text:
Do Academic Titles Matter in CV?
I am a teaching assistant and I am writing a list of instructors that I have assisted.
Should I go with full titles such as Assoc. Prof. Dr., Asst. Prof. Dr. or is it enough to write Dr. only.
I have encountered many CVs that only uses Dr. no matter the person is either assistant professor, associate professor or professor. I think people only write Prof. instead of Dr. if the person is a Professor Dr. What is the right way to do it?
The same question applies to writing names of project supervisors, thesis advisers, references etc.
The country I will send my CV is Sweden.

From my experience (6 month internship in research in Stockholm) swedish people do not care so much about titles.

I suspect that this is strongly culturally dependent.  In the American tradition of egalitarianism, my C.V. has never had any titles in it at all, following the example I saw amongst my older peers and professor.  On the other hand, I suspect that a German C.V. might be much more particular, since academic titles are considered important enough to be protected by law there.
My suggestion to you, then, would be to look at the CVs of people with a position similar to that you aim to obtain, and to adopt the style that they have used.

In my country, addressing someone with their academic title is a matter of respect and probably protected by law as well. However, I have checked some of the CVs in Sweden (the country I intend to apply for a PhD), and most of them do not even use Dr. prefix. I am really confused.
Actually,

The thing is that in order to be a professor in most countries (including, most likely, Sweden), you need to be a Dr. anyway. So there's no need to repeat yourself -- simply saying Professor is good enough.

@WolfgangBangerth "The thing is that in order to be a professor in most countries, [...] you need to be a Dr. anyway." Is that actually true? As in, is holding a PhD an absolute requirement to becoming a professor, which cannot be waived? "In most countries"? (How would you even know what's required to become a professor in Namibia?) There's at least one case in the UK: Mick Aston, who was a professor of archaeology at Bristol and well known for a TV show he presented, didn't have a PhD because all his notes and thesis drafts were in a van that was stolen and he never got them back.

@DavidRicherby: Of course the requirement is not absolute, and you're right that it may not hold in less developed countries. But the question was about Sweden where I'm sure that, just like in all other Western European and North American countries, 99% of professors or more actually do have a PhD.

@WolfgangBangerth Sure, the great majority of professors do have PhDs. But you were claiming that they are an absolute requirement, which is a rather different proposition.

@cagirici Does mentioning someone's name in your CV count as "addressing" them? Do you put titles in front of your faculty coauthors' names in your list of publications, or on the first page of your papers?

@DavidRicherby -- let's not parse words. I think most people will understand that saying "in order to be a professor...you need to be a Dr." means that it is a general requirement, not one that cannot be avoided in exceptional and rare cases.

@JeffE you, sir, have just enlightened me.

Your title framing do depend on your culture. In some countries, it is customary to only include 'Dr.' before your name and your occupation like Asst. Professor, Associate Prof., or Full Professor below your name.

"I do oppose the nesting of titles like 'Professor Dr. X'." So what? The question isn't asking for people's opinions on how certain countries style academic titles.

@Ébe Isaac Do note that in some cultures, nesting of titles is actually important. I'm from Serbia and there traditionally title of "Professor" is used for any teacher that has bachelor's degree or higher, so Prof. Dr is used to show that the person is indeed a university professor and not say a secondary school professor.

@AndrejaKo: Edit confirmed.

I would advise dropping the secondary titles, which are mostly academic details internal to your university.  If the viewer is interested in greater detail, they can look them up themselves or ask you.


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How to prepare a presentation if there is a visually impaired person in the audience?
When preparing a presentation, I usually avoid putting a lot of text and then read the slides. To me, the best presentation contains very good figures with presenter explaining them, and not reading what is already written. Thus, I prefer using little to no text and use only figures if possible.
While I was helping a group of collegues for their project presentation, they mentioned that there is a visually impaired student in the classroom. Although I encouraged them to present the topic using figures and drawings (the topic was very suitable for this), I wonder now whether it is the best practice.
Moreover, I realized that this might also be the case during a conference talk, for which we do not have the prior knowledge of the presence of a visually impaired person.
So, my question is for the ones who have visual disability, who know such people, or who had similar experience. What is the best way to prepare a presentation? What to think and what not to overthink?

@DSVA No, it would not make a lot of change. But when we use figures, unintentionally, we describe the figure using words like "as you see here, green area represents X" etc.

@FedericoPoloni Blind means no eyesight. Visually impaired means little to none. Not trying to be politically correct, but I just wanted to cover a larger set.

A colleague of mine has a visual impairment and encouraged us to ask him for feedback on our slides to check if they're easily readable for him. So, why not ask the student in question if your slides are ok for them to see/ read/ understand?

This should help, but try not to overthink it too much. http://www.rnib.org.uk/sites/default/files/WBU%20visual%20presentations%20guidelines.pdf

In grad school, I had a blind classmate. The main effect on classes was that teachers were supposed to say everything they wrote on the blackboard. (This was long before slides.) I suppose that, if they drew any pictures, they'd be expected to describe those aloud also, but I don't actually remember any pictures.

Yes, get feedback on your slides from the student, but I'd go even a step further. Talk to the student before you prepare your presentation. Ask him what screenreaders he uses and how he uses it. Some students use Jaws. Others zoom in 10 to 30 times and stick their eyes a few inches from their screen. Also, there may be a support office for visually impaired students at your school (at least, there was one at my University). If you don't have time to find the student in question, at least, search for such an office and talk to the counselors there, they should know him and what his needs are.

If the person is just impaired and not really blind, I'd reserve a seat at the first row and kindly ask him/her to take this place. Like this (s)he is closer to the front of the class and will have more chance of being able to see everything.

Just an idea... might a hand-out  on A4/letter-format or even A3 work in this case?

From conversations with my wife, who is blind, you don't want to overthink this too much. Most of the things you can do to help the visually impaired will help everyone in the audience.
For starters, I'd suggest sending out the slide deck beforehand if at all possible, since this helps everyone be prepared. You should also make sure any figures have some sort of caption or title on them with a brief description of what's being shown. This will help anyone using a screen-reader to follow along.
The major thing that will help is making sure that you're giving general descriptions of the charts and figures, as well as the takeaway from those figures. This is good practice in general, since it ensures that your audience understands what you're trying to show with a figure and is invaluable to someone with low vision because it allows them to better understand the information being presented.
The true goal is to ensure that someone with only an audio recording of your presentation, no slides at all, can follow along to a reasonable extent. A couple of things may be missed, but the overall meaning should be apparent.

+1 for send out in advance; offering to provide (large-)printed copies may also be helpful

It should still be possible to give enough of a description or overview of the figure that the overall meaning should be apparent, if not the details. If you can't give an overall reason why a figure is in the presentation, then it probably shouldn't be in the presentation at all. Figures may be used to show proof or give depth and detail, but words can still be used to convey what is being proven.

From experience with someone who is visually impaired (but not blind): don't worry and go ahead as usual. Ask the visually impaired person what works best for them, if that is feasible. The person might want to use his/her own computer to look at your presentation, sit aside with at a special screen, or whatever works for them. One thing that would help in many cases is to use the mouse pointer instead of a laser pointer, since the former would be visible on the extra screen.

Figures and drawings with little text is best practice for presentations generally. Audiences can't really listen AND read full sentences at the same time, so you only want to use text in the form of signs and labels. The rest of the content should be either in your talk or in a handout available after the presentation (so they're not distracted by it during the presentation).
As for accommodating impairment, for colorblindness specifically check out this article: http://stephanieevergreen.com/handling-colorblindness/ (Stephanie Evergreen is an expert on presentations in general and I highly recommend reading more of her material)
Most other impairments are either near impossible to account for, or the person with the impairment will accommodate themselves because they have to for everything else anyway.
One caveat is when you have a regular attendee with an impairment that's specifically asked for help being accommodated. In such a case try to get a good understanding of what they specifically can and can't see and do your best from there. I don't think I'd go to the extent of running all my slides by them, but if you understand the disability well enough you shouldn't need to anyway.

Where I am, when a student asks for an official accommodation via Student Services the instructor is given exact details for what the student needs based on the types of materials used.  I put all of my stuff in our course management system, I've had several visually impaired students and they asked for nothing extra - just the utilities on the computer to zoom text etc sufficed.
Most academic institutions and school boards will have some sort of "disability resources" office/person whose job is to make sure any accommodation is provided per the ADA or other relevant law (Americans With Disabilities Act - similar legislation applies in other countries)
If you are presenting in a situation where that isn't typical (open lecture, conference, etc) then I would provide some way for folks to get your slides online at the start of your presentation, so they can use whatever technology they have to access it in a manner that fits their needs as you give your presentation.  Provide both a short URL for users to manually enter and a QR code or other commonly used scannable "pointer".

This is a partial answer, adding something I didn't see in the other answers.
Be careful not to pack each slide too densely.  A typical slide layout shouldn't have more than approximately five lines of text.  If it has more, then split it up.
This will push you to choose nice, big fonts.
This fits in with what @jhyatt wrote, "Most of the things you can do to help the visually impaired will help everyone in the audience."  Overly dense slides aren't fun for anyone.

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Research plan without a specific goal?
In order to apply for studying abroad (writing my M.Sc. thesis) I need to write a research plan. However, I only know the approximate research field, e.g. "program analysis for concurrent software", but I was not assigned an actual topic or specific goal yet.
How am I supposed to write a research plan without knowing any more details? I'm completely inexperienced regarding such paperwork (never had to do it before), therefore I relied on templates and guides I found on the internet, but they all assume you already know a specific goal.
What am I supposed to write in this case? Is there some outline I can use as an orientation?

what did your supervisor say? What do the research plans from previous students on your course look like?

I don't have one yet, I'm basically applying to get one. Since this is no course per se, there are no "previous" students like in a regular course. There might be previously supervised students but I don't have access to their applications nor do I know them.

I had an experience with along these lines from the other side recently, working with a student to write a plan for the research that he would be doing under me during a three-month visit.  We had to be ultra-specific in order to meet visa requirements, but the project had a lot of uncertainties in it.
In fact, however, the challenge of writing a specific research statement was quite useful for making sure we thought a bit more in advance and were able to get a fast start once my student arrived.
I would recommend getting in touch with the person that you are expected be working with abroad, and set up a time to talk (Skype, Gchat, whatever) about some more specific goals.  Some good examples of starting points for a discussion:

Are there particular types of analysis technique that are likely to be used?
Are there particular pieces of software that are likely to be good test cases?
What is the goal? Do you want to find security issues, bugs, inefficiencies, usability, portability, robustness, something else?  Or are you just trying to exercise the scalability of the techniques?
What are some intermediate checkpoints that you can use to know if you are making progress towards your thesis?  What should be done in 1 month? 3 months? 6 months?

It's OK if the answers change while you're there.  Everybody understands that research is research and that things may change.  But going in with a concrete plan will help a lot in making good use of your time, in understanding whether something has changed, and if so what you want to do about it.
And if the potential supervisor abroad can't make time for a meeting with you?  Then maybe you should rethink whether this would be the right place to go...

Thanks for your answer! I'd like to add my experience, since I already handed my plan in: I suspected the main focus to be whether I am familiar with the research field and/or if I'm capable of digging into it, therefore focused heavily on this part, with success.

Glad to hear it, and I hope your study abroad goes well!

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What is expected from a graduate-level term paper?
From what I have seen, many graduate level courses (in physics) in the US involve the submission of a term paper for a large percentage of the overall grade.
Wikipedia talks about term papers as:

A term paper is a research paper written by students over an academic term, accounting for a large part of a grade. Term papers are generally intended to describe an event, a concept, or argue a point. A term paper is a written original work discussing a topic in detail, usually several typed pages in length and is often due at the end of a semester.

While the description is fairly self-explanatory, it doesn't talk specifically about graduate courses.

Is original research expected in the term paper? An answer here seems to indicate that this isn't the case for undergraduate courses. Is this statement applicable for graduate courses as well?

If these are not much more than a term paper, then one person can probably do this by putting the assignment together on paper or in email and only answering questions during normal office hours. These kinds of assignments have clearly articulated goals and guidelines and apply techniques as laid out in lectures and homeworks.

Alternatively, is the term paper supposed to be like a short literature survey/literature review?

If I understand correctly, the student is usually free to choose a topic of his/her choice provided it is approved by the instructor beforehand. Sometimes, the instructor may also suggest a list of topics with references.
I'm primarily interested in answers relevant to physics courses.

It depends on the professor in question and should be posed to them for specifics. There isn't a "standard" for what a term paper/project might be. A mechanics class might want you to analyze a specific scenario, using techniques learned in class, while another class might want a survey of modern topics.

@scrappedcola, you mention that "There isn't a "standard" for what a term paper/project might be." Is that the case for graduate-level physics courses? (Do you speak from first-hand/second-hand experience?)

I asked a professor pretty much the same question and that was their answer to me.

In my experience (math), the requirements depend entirely on the course/professor.

@scrappedcola your comment is correct. You should resubmit it as an answer.

I asked a professor this question once and was told that it depends on the professor in question and should be posed to them for specifics. There isn't a "standard" for what a term paper/project might be. A mechanics class might want you to analyze a specific scenario, using techniques learned in class, while another class might want a survey of modern topics.


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Is it fair to my PhD student if I ask them to do "miscellaneous" work for a paper they're not going to be a coauthor of?
I've started work as an assistant professor recently,
and my first PhD student has just started her first semester.
I'm working on a paper with my collaborators
which is almost ready to submit.
I am thinking of asking my PhD student
to help us in the writing of the paper
by drawing a graph using LaTeX/PGFPlots.
However, I am not sure if this is fair to her.
Here are how I see the pros and cons of giving this work to her.

Pros:
Offloading the drawing of the graph to her
would be beneficial to me because it would save my time.
In addition, she would be learning skills
that are useful in her academic career.
Indeed, I have used LaTeX and PGFPlots in my two most recent papers
and will almost certainly use it in the papers I write with my PhD student.
Cons:
I am afraid that she might feel taken advantage of,
in that I am offloading menial and tedious tasks to her,
asking her to do work for a paper
without allowing her to benefit by being a coauthor.
In our field (a type of applied mathematics),
the real work is doing math theory,
formulating problems, solving them or proving math results.
What I am asking her to do (drawing graphs)
is sometimes an important part of paper writing,
but not nearly as important as mathematically rigorous work
such as developing theory and proving math results.

Note: I estimate that it would take me 3-4 hours to draw the plot,
although it may take her a longer time (perhaps one or two days),
given that she is fairly new to using LaTeX/PGFPlots.

Thank you all for your answers and comments.
I posted what I decided to do as an answer below.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

Preparing a graph from already-generated data, to me, doesn't merit co-authorship but would justify a mention in the Acknowledgements. However, something that takes two days out of a student's time (even if it would only take you 3-4 hours) seems like a lot to ask for just an acknowledgement.
How useful is learning the process? If it's legitimately training that's important to her future career, that might tip the balance toward asking her to do it. However, I think my default would be to do it myself.
One other part of the equation (probably and hopefully only a very small part) is that the student is female, based on the pronouns in the question, and female scientists are often expected (from unexamined assumptions) to disproportionately look after administrative work.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

If you have to ask, then I suspect that at some level you know it's wrong.
I'm a PhD student, and I would find it extremely rude of my advisor if he behaved this way. It's not a student's job to perform menial tasks for his or her advisor.

Well, it kinda is, you just don't understand why yet

Yes, but in an healthy PhD/postdoc context you will get credit for it!

@Gaius no it isn't, at least in any of the few universities I've been associated with. Unless you count "doing research as part of the advisor's research programme" as a menial task...
As to whether the task in question is menial... that's borderline in my head, and I'm guessing that's why the question was asked.

@Gaius Would you mind explaining why the role of a PhD student should be performing menial tasks for the all-powerful wizard?

The number of appropriate and/or required menial tasks is probably greatly field-dependent.

@DanielWagner New equipment needs to be installed, test tubes need to be cleaned, figures need to be generated for the group web site, etc etc. Who is going to do this: (1) the professor with multiple imminent grant deadlines, editors complaining about late paper reviews, all while dealing with a schedule completely full of student meetings, course planning and teaching, and committee work; (2) the PhD student with extremely copious spare time, relatively speaking?

I disagree with the "learning" benefit. She will have to learn it at some point, why not when writing her own paper. Learning it now won't take less time overall, in contrast, she will spend extra time drawing your figure.
I would not see a problem when you have a PhD student or postdoc who is good in preparing a special kind of figure, to a level way above yours. Then sure you may ask that student, and acknowledge the work (probably not by co-authorship, given there is no significant contribution - assuming that the paper could have been published with an ugly and harder-to-read figure).

An intermediate suggestion might be for the professor to spend the 3-4 hours (or more) over several days in teaching/mentoring the student in the tools while making the figure. "You need to learn these tools, I have a figure I need to make. Lets work together so you get the basics of what is required."

@JonCuster Why not write that as an answer?

It's beneficial to you.
It's not actually beneficial to the student (she could be working her own work and when writing it, she would learn the tools).
She doesn't get any "science points" for it.

You can from a position of power ask her to do it and tell her she can refuse (wink wink). That means she actually can't, even if you really mean what you say.
This does not feel right, you are there for your students, not them for you.
So I see three options.

If she will need to do similar work for herself soon, offer her that she can prepare some template, help her with it with the condition that you (or better anyone) can use it. It will take more of your time than you doing what you need though.
Just do it yourself.
Pay her to do it.

Very nice analysis of the situation at the beginning.

More generally than pay could be: 'Properly compensate'. For instance by offering time/knowledge (that is clearly outside of time that you would normally make available), or arranging some budget (e.g. to register for a symposium). -- If you would want to pay for it, why not ask at the end of a lectures whether one of your students want to make a few bucks (they tend to have a lower fair rate).

Thank you all for your answers and comments.
This is what I decided to do after thinking it over.
I was chatting with my PhD student over lunch
to find out how she was coping with her first semester
as a person new to being a PhD student,
as well as new to the city and the university.
I realized that this is quite a busy time for her:

Our department requires her to
take 3 regular courses (each 3 hours/week)
and a seminar course (2 hours/week)
The university requires her to take a half-semester English course
(also 3 hours/week)
to improve her English speaking skills
She was also assigned to be a grader for another departmental course

So even though I think it would be a good idea in the long run
for her to learn how to use PGFPlots to draw graphs;
for the next few months, I feel that it would be better for her
to settle in to her new life as a PhD student.
Jon Custer
made a good comment:

An intermediate suggestion might be for the professor to spend the 3-4 hours (or more) over several days in teaching/mentoring the student in the tools while making the figure. "You need to learn these tools, I have a figure I need to make. Let's work together so you get the basics of what is required."

What I decided to do is the following:

I will draw the graph on my own.
During our weekly meetings,
I will "bring her alongside" my work on the graph,
by showing her the code.
The goal is to allow her to see
how I am iteratively working towards the final product.
This should also help her when she does have to draw her own graphs
because at least she would have at least
a little familiarity with the tools required.

As an aside,
I felt that during my time as a PhD student,
I almost always had no idea what my advisor was doing
outside of his relationship with me.
I think it would have been beneficial
if he had told me a little bit about teaching, or admin work;
but especially about successes and challenges faced
when working on his other papers
(i.e., not the one he was working on with me).
Consequently I am trying to keep my PhD student a bit more in the loop
so her eyes are more open to what life is like as a faculty member.
If she becomes a faculty member in the future,
hopefully this allows her to make a more gentle transition into that role.

"I felt that during my time as a PhD student, I almost always had no idea what my advisor was doing outside of his relationship with me." +1 to this and all remaining comments; it helps you think about your post-PhD path, and it humanizes your advisor too. Though, keep in mind that complaining a lot to your students about things other than them can lead to some irritation.

@pentavalentcarbon Thank you for the reminder not to complain excessively to my to my students. I'll be trying to share some information, both positive and negative, about how my career is going. At the same time, I'll also be careful not to share too much information.

No, don't do it. This is not fair and disrespectful in particular for a person who has just started his/her research career.

Too short to edit, but it's a bit confusing to refer to the student as "his" when the question states the student is a woman.

@Azor-Ahai: In fairness, the title uses "him/her", and some people do use masculine pronouns to refer to either gender.

@NateEldredge, Yeah, but the woman in the question was much more salient than the title in my mind while reading, hence my confusion.

I don't think I would be comfortable asking a new PhD student to do this for uncredited work. Specifically:

I don't think that "learn how to do this from scratch for a paper getting submitted" is conducive to genuinely learning - there are no intermediate steps, toy data, etc. and for a brand new PhD student, I would be quite concerned about them getting derailed.
It's effectively uncompensated work.
It puts the student in a very awkward place, where it's possible her "learning" will stand in the way of a paper getting done swiftly if she misses your estimates, etc. The idea that the paper not going out could be framed as "her fault" despite her not being an author on the paper would leave a bad taste in my mouth.
As noted by others, female graduate students are disproportionately asked to bear the burden of uncompensated, administrative or other tasks that neither truly advance their careers nor generate entries on their CV. Even if this is not what is occurring in this case, I think it's worth it not to help establish the notion in your lab, her perception, the department, etc. that this is acceptable.

"As noted by others, female graduate students are disproportionately asked to bear" - [Citation needed]

You are right that a brand new PhD student would be more easily derailed by having to learn a new tool. If my PhD student were more mature, it would make me more likely (all other things being equal) to ask her to help and learn.

Is it fair to my PhD student if I ask them to do … work for a paper they're not going to be a coauthor of?

No. This is absolutely not fair.
By default, any work on a paper confers authorship. There are some well-defined exceptions, but these need to be justified. And they fall into specific categories:

Editorial work (typesetting, proofreading etc), for which you pay.
“Little effort work” (e.g. superficial proofreading, suggestions, discussions over coffee1), which a friend/colleague does as a favour (that is usually returned), and which merits acknowledgement.2

Any intellectual contribution to a paper (even if you believe that it’s not a scientific contribution3) must be acknowledged and rewarded with authorship. This is doubly important when the person doing the work depends on a publication record for their career development (technical personnel might not find authorship very important; but they are explicitly paid, with money, to help out). These are simply the rules of the publishing game.
So: is an illustration an intellectual contribution? If it cannot be created automatically, chances are that the answer is yes.
But let’s say it isn’t in any way an intellectual contribution, it’s pure menial work: then you either pay somebody to do it, or you ask it as a favour.
Which brings us to the second major problem: the imbalance of power between a PI and a PhD student means that you just cannot ask favours from your student. Effectively, you are giving them orders to perform work, for free, outside of their contractual responsibility. This is exploitation. It’s irrelevant whether that was your intent or not.
In summary, asking your student to work for free is unethical, and potentially scientific misconduct: no matter the situation you either exploit their labour for free, or you steal their authorship.
This situation is, unfortunately, not uncommon in science. But that doesn’t make it right. It’s for this reason that the complacent acceptance in the replies and comments have generated no little outrage on Twitter.

1 Scientific chats over coffee can be extremely fruitful, as any researcher knows. They much more often deserve authorship than is common practice.
2 I know of some researchers that reward any kind of work on a paper with authorship, including trivial things like fixing typos. I find this excessive but it’s worth noting that this point of view exists.
3 Think about it carefully: what does that even mean?

While I incline towards your stance on this matter: is it really necessary to have that sentence disparaging the other answers to this question? I think most of them are actually on your side, more or less. YMMV

@YemonChoi I seriously considered leaving it out. But I’m genuinely horrified by some of the answers/comments here; the mindset is problematic. And I find it important to point out that this is a generally shared sentiment — at least in my corner of Twitter (which includes several PIs from different fields). For what it’s worth, this answer went through several iterations that were a lot more strongly worded.

The behavior described in your footnote #2 is absolutely unethical, and likely violates the authorship policies of the journals as to intellectual contribution.

@TomChurch I find it excessive as well. But “absolutely unethical“ hasn't got a leg to stand on.

If the student produces the graph, she is the author of that picture. Hence she has the right to be co-author of the paper as well. It then has to be her decision to refrain from that right. Anything else (like asking her to do the work without having the chance of being co-author) would be trading of authorship which is scientifically unsound behaviour.

Drawing a picture is NOT authorship. She would probably be the copyright owner of the picture, unless university rules state otherwise, so would be owed acknowledgement of that. But being an author on a paper requires more.

It requires to be a scientific contribution. We can all argue over what actually IS a scientific contribution. Drawing nice illustrator figures for a few days for a review would quite likely yield authorship. Spending a few days on a plot does not?

@BPND Not binding, but see http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html for example.

A plot that takes days to create is at least data analysis, if not data interpretation (though probably not by a new PhD student). According to Science, this merits authorship: http://www.sciencemag.org/authors/science-editorial-policies

@BPND That argument might earn a lawyer his/her fee, but it makes no scientific sense. You seem to be saying that if you work slowly and/or inefficiently because you don't know how to use the correct tools, that somehow increases the "science content* of what you are doing! Someone who has never used LaTeX before might take a week to learn how to do something I could do in 15 minutes (and maybe I would do it "better" than them as well, having more experience of the tradeoffs between what is possible and what is quick and easy to do) - but so what, so far as "authorship" is concerned?

@JessicaB I had an entire paper that could be summarized as "Drawing a picture" - I'd say it depends entirely on the picture, and what it took to create it.

@Fomite Your work for that paper would have been in working out what picture to draw and why doing so had something meaningful to say, not the drawing of the picture. Learning to use LaTex is not the same thing.

@alephzero I do not seem to be saying that. The point is that the supervisor is unwilling/unable to perform an authorship-meriting part himself. If you distribute that kind of workload, even acknowledging the vast amount of time required, deal with the consequences (which is "dilution" of authorlist).

@BPND A plot drawn using LaTeX and PFGPlots could take a while to create with absolutely no data analysis if the creator has no familiarity with computer programming or anything related. (I had several fellow students who were very strong mathematically, but only had a basic understanding of concepts like "double click" and "menu".)

@user3067860 But why does "no data analysis" equal "no authorship"? There are lots of contributions worthy of authorship, not just data analysis. Making an even moderately complex figure is an intellectual contribution (if you're not happy with that, buy an image from Shutterstock, or pay somebody to make it).  The whole mindset towards authorship on display here is backwards: the default should be that contributions confer authorship. And you need to find specific reasons to waive that requirement.

Why would you waste a PhD candidates' time on that? They are the ones who could take the legacy of your ideas and work into the future. Don't you want to train them to do that the best way they can?
Don't you have BSc or MSc students who need to do a thesis or courses given at your institution which can make the miscellaneous things as part of a project or lab? Many institutes also have research engineers employed for the purpose of helping with similar "miscellaneous things".

If your student is working for you on a contract, then absolutely, though an acknowledgement would still be polite. In that case you are giving the student the task in the role as your (part time) employee, which is a common case.
If your student is financed by a scholarship given by a 3rd party they are not obliged to do work unrelated to their thesis.
If your student is financed by a "scholarship" given by yourself, they are officially not obliged to do any work unrelated to research for their thesis, but in practise this is still very much expected. This is a common situation, at least in my experience, to save costs such as insurance and pension, but I advise you against that as it has too many negative ramifications for the student.

"Co-authorship" must satisfy all of the following three conditions:

Provide ideas
Significant contribution
Approve the final submission

You could ask your student or RA to do the job for you, if they indeed agree and are compensated. If his contribution does not satisfy any of the 3, he should not, in principle, receive a co-authorship.

PS: Many BS and BA are willing to RA for free. Why not take a part-time one? This will help both of you, your PhD, and the BA. Many BA are good at Latex, btw, and many of them learn unfamiliar things much faster than the "old" PhD and the Profs (you).