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Excluding a coauthor based on data misuse and misrepresentation?
My graduate student utilized some particles produced by a collaborator's lab in some animal imaging experiments, which were designed and analyzed by my student and me.  The protocol for synthesizing the particles has already been published by my collaborator, and a technician in the collaborator's lab made the particles according to the protocol.  I shared some of the resulting in vivo images from this study with my collaborator, but unfortunately, I subsequently discovered that the collaborator used some of these images in a fraudulent manner (grossly misrepresenting them as preliminary data in some grant applications).  The collaborator's institution conducted a formal investigation of this and other incidents and found scientific misconduct had occurred.  I would like to publish my graduate student's image data, in part to make sure that a legitimate representation of the data is in the literature, but mostly because the work was publicly-funded and represents the hard work of many good people.  If the misconduct hadn't occurred, I probably would have considered including the collaborator as a co-author on the publication, by getting them more involved in the manuscript, even though the particle prep was not novel. But now there are many reasons why I do not wish to publish something with this collaborator!  Is documented scientific misconduct involving the data from this study a valid reason for not including this collaborator as a coauthor of a paper describing this study?  Can I simply acknowledge the technician who provided the particles and reference the prior publication of the protocol?

This is outside of my field, but it sounds to me like this person never should have been a co-author in the first place, if all they did was delegate a technician to produce some raw materials. Certainly put them either in the acknowledgement section, or as source of materials in the methods.

If the misconduct in question tainted the data itself (and not just subsequent uses of that data), then the paper itself is fundamentally tainted and should be reworked with non-tainted data. If the data isn't tainted and it is a result of this person's work, then they deserve credit. Proper credit has to do with your intellectual honesty, and not the merits of the person receiving the credit. Having said this, I don't think that this necessitates including them as a coauthor -- but I don't see how you could avoid at least acknowledging them by name.

+1 for "Proper credit has to do with your intellectual honesty, and not the merits of the person receiving the credit."

At the moment your question is a little ambiguous:

I subsequently discovered that the collaborator used some of these
  images in a fraudulent manner (grossly misrepresenting them as
  preliminary data in some grant applications). The collaborator's
  institution conducted a formal investigation of this and other
  incidents and found scientific misconduct had occurred.

This suggests that while the images were misused, the actual data itself wasn't tainted - for example, the "particles" used in the analysis are what your collaborator says they are, etc.
In this case, I think whether or not to include them as an author comes down to the authorship criteria of the paper - i.e. did they make substantial contributions to the work, etc. If that's the case, I think you have to include them as an author.
It's a bad idea to use authorship as a reward, and it's a similarly bad idea to use authorship as a punishment. It shouldn't carry moral weight.
That being said, given "this and other incidents and found scientific misconduct had occurred", your current findings might be sufficiently tainted by association that it may be worth starting over.


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What to tell students who want to know how to succeed in your class
Setting is math in the US.
It's quite common for a student who is not doing super well or is worried that they might not be to approach me and ask how they should be studying/what they should be doing do succeed in the class.
I never know what to say. I just don't see it as part of my job to give "study skills" advice and probably won't be able to say anything particularly apposite (especially because I was educated in a completely different system in Europe, so I have no first-hand experience of taking the kinds of classes they are taking). Also, I think developing your own study skills that work for you it literally part of the challenge of being an undergraduate.
But they still feel like, as the professor for the class, I ought to be able to tell them something extra and useful about studying.
What is a good way to deal with these sorts of requests for advice?

Doesn't your lecture include some kind of weekly tutorials where students have to solve math problems to practice their skills and understanding of the material? If yes, refering them to this would be one thing you could do.

I just tell my students to practice - that's rhe real way to succeed.

For undergraduates the school probably has centers and programs to train basic skills, which you can refer students to.

Do you feel uncomfortable telling students how to succeed in your class because you don't think it's your job, or because you don't actually know?  Nothing flumoxes a master juggler like asking them what they're doing with ball #2.

@JeffE Not sure. It's definitely partly that I don't know. It's not that I feel I know but somehow think its not my place to give that advice. I guess maybe that a lot of "advice" just seems painfully obvious/not really advice e.g (as user37208 says): put in a bit more time thinking about it by yourself. Maybe this is just a manifestation of surprise that I would literally have to say that.

Personally, I've never had a dean or dept chair give me flak for not teaching study skills to those that lack them. On the other hand I know they would come after me for not teaching the promised course objectives. This is because one is my job and the other isn't. I'd warn the OP to find a mentor within their dept, or just ask their chair this question if nothing else. Taking on the grand objectives the internet thinks one must deliver seems like a risky move for one's career, given the severe demands you have on your time and effort already.

isn't this what math lab/tutoring centers / TAs are for? Why not just direct them there where they can get as much one on one help as needed?

@NajibIdrissi  I'm not sure I agree your comment is as helpful as the upvotes suggest, but let me try to respond. I feel like maybe you are re-conflating exactly what the question is trying to separate. Of course it is my job to teach them - to the best of my ability - the material of the class, which will help them succeed. But it is very easy to find oneself giving a student basic lessons in time management, study skills lessons, motivational pep talks, advice on life goals etc. and even though those things will help them succeed in my class, where does my job as class prof end?

It is not always a good idea as a teacher to teach people how to succeed in their classes. Because later in life there are no such cheat sheets available.

@JeffE - Most master jugglers could tell you exactly what ball #2 is doing...

@mathreadler: there's a world of a difference between suggesting they write their own cheat-sheet, versus giving them one (spoonfeeding). Ditto, suggesting the possible benefits of study partners, study sessions, flash cards, how to get maximum benefit from homeworks, how to use TA sessions/ office hours, exam technique etc.

It's what they learn about how to be successful and learn things that will be much more important in 10 years than the specifics of your class.

@Elin this is what I mean. Don't help them too much with the specifics of the class because then they won't be forced to learn general learning they will need when they are on their own.

@JeffE Master jugglers surely know the Siteswap juggling notation. So it shouldn't be any problem to describe what Ball #2 is doing.

Actually, in the US, in modern times, it really is your job to help them develop study skills. Many students arrive at college with hardly any skills at all, having coasted through their previous education, often with few learning burdens put on them. Many don't know how to take notes, or summarize them, or separate the important points from the rest.
More important, in math, they may not have an attitude that it may take more than the minimum to get by and that memorization isn't going to carry them very far.
I've discussed the teaching of learning skills here in other answers, so won't repeat it (search: Hipster PDA, for example).
But there are two things that might work. The first is to require more practice and make sure that students have some way to get feedback on that practice. A text book usually has more exercises than you want to require, but you can suggest that more (even all) be done. You can even hand out supplementary problems that are graded or not.
The second thing is to have a daily quiz, taking up the first 5 minutes of your class. Ask questions based on the previous few lectures (2 or 3, say). The quizzes don't need to count much toward the grade, but should count for something. Students can swap papers and grade each other for a short quiz, so your load doesn't need to increase. But an additional advantage of this, other than the goad, is that you get feedback every day on how they are doing.
I can't say that the students will love you for this, of course. They will likely grumble. But you will learn who most needs your help and it won't be much of a burden on those who don't need additional work to succeed.
I once became something of an expert on rational functions and could look at a definition and pretty much know what the shape of the graph would be. I learned this by graphing hundreds of them, by hand (1960s) using derivative information.

Two specific links you might want to examine for Hipster PDA are one here and one at CSEducators

I'd recommend just adding a link instead of recommended search terms. you never know whether what you intend to point to will someday be buried by other content in the search results.

Hipster PDA is a misnomer, IMHO, it should be PAA.

@AaronHall, I didn't name it, of course. Just found and used it.

I don't know how to take notes either and I have a master's degree in CS... it is not really a valuable skill for everyone.

@dn3s, There are different aspects discussed at different links. I didn't want to list them all. I don't see how it would be buried if others contribute to the idea. It would possibly be enhanced.

This link where @Buffy discusses the Hipster PDA on academia.stackexchange is useful: https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/115795/21100 Here's another one (for people like me who were curious): https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/a/1168/1979

@Adrian as a person who didnt take notes in my master studies, I will disagree. See, i had one last course dangling, and there were quite high incentives to do it. So i decided to take this as a callenge to do all those things you are supposed to do, but dont do, and for once do them. Difference was like night and day, not only did i come out of this better than any other time before. I did it with less effort, perfect retention and perfect score. So i wouldnt say is, not all, i would say your not beig as good as you can be without notes. Notes of class, what you read,  of exercises, practice

This isn't really answer the question ... a daily quiz may help students succeed but it doesn't tell OP how to respond to the question.

The students who are asking you this probably already know the general study skills advice. What they're trying to find out is what you think is important, how you're going to assess them, and how much time (realistically) it should take to prepare for class. Many professors tend to be rather opaque about all of this, which students find frustrating. It's particularly frustrating if the student has many other demands on their time, such as a job or family responsibilities, which is much less frequently the case at European schools.

I'm not sure I agree they already know the general stuff, now that I see some of the other comments and replies, but if I accept that for now then my main thought is: I genuinely don't know how much time realistically it should take.

@T_M You should certainly have some idea, although of course it varies between students. I put a typical honest minimum time commitment on the syllabus, with the addendum that if they are putting that much in and still struggling, they should consult with me one-on-one to troubleshoot their study skills.

About the assessment part: thing about questions like "is studying the 5 pages long proof useful for the exam ?" or "will the exam be about exercices or about theory ?" (students may be reluctant to ask them directly to avoid looking like they want to minimize they working time). Making the objectives clear is an important part of the teaching process.

@Kolaru This is exactly the point. I would argue that making the objectives clear is the most important part of the teaching process. It also equalizes opportunity, a point which is made wonderfully here.

That "which is much less frequently the case at European schools" may be unwarranted. Maybe you have some specific country in mind? I suggest to check OECD statistics to qualify and/or back up this claim, or to remove it.

@T_M Theoretically, from an accreditation point of view, students in the US are supposed to spend approximately three hours per week per credit hour; typically one of these hours is in-class, and two are out of class, though this formula can shift substantially in various ways for lab or studio or research-intensive classes. So if you're teaching a 3-credit class and class meets for three hours per week, students should be spending an additional six hours per week on homework and studying. Theoretically.

"such as a job or family responsibilities, which is much less frequently the case at European schools." I completely disagree with this statement. In Britain alone there are millions of "young carers", children who have to help look after parents who are disabled or have a debilitating condition, and a lot of college or university students still have to balance a job alongside their studies, regardless of whether they get student loans from the government.

@Pharap Most US undergrads are over 25, about half of US undergrads have jobs, and about two-thirds of those are employed at least 20 hours per week. What are the rates in the UK and Western Europe?

If you don't have some realistic estimate on how long things will take your students, it's worth spending some time talking with them to find out. That doesn't mean giving students less work simply because they ask for it, but it's important to have some basis to compare the workload of your class to others and to ensure that the time spent on assignments is proportionate to their educational value. (If you know a problem set took 8 hours, you can assess whether that's the best use of students' time compared to other ways to spend 8 hours of learning time.)

This is an important question to answer for a bunch of reasons, most of which have been discussed in other answers (all of which I like). One aspect that’s been neglected is that you have more info than your students. Many of them have never taken a course with you before. Many of them may have never taken a course in this subfield before. None of them have access to historical information about course performance, such as average homework grades or test medians and standard deviations. This information would be a huge help to students who are trying do figure out how to study for your course, and you should absolutely share some of it with them.
There are two ways you can think about this question: academically and administratively. Both involve thinking about the design of the course and how it interacts with student performance, and especially what sets apart the students who end up getting As.
Thinking about this academically involves focusing on the content. What do students tend to find hard? Is there a particular subject or collection of ideas that students tend to do poorly with? Even just warning students “many people struggle with dynamic programming but find A* algorithms much more intuitive” can be hugely helpful. The next step would be to recommend additional resources or ways for students to check their understanding. Information like “if you can do the two-star problems in the book you should be confident in your exam scores” or “khan academy has a video sequence on adjacency matrices that many students find helpful” can help students help themselves succeed far more than they would be able to do on their own. Do students regularly get dinged for not being rigorous enough in their arguments? Warn them explicitly that this tends to be an issue, especially for weaker students.
Thinking about this question administratively means focusing on the design of the course, especially how students tend to preform on particular aspects. Do most students get 95%+ on the homeworks, and get differentiated by their exam scores? Are the homeworks very time consuming, so that students who work in groups have a significant advantage? Is the median on Exam 2 a 45-50% and students who get a 60%+ on that exam largely shoe-ins for an A/B+? Telling students things like that can help them schedule their lives around your course.
Of course, the best possible response tends to be a mix of both approaches. Here are two comments that I would consider to be extremely helpful responses to this question.
Answer 1:

This course is a lot of work. Homework tends to be a large time-commitment, and most students don’t end up answering every question. Since homework is worth 40% of your grade, answering one or two additional questions per week really adds up. Many students rely on study groups to get through the homework efficiently. I don’t reuse homework problems on the exams, but checking out the problems I don’t assign in the textbook is a good way to make sure you’re not missing key concepts that don’t get tested in homework and often times I will draw on them for inspiration to write exam questions. The course is a lot of work, but graded leniently and most students who put in the time get grades that they are satisfied with.

Answer 2:

In this course I tend to focus on higher level concepts than computation and detailed analysis. Many of the homework questions are designed to be thought-provoking but not necessarily time-consuming. It’s important that you put time into the homeworks, but the exams are designed to challenge you beyond what the homeworks contain and so it’s also important to go beyond them. They are short, but the problems are very deep.
I will often spend my office hours talking about extensions and applications of the things we cover to other areas. For example, on next Tuesday I will talk about how the Compactness Theorem is a well-known result in topology in disguise, and will show how to translate proofs typically done with Tyconoff’s Theorem into the framework of this course. This is emblematic if the kind of work I will expect you to do on the exams.

What to tell students who want to know how to succeed in your class

A few concrete suggestions In addition to other fine answers:

Pay attention to what students tell you about their experience towards the end of the semester. You will often hear people say "X was hard for me because of Y", "I really liked Z", "W was confusing to me, I couldn't follow what you were trying to do". Based on that, you might develop advice you could give students earlier on.
Encourage students to come to your office hours if they feel they're falling behind, have missed something, or are having trouble. Make it clear that the office hours are intended exactly for help in these situations (on this point I disagree with @StellaBiderman).
If your course is generally considered difficult or challenging, acknowledge this fact at the beginning of the semester, don't just start teaching. Recite some platitude about the importance of applying willpower and patience in tackling a significant challenge; and that the course staff is there to help the students learn and get through it, rather than just handing out homework and exams. You might be surprised, but this rhetoric, despite being supposedly obvious, does often help. Say it like you mean it though...
If the students are organized in a student council with official representation, be in touch with the relevant representative to see if there are difficulties that get reported through them but not to you - especially if it has to do with your demeanor, attitude or personality.

But I also have to share an anecdote about a teacher of mine, Prof. Michael Kaminski. He taught me "Logic for Computer Science 2" about 15 years ago, including Goedel's incompleteness theorem, temporal logic etc. Starting his first class he told us - in his slow Hebrew with a think Russian accent, and kind of an apologetic but all-knowing half-smile:

Well, the material in this course... it is very difficult. You... no, you are not able to understand it. But that is fine. It is fine. You will learn it, you will memorize, and you will remember it for the exam, and that will be good enough. What can you do, this is how it is.

Now, that guy - people were so scared of his advanced classes that nobody would take them. Only 5 people were taking that class, and the exam grades were (on a scale of 0 to 100, and when you can accrue up to 125 points on the final exam): 9, 11, 31, 59 and 68. But the scariest thing is, that he gives the same exam every time he gives the course! And the guy who got 68 was taking the course a second time! Anyway, he's a great teacher and had a quirky set of humor.

What to tell students who want to know how to succeed in your class

I usually get these types of "weaker" students to come out of the woodwork around the middle of the semester (this is in engineering, in the US); they've been copying off of their friends for the first 8 weeks, and now their friends are struggling a little bit more than they were at first, so (some of) the weaker ones are in a state of panic.
So, what to tell them?
I tell these students that I'm here to help, but emphasize that the student needs to take advantage of that assistance and follow through; it is not my job to stay on top of whether the students understand the material or not.
Also, I try to be straight with them: they may have already gotten themselves into too deep of a hole, so it may not be possible to salvage the semester with a passing grade. In these cases, I emphasize that they should not focus on the grade and just try to get caught up on the "old" material as efficiently as possible, while trying to keep up with the new material.
Finally, as mentioned in other answers, some schools offer some type of tutoring services/center -- past experience suggests that this doesn't seem to be helpful for my students as much because the tutoring center can't really help my upper-level engineering students with their studies.

And that they should work with their friend(s) on helping each other, using each other in a 'talk to the duck' style. It is good collaborative practice and aids mutual learning. One explains how far they got, what their problem is, and the other has a clue about overcoming the problem, and together they both learn where the problems and solutions are. It worked well for me (especially when others essentially came an told me where the tricky areas were..)

@PhilipOakley Most of my struggling students seem to have ill-functioning academic relationships with their friends in the same course.

Back in my day - when we bought and studied out of books because the WWW didn't exist until about '93, and wasn't useful until about '95 - the professors would put books on hold in the restricted section of the library.
You could look at the book in that section, but not take it out of that section (it was guarded; backpacks were searched).
I learned... not in my freshman/sophomore years... that this was where a lot of test questions came from. There was never any homework from those books.
Maybe there is a way to make resources available in the same way - for those that want to 'do extra'.
The students seeking advice could be pointed to those resources as additional work for them to do. If they want to do it, great.  You're available during office hours to help them.
If they just want a leg-up without learning the material then they're no worse off with that advice.

Maybe there is a way to make resources available in the same way — There is. It's called "putting books on reserve in the library", and we still do it.

@JeffE I was wondering because all of my children's school books are electronic, except for workbooks.  I know that my university still has a library (with a big robot that gets the books from the shelves) but wasn't sure about a reserve section, and wasn't sure if new books were purchased in print.

In addition to paper books, which yes, can and are reserved by professors: We may also be able to reserve/recommend E-books for students (yep, there is a way to rent E-books at some university's libraries) or just point them at our favorite online resources (websites/blogs/articles/etc) as "additional resources" within the course - I've used both in a similar way (not pulling quizzes directly from the additional resources but matching them to points in my lecture that were used in a quiz)

To contribute a bit on things that have already been said, I want to mention an actual anecdote that I always mention when this topics arises.
I was teaching a (basic) group theory class, so at the very least the students has already passed three university math classes. One day this student comes to see me to ask the same question the OP got: "I'm working hard studying for this class, but it's not working for me; what should I do?". So, without thinking much, I told the student:

"look, just reading math is never enough. You have to grab the book and the class notes and read them, with pen and paper, writing the ideas and the math as you go through. When you get to the exercises, try them and you will (probably) not be able to do them. Then go back to the text, trying to find the notions that you might need to do the exercise, read again, try the exercise again."

His face changed completely, he was in shock. He said "wow, that's awesome! That's a super idea! I gotta try that!" and he left happy. Remember, this student had already passed (probably with decent grades) three university math classes, and yet he had no idea what "study" meant.

This is a great anecdote! Great example of why I am suspicious of some other answers and comments which emphasize that the student might secretly already have the right study skills and wants to know some other information but doesn't know how to ask it. I think I instead believe your answer is what should be emphasized more, that they might have got this far and genuinely lack really basic skills for studying math.

I am not an academic, but as a former college student (good but not great) I am completely baffled by the answers in this thread.
I never would have thought to ask this question to a professor while in college. Not once did I ever consider it the professors responsibility to teach me how to succeed in a particular class. If a fellow student would have confided in me that they did this, it would have led to a severe loss of respect for them. These are adults we are talking about.
If they made it that far without learning how to study, a failing grade would be the single best life lesson you could give to them, worth far more than whatever the course was about.

Thing is, it looks like you had the right attitude towards studying and your responsibilities, but that's not always the case with otherse. Many of us see students fail again and again, and they seem to learn nothing out of it.

So you fail them. Then what? Fail them again next term when they still don't know how to study? (It's a serious question. How do you expect them to learn to study?)

You don't say what level of students you are teaching or whether they are primarily math majors.   If you are teaching first year students you are playing a crucial role in teaching them how to be college students; if you are teaching first year math students (or maybe even math students in their first course above calculus) then you are teaching them how to be math majors and ultimately mathematicians. This continues over the years, but the skills get more sophisticated.  I think it is great that you are seriously thinking about how to answer this question.
I don't teach math but I often do include a section on my syllabus that discusses "How to succeed in this class" or "How to get a good grade."
Some common things to include (that are surprisingly not obvious to American undergraduates especially first year)(of course only include items if they are really true for your class):

Attend every class unless you are infectious.
Do the reading (including working your way through examples if it is that kind of reading).
Do the homework yourself even if you ask for advice from other students. (Especially important if this is the kind of class where homework is not collected.)   (I point out "Data analysis shows that homework completion is strongly predictive of final project grade.", but that's just my course.)
If you get homework wrong or points taken off, make sure you understand what you got wrong and make corrections. Same thing for quizzes and the midterm.
Take notes during class. This includes taking notes on what other students ask (if it's that kind of class) or contribute to discussions (if it's that kind of class).
Get help if you need it, by asking questions, coming to my office hours, and/or using the tutoring (or writing) center.
Everyone can be successful in this class if they put in solid effort on the work and persist when they find the work challenging.
(Of course don't say this if you don't really believe it.)

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Transfer from a Hungarian to an Austrian University for non European student
Can a non EU student transfer from a Hungarian university, for example Eötvös Loránd University, to an Austrian university, and if yes do you have to go through the same procedure that you would in your home country such as visa.

If you're a non-EU citizen you will certainly need a student visa for whichever country you want to study in. Your university may be able to give you more specific guidance.

@astronat thank you.

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text:
Is it common for a university to remain unresponsive to queries?
I'm planning to study in the u.k. I've never been to the u.k. but is it common there to remain unresponsive to the students' queries?
I've sent a few emails to the student service team for some queries. They replied me once or twice and on one of them, idk if they forwarded it by accident ot not, they sent me the conversation they had about me through emails including the answer to my query. They were complaining to each other how I email multiple ppl at the same time. I'm not sure if that's a professional way to deal with anyone even though I'm a student.
After that, I sent a few emails because I urgently need to work on my visa, and they haven't answered to any of them. It's been roughly 9days since I sent my unanswered query.
Could they be ignoring my emails on purpose?
I've been informed that an organisation is to take certain period of time to reply before when I was emailling other institutes, but never experienced this unresponsive instutue...

It doesn't sound very nice, but: What's your definition of "a few"? Why do you email "multiple people"?

Unprofessional at least. But it could be that you sent much mails and perhaps none was clear enough.

This can be frustrating and is unfortunately common behavior. The advice I'd recommend keeping in mind are (1) keep your emails as short as possible, while containing an easily identified, specific question; (2) try to make sure you are contacting the right people, for example I wouldn't expect most of their staff to know anything about visa issues. University bureaucracies are giant beasts and n one person is familiar with every part. In any case, do your best to avoid emails where you describe your situation at length and where it's not clear what you're asking from them. Good luck.

Your question here on Academia.SE is a good example: you ask "Is it common for a university to remain unresponsive to queries?" when you actually need to know "How can I get student support staff to answer my queries?" Try to be direct, simple, and polite. One again, very best of luck.

You need to contact the international office of the uni for visa questions. Student services are for helping existing students with problems like replacement library cards, IT issues or timetabling clashes.

Unfortunately, yes, it is very common for universities in the UK to be unresponsive, and for administrators to be unkind and feel entitled.

Can you clarify what stage you are at in the application process and whether you are applying for undergrad, master or PhD. Have you already filled in the official application form? Do you have a official offer? If so, is it from the university, from a department, or from an individual supervisor?

They complained that you've emailed multiple people; maybe that breaks some organisational hierarchy and given they are British, they might be too serious about the hierarchy thing.
You should probably send one more short email to exactly one specific, most relevant recipient, apologize for any mistake in correspondence on your part and politely share your query again while mentioning the urgency.

Do people really percieve the British as serious about organisational hierarchy? In the army I imagine that holds, but not in academia...

@astronat, the observation was not meant to be disrespectful, rather, to indicate the sense of order and discipline that the world generally assigns to the British.


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It is appropriate to call the professor for this situation?
I have a great relationship with one of my professors(at least I think), and a few weeks ago we discussed the possibility of doing a research project together this summer. However, he never replies to my emails again after the semester ends(2 weeks already, I sent one email and a follow-up, and even a phone message), and I saw him attend an academic panel virtually yesterday. I am abroad, so I'm unable to go to his office. I have his phone number(from the syllabus). Should I call him?

Normally, "should I" questions are off-topic. However, two weeks out of semester is not much, he may be on vacation, on conference or retreat. Do not lead him to feel pestered. You let him know you are interested, now let it sink in. If he is interested, he will contact you back, else try to contact him early next semester.

but we actually talked about this before and he agreed to do the project during the summer break. but then he just doesn't reply anymore, which is confusing

@CaptainEmacs, Early next semester is September. Too late for a summer project. But I agree, that two weeks after the semester ends can involve lots of things.

It is probably better avoided to call. If they are busy with things, there is little they can do on a phone call but get annoyed.
If you already have any guidance on the project you could start reading or whatever prep work is needed.
Send another email in a few days and say you need some guidance to continue but that you've started (assuming you have).
There are lots of things that might explain the delay, but ignoring you isn't near the top of the list.

He already sent two mails and left a phone message inside 2 weeks. I would not send the next mail in few days anymore. This is getting naggy. I would wait at least 3-4 weeks now.

Thanks, bro, for your comment. I will wait for 2+ weeks to send another email and find another supervisor to help me. He is a great candidate for a recommendation also. So sad

Given the question was asked last summer, I would assume it is too late to answer this right now. However, I believe situations like this is quite common.
Given professors using cannot have a vacation time outside of summer or winter breaks easily, it is common for them to schedule many events and travels to the start of the summer break. And since OP mentioned he had seen the professor in a panel, the professor was indeed busy on some thing.
And given you seems to have a 3.5 month summer break, I would argue 2 weeks into the break is definitely not a long time yet.
Also, it's common for professors to check their school email and phone much less frequently, so you might also want to try to contact them through their personal emails to remind them, if it is possible.


text:
Can I work as a postdoc with EAD as a J-2 visa holder?
My wife started to work with a J-1 visa in the US as a postdoc. I am also a scientist, but i am here as a spouse with J-2 visa. I would like to know, if is it possible to work as a postdoc with employment authorization document (EAD).

I would think so, but you really need an official ruling. Ask the immigration authorities or the HR office at a research university. I don't see how a post-doc is different from any other work for pay for immigration purposes, though.


text:
How much weight do LoRs from Indian professors carry for US PhD admissions?
I'm applying to PhD admissions to the US. My undergraduate college is in India (non-IIT/NIT/BITS), where professors often ask students to draft their own recommendation letters. How much weight, if any, do these letters carry? Are they even read by admissions committee members?

If part of your concern is that the students are asked to draft their own recommendation letters, I have seen this occur (for PhD applications) from professors at top international universities (e.g. top 100 in the world).
I believe the motivation is that the students know what they want to emphasis in their applications (and awards they have won) then they can make sure they are happy to attach their name to the claims (or edit it into their personal style).

First, we don't usually know if the student wrote the letter or not.  We read them, but many of them are not helpful: see https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/45513/19607

Of course, the letters will be read and considered. The university ranking as well as how well known the professor is in his field has its weight, but that doesn't mean only the best are considered. The graduate committees typically consider the applications as a whole including the grades, research/work experience, standardized tests, LoRs, SOP, and so on.
Regarding writing your own letter, that's quite common. Professors do as it gives them a great starting point to edit and write a compelling letter without spending too much of their time. It also allows students to highlight different strengths from their letters.


text:
How can I tell who would be interested in my research?
I'm a math postdoc. On MathJobs they sometimes ask if there are any "faculty contacts," which are people I've met or who otherwise have interest in my work. But sometimes I don't know who the faculty are, I've never met them at a conference, etc.  My feeling is that if I work on something that none of the faculty are particularly interested in, that will sink my application. In other words, I think I need to get someone on the faculty to be enthusiastic about my application. But to do that I have to say something like, "What I'm doing is related to the work of [insert name of faculty member]..."
Actually some of the job descriptions explicitly say that they prefer candidates that match the interests of the department. Why would a department hire candidate X, who works in some out of left field area, when they can hire candidate Y, who works on something that interests faculty there?
It seems that it is not enough to just do good research to stand out. I have to persuade the faculty that I should be hired over everyone else.

Should I even bother applying to university X if nobody at university X is familiar with my research? My impression is that even if I wrote 10,000 Annals papers on some topic that nobody at university X knows about, I will still be at a worse position than someone whose best paper appears in, say, Manuscripta, if there exists a faculty member who works in that area. Pardon the hyperbole.

If you're a newcomer, you might not be on their radar yet, but/and your application could make them aware, if peoples' general interests could include your work. Do your elevator pitch! :)

For instance let's say I write 10,000 Annals papers on representations of finite groups. But nobody at university X works on that. Would I have to prove some long-standing conjecture of a professor at university X using representation theory of finite groups, or something like that, to be shortlisted?

@garrett for instance, "At Wisconsin postdocs are hired by a specific faculty member with the expectation that the two people will meet regularly and probably collaborