who may have some suggestions.

Sorry, am I the only one not to know what PI stands for?

@mts It stands for "principal investigator". It specifically used for the researcher in charge of a grant and is used by funding agencies. It is often used interchangeably with "advisor" or "supervisor". It's used in academia but I don't think it's popular in all fields.

From the comments I gather that you are afraid to criticise your PI for producing low quality images, which is natural.
I think that a good course of action here would be an e-mail where you tell your PI that your journal requires vector based images. Then you say that you know that he is a busy man and that you are willing to reproduce his images in Illustrator if that is okay with him (assuming the pictures are easily reproducable). That way he will probably thank you for going the extra mile and taking work off his shoulders.
I would refrain from telling him to make better pictures himself, because he has probably done it the same way for decades and it is hard to change such habits.
Good luck with your publication!

What ended up working was to first make an effort to really polish the images regarding my parts of the article, partly to demonstrate how vector based drawings can improve the quality of the figures and partly do demonstrate experience with this. Then I made some polite suggestions on general ways to improve the figures first sent by this PI. He then made the suggestion himself that I could try to implement these improvements, which I happily accepted. While I can't promise the end product will be amazing, at least awareness has been raised and the opportunity given.

While this specific instance obviously has been dealt with, others might find the following useful.
It is professionally acceptable, usually even desired to establish work delivery in certain file formats.
Ideally this is done before work is started or as concerns become apparent.
I see no issue if the quality requested by OP (with third parties like publications in mind) enhances the overall presentation.
In fact, I'm in agreement.
Print publications not only frown upon using lossy compression formats, they have standards regarding resolution as well.
Vector formats can be scaled without images becoming pixelated, so are superior to bitmap formats with insufficient resolution.
So to clearly answer the question at hand as well:
Politely and neutrally suggesting to adhere to the standards required by print media (as mentioned, research on the site of the journal in question or industry standards) should be enough to convince anyone to prefer certain file formats.

Reading this answer, I wonder whether you arrived here from the sidebar and think you're in the Graphic Design stack. In particular, I can't see how "contract negotiations" fit into the context of one co-author convincing another to change workflow. It's a collaboration, not a client-contractor relationship.

Fair point, I misunderstood their relationship. Will edit.It makes however a lot of sense (even among  Co-authors or colleagues) to clarify these topics beforehand or as they appear to be of concern, don't you think? There should be no ego or the like be an issue if this is done early on, with the final quality in mind and has merit in the context of the work.


text:
Applied a new technique on a facial recognition program and the new results are better than the previous one. Can I write a paper on this?
I was playing around with this source code which yielded say results X on using a specific data-set. Now, I came up with an idea to add a change in the source code (specifically, in the data-set) which on execution gives better results (results Y).
The results in X and Y are the facial recognition confidence.
So, the confidence is much better in the Y result when compared to the X results after the new technique is implemented.
Is it possible to publish a paper?
Where the aim of the paper would be to state that this technique gives a better confidence value for the provided data-set.
Any help would be recommended!
This is my first post. Thank you.

In general, yes, you can publish a paper. However, since you are basing your work on that of another you need to properly cite the earlier work. Check any copyright restrictions on the computer codes you use, also. It is possible that you will have to get permission if you use part of that code. But it is also possible that the authors already publish a license to use and extend.
The only other issue is to find a journal or conference that will accept the paper.
I would suggest that part of your paper discuss the earlier work in some detail and the results that it provides. All properly cited. Then you can discuss your new approach and how it improves on the original.
It would also be good to explore alternate data sets to give yourself assurance that your result isn't too narrow or tailored to the specific data set of the original paper. You can even do a comparison on a range of data to get true confidence in the value of your work.
I also think that the "new" approach would be more valuable if it is different conceptually than the earlier work, not just a more carefully coded, but essentially the same, algorithm. How is it new? How is it better?


text:
What is the academic job market going to be like in September-November 2020?
Is there any good reason to be optimistic? I have the impression that this may be the worst job market year in the past ten years.
Edit to be more specific: I am referring to hiring grad students, postdocs, and tenure-track assistant professors, primarily in the U.S., but in other countries as well. Have many universities instituted hiring freezes for this upcoming year?

For which market exactly? US? and for whom? US citizens or global citizens?

I am curious about this topic, but this question is currently very vague. Please edit it to be clearer about what specific information you want in an answer. (Imagine an ideal answer and edit the question to specifically elicit that kind of response.) Otherwise this question may be closed.

So your question is actually “give me a list of universities with a hiring freeze.

If you transform your question into a "shopping question" it will certainly be closed. Ask about the issue, not for names of universities.

Mathjobs right now lists exactly 1 tenure-track job at a research university in the US open to a pure mathematician.  I didn't keep track, but my recollection of prior years is that this is awfully few for August 10.

Which academic job market? American historians? Canadian computer scientists?  French mathematicians?

@JeffE I was just wondering in general. With the current situation, how is the academic job market in various fields compared to previous years?

In December I applied and in March everything is halted until further notice. I've been to interview on another institutions in March. No reply from committee and it's August.

This question will be old in a few months, what's the point?

What is wrong with December? crystal ball for xmas anyone?

It's going to be great. Some people in my department already hired for this coming autumn.

@Notagradstudent  The academic job market isn't a monolithic thing.  The job markets in different countries, in different fields, and in different types of institution are different. There is no sensible answer "in general".

At my US large state univ, there is a hiring freeze for this coming year. Yes, this did also happen c. 2008.
One difference is that in the US the trans-economic source of the problem is by no means resolved... and even when/if it is "resolved", I think the "new normal" is very hard to predict. So administrations are being, and I think will continue to be, very very cautious about commitments toward the future.
So, no, no reason to be optimistic, because we don't even see the end of the disaster yet. Sorry.

@Wetenschaap Perhaps a generic way to answer the OP's question would be to explain how one might find out for themselves what the academic job market is like, if such a thing is possible?

There are some imprecise indications that the last several years have all been the worst year in the last 25 years.  2020-2021 will be much, much worse.  In most cases, the question is not who will get a job, but who will lose one.
http://theprofessorisin.com/2020/05/01/tenured-faculty-member-says-quiet-part-out-loud/
Hiring freeze list:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KohP4xZdN8BZy1OMeXCAGagswvUOWpOws72eDKpBhI4/edit
I have no affiliation with the business that provides this information.

DISCLAIMER: I'm from the UK, and I mostly speak about UK academia, although I have some experience with the US also.
I think there is a difference between Grad Students, Postdocs and Tenure track profs, because they are all funded differently.
I see no reason to be optimistic about the job market for Lecturers/TT profs/others that are funded by core University money. Every university I know has a hiring freeze.
Postdocs are different because by-and-large they are not funded from university funds, but from external grants. The universities wouldn't get to keep that money anyway if they didn't spend it on postdocs. Certainly here in the UK, people still have grants, and there is no suggestion there will be fewer next year.
Some grad students are funded by universities themselves, others by outside agencies. In the UK the vast majority (9 out of the 10 students each year in my department for example), are funded by outside sources, and so they aren't going anywhere either. But I would expect to see places funded by the universities themselves drying up.


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Does being accepted in a PhD program guarantee that my tuition is payed for?
I'm a prospective psychology PhD student, and one of the most intimidating problems was tuition expenses, but I've checked a number of PhD programs (NYU, Carniege-Mellon, Princeton) and they all say something along the lines of "anyone accepted into this program has fully funded tuition" and it feels too good to be true. Is it? Are there any expenses as a PhD student or am I studying for free?

You should not enroll in a PhD program that is not paying you.

It seems like you are very new to thinking about grad school. If so, this FAQ, or this one, may be useful.

The first thing to remember is this: "Free is too expensive." Having said that, most universities provide between 2 and 4 years of "soft" (i.e., university or advisor TA and/or RA) funding. The problem with such funding is twofold: (a) too many mouths to feed and (b) too  little consistency in the system. You should consider writing your own grant before starting your PhD program or at least within the first 18 mos of starting your program. This will do a number of things for you, including; (a) focusing your research, (b) building a reputation, and (c) reducing your reliance on others.
Cheers,

I'll guess that in the US there are very few grants open to people before they finish a doctorate. Can you give some examples that might be readily available? Most TA positions are not limited to 2 years. I've never heard of such a thing in US.

Note that outside funding (personal or an external grant) would  need to be about $60,000/year or more to be equivalent to a TA with tuition forgiveness. And if medical is included, then more, maybe much more. Are there funders who will risk that on an unproven researcher?

In the US, most doctoral students are funded, usually with a Teaching Assistantship. Almost all TA positions come with a stipend and waiver of nearly all fees, including tuition.
There might be some exceptions. And there might be some fees, but, compared to tuition, they are low.
In some fields Research Assistantships might also be available, probably grant funded, and also very likely to include tuition waiver.
Of course, this limits the number of students to the funding available. But TAs provide a valuable service to the university in assisting in undergraduate education.


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What academic functions does a Professor Emeritus usually serve?
I for one have never understood the distinction between a regular prof with a prof Emeritus/Emerita aside from the obvious fact that a Prof. Emeritus is someone who is usually fairly elderly and has spent quite a bit of time in the University.
I am currently spending a working with a Prof. Emeritus who is the a supervisor/advisor to my project and conducts biweekly meetings (which are really brief chats about life) and am in need to make a serious request. I feel uncomfortable because he may have a lot of other work on the side. I do not know whether has classes on the side nor am I aware of any research activities.
How does a professor become Prof. Emeritus (is age-status a must?) and do Prof. Emeritus usually still actively conduct research, teach classes? What is the distinction between a retired professor and a Prof. Emeritus?

This question is largely answered on Wikipedia.

To the best of my understanding, the primary function of a professor switching to emeritus status is that it frees up a faculty slot for a new hire.  Emeritus is essentially retirement without giving up affiliation. An emeritus professor can ramp down their duties, go part time, etc.  In some cases they may still do some teaching and supervising, and may have office space, but I believe they are typically no longer paid and no longer expected to fulfill normal faculty duties.  That said, when they are still active, their advice and participation is often still quite valued by the active faculty.

+1.  Basically emeritus faculty don't have duties as such.  They sometimes still do faculty things, but only as much as they want to.

+1. No more duties means no more required teaching and no more committee meetings. Some emeriti finally go full throttle with research, others essentially retire and pop up once a while to have coffee at their old department. If @IllegalImmigrant's emeritus invests the time to supervise him, he obviously is somewhat invested in his project. For purposes of making serious requests to him, I'd treat him like any other non-emeritus professor (who could just as well decline the request).

One other benefit a Professor Emeritus mentioned to me on switching to the role was that he was able to keep an office within the faculty as well, rather than retiring outright and having to do any research from home, etc.

Some of my best graduate courses were taught by emeritus professors: folks who were only teaching the subject they most loved and could devote otherwise unreasonable amounts of time and attention to the project. That serves their passion and my development.

Emeritus faculty are a subset of retired faculty. At some universities, one gets the title "professor emeritus" practically automatically when one retires; at others, the title is a non-trivial honor.  (Dean Rusk is reported to have explained "emeritus", at the time he retired, with the etymology: "e" means "out", and "meritus" means "deserves to be".)

Actually, it's "ēx" ("out of") + "meritus" ("merit"). Or was that irony? :)

I think Latin allows "ex" to be shortened to "e" in some contexts.  The first example that comes to mind is the motto of the United States, "E pluribus unum".

I may be mistaken (being surprised at @AndreasBlass' answer that not all retired faculty are "emeritus/emerita" [if gender matters]), but in the U.S. in the last 20+ years it seems that (at R1 universities, and maybe R2s) that "emerit*" just means "retired".
The cutesy wrangle about whether the "e(x) merit*" means "from merit" or "without merit" will probably never go away...
So far as I know, no emeritus faculty get any pay, although there may be some deals about benefits (health care in the U.S., ...) People may get to keep modest offices, in some cases, or be reduced to sharing with several other retirees, depending on status...
With widely available internet, and with crumbling infrastructure at many universities, the supposed advantage of "having an office" is evaporating. Many people have better internet, better control of AC or heat, easier parking, nicer space, ... _at_home_ rather than at the (once-regal?) office space on campus. I have a much smaller chance of getting mugged while working at home, already. I have a thermostat! A clean refrigerator. If I had a nice, big, old-fashioned slate blackboard I'd probably have my research students come to my house instead of going to campus to meet them (and have blackboards, luckily, but no AC, parking difficulties even with paid-for reservations, and traffic...)
Skirting faculty meetings, committee assignments, and administrative overhead is a great perk of being retired/emerit*.
In my experience, though, retired faculty do not teach, although they may participate in seminars. On one hand, there are serious conflicts-of-interest in having people who're paid $0$ teach classes, no matter their competence. On another, ... sure, why not let people who've stopped occupying a paid faculty slot still contribute? Unclear to me the wise solution here.


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How should I handle students who ask questions that are "beyond the scope of the course" as a TA
One of the most common replies I have gotten as a student in engineering is the phrase "what you are asking is beyond the scope of this course". But I always found it a bit funny coming from the prof since he or she most reasonable have a thing or two to say about the subject. Furthermore, whether something is considered "beyond" sometimes depends on a prof's temperament, on a good day a topic that is beyond will be addressed, or a busy day that topic is hold off indefinitely.
Now I am a TA for an introductory calculus class. Often there would be a handful of students come into the class with years worth of experience in calculus. Sometimes they will ask a question that is addressed in an upper year course, sometimes the question would have to resort to complex variables, sometimes it relates to physics.
How should I handle students who are interested but asks question beyond the course in the sense it requires an additional course or two to truly appreciate its importance or at least to see how the actual calculations are performed.
I could tell them the answer but sometimes it can lead a student down a rabbit hole which can be devastating given how busy first year students are.
Further, I don't want to disrupt their "natural course" by saying something that may prevent independent self discovery.
Lastly, I don't want to say something which could be misconstrued as a test topic.
At the end of the day, how should I address the questions that are deemed beyond the scope while not withhold information.

Related: What to do when students bring me questions related to other courses and subjects?

If your university has a course website e.g. like what blackboard, you can answer the question there.

"This is beyond the scope of the course" is not a great answer without further clarification or commentary.  As you say, the ethos of the university is that your instructor is someone whose qualifications and expertise lie far beyond the scope of any undergraduate course.  The answer is justified for a student who asks a certain kind of question in class, because class time is limited and one must exercise judgment about what to say and cover in that limited time.  Going off on a lengthy digression that is likely to be of interest to only one student and perhaps not even well understood by her is not a good use of class time.  So I would expect an instructor to say "Come talk to me after class if you are interested in that."
If a student comes to talk to you in your office hours or your spare time, I think that she deserves some kind of answer.  The answer may in fact be that the question lies beyond your expertise (and there is nothing inherently wrong with that; there is a lot of stuff out there...), but in that case you should still spend at least a little while trying to direct the student elsewhere, either to the appropriate reading materials or to some other faculty member who can better help them out.
If you do feel that you know the answer to the question -- or at least, enough of the answer to the question -- then, sure, take a crack at answering it.  It takes a lot of expertise -- subject expertise, pedagogical expertise, and practice -- to be able to give answers to such questions which occupy a reasonable amount of time and are at least somewhat meaningful to the student.  This may involve for instance asking some quick questions of your own, trying to understand the student's background and the true direction and depth of their interest.  One mistake that even seasoned pros make is to open up the gates and flood the student with information of a quantity, density and sophistication that is beyond what they can be expected to process in the moment.  If someone asks you about the example of a conservative vector field on the punctured plane which is not a gradient field that you discussed in class, you should probably not respond by giving them a half hour lecture on DeRham cohomology.  (At least not at first.  One of the amazing things about teaching is that the chance that a multivariable calculus student really is looking for a lecture on DeRham cohomology in answer to their question is very, very small...but it is positive!)

How should I handle students who are interested but asks question beyond the course in the sense it requires an additional course or two to truly appreciate its importance or at least to see how the actual calculations are performed.

You take a shot at it.  Make your first shot very brief: just drop some terminology and try to give a sentence or two expressing one of the main ideas in broadest terms.  In the above case, you might say "Whether every conservative field is a gradient field depends on the domain.  We saw that this is the case when the vector field is defined on the entire plane [or all of three-dimensional space...].  It is also true if the domain is something like an open disk or ball.  It turns out though that 'holes in the domain' lead to conservative vector fields which are not gradient fields."  (By the way, I first wrote more and then deleted some of it!  Restraint is truly hard.)

I could tell them the answer but sometimes it can lead a student down a rabbit hole which can be devastating given how busy first year students are.

I'm not really sure what you mean by this.  The type of personality that is going to be "devastated" by learning that things go deeper than they currently know does not seem well suited to higher education.  If anything I feel exactly the opposite way: as an educator at any level, showing students the rabbit hole is one of the most important things that you can do.  Especially, getting an undergraduate degree is all about learning just enough to get an awareness of the true depth of knowledge and acquiring a sound foundation upon which more knowledge can be built.

Further, I don't want to disrupt their "natural course" by saying something that may prevent independent self discovery.

Again, I don't really buy into this.  Students who want to be sufficiently well insulated from being taught things by other people do not belong in a university.  Self discovery is a wonderful and important thing, but it is enriched and reinforced by prior knowledge and coursework, not ruined by it.  There are plenty of things to discover for oneself, and anyway you are only telling them a little.  It seems very likely that such a conversation would if anything trigger the student's independent learning and self discovery, not inhibit it.

Lastly, I don't want to say something which could be misconstrued as a test topic.

This is why it's best to address such questions outside of the classroom, or at least outside of the class session, and ideally with only the students who are explicitly interested.  It should then be much clearer that what you are telling them is not a test topic.  If there is any ambiguity about that then you should resolve it.  For instance, maybe the question actually is closely related to a test topic but comes from a direction in which the student does not see that.  In that case you should point out the connection to them.

I think it is always worth at least mentioning in a sentence something like  "Even though we have local potential functions, we cannot assemble these into a global potential function on the whole punctured plane.  This is the beginning of a beautiful subject called Algebraic topology, which is concerned with such phenomena on more general spaces".

Yeah, exactly.  I usually quickly give an answer that gives the student some idea of what to do next and the potential complexity involved and then get right back to whatever it was I was talking about before.

From a student perspective, a short answer that just mention the concepts I need to know to solve a certain problem I am interested in is pure gold. If it comes with a reference or two, it's even better.
I think most students (especially those who ask that kind of questions) are able to manage their time efficiently and decide what is more important for them. Also, some of them actually enjoy what they are doing (some ask just of curiosity) and want to study that topic more deeply, in their own spare time. From my experience, knowing what to look for or where to look for it saves a lot of time. Considering the fact that if I ask such a question, I'm usually really interested in that topic, I'll waste that time to find the concepts/references that I need.
So, for questions that are way beyond the scope of the course, I think the following answer is ideal:

This question is well beyond the scope of this course. In order to solve your problem, you require concepts A, B, C, which are studied in more detail in courses X, Y, Z. But, if you're really interested, you can find some information in the following textbooks ...

I don't believe that this is too much time wasted on your side, given the fact that you are aware of the required concepts. Also, it is not harmful to the student, as you make him aware that if he chooses to study this in more detail, he should do it on his spare time at this moment. Also, you inform him about a possible academic path, by giving information about which courses study the topic in more detail. And, if he really wants to study the topic in more detail, he has the references required and knows what to look for.
Also, it might helpful to point to another academic who is more entitled to give an answer like above.

Excessive enthusiasm or curiosity is usually easily handled (unless you have Feynman Jr) and is a Good Thing.
Obviously the primary responsibility of the prof and TAs is to teach the on-course material, and teach it clearly and well. If not, you deservedly get into trouble.
If you confuse some students or they mistakenly think something is on-course when it isn't, you could get into trouble.
But, you also want to encourage curiosity and give students signposts to how everything all fits together and what future courses build on it, and how it relates to other disciplines. Yes, it's a judgment call and depends on your/professor's workload, mood and energy level that particular day.
So as to material beyond the scope of this course, IMO that falls into different categories:

a) stuff that's beyond the scope of this course, but will be covered in follow-on courses (core or popular electives).
b) ... stuff that's really advanced or only covered in rare electives.
c) ... stuff that's generally offtopic for most students, as in essentially irrelevant.
d) ... stuff that's generally offtopic for most students, as in is only covered by further degrees or diplomas, possibly in a different field, e.g. Masters in Quantitative Finance.

a), b) you try to encourage their curiosity without dedicating class time or injecting confusion about what's on-topic.
c), d) you gently tell them is offtopic and point them to the library for any independent reading they care to do.
I guess your specific case is kind of the flipside of a):
e) stuff that can be understood by people who have done other prerequisites or courses
I would briefly mention to them the advanced calculus or physics implications of something, while preambling "this is not on the course, just for the benefit of people who've already studied X,Y,Z".
If the more basic students object, you may have to tone it down.
Possibly better to give these pointers in writing (/on course website) so doesn't take up class time or confuse the others.
"See me in office hours" might be one tactic but don't let it preempt teaching the essential material.

Write down the question: I always do this, even with questions I answer right away. It shows me the gaps in my teachings. By the students' questions I can adjust my material for the next time I teach a topic. Taking a note is also the basis for all other recommendations.
Recommend books: Tell the students where to find that topic treated. This also "forces" you to keep up to date about material that would else lie beyond the scope of your own preparations. It's never bad to know more than you have to teach. Since I have written down the question I can check what books are available and give more precise recommendations (e.g. "Chapter X in book Y treats this topic thoroughly - but I find the whole book very interesting.").
Office hours: Since I wrote down the question I can do some short research to be up-to-date when the student (or group of students) comes to seek my answer on it.
Breaks/After lecture: My least favourite way of handling this. First of all you're under time pressure during breaks and after lecture (cleaning up the space for the next lecturer, etc.) and secondly there's no time anymore to really have a look at material covering that topic. I prefer to be up-to-date before giving an answer.

Your first goal is to NOT disrupt the flow of class. So what you could do is have the student write their question down and bring it to you at the end of class or during office hours.
Now if you are exceptionally busy (which is entirely possible maybe a large class) then you probably don't want to be sniped at the end of class or during office hours by the same question if there are other students with more basic needs. In this case you can either 1. make the student wait [which also might not work if the question-load is so high that you miss your next class/fail to dinner and sleep before the next day]  or 2. have them email you a list of questions which you add to some kind of TODO list, and then you get to them when you get to them.
Assuming you're acting in good faith and you have reached plan (2) those questions will be answered as soon as possible whenever they can be answered and the student receives the enrichment they are looking for, but it might be a long time. If you just do not have enough time to answer those questions you are best off directing the student towards someone else who might have more time OR give them a lesson in asking questions on online forums such as math.stackexchange, physics.stackexchange and physicsforums.
Nurturing curiosity is a critical role so you really want to try backup plan after backup plan to try to answer those questions and never abandon someone or just flat out say "i refuse", at most you should say "I can't but here where you can go next to find an answer ____"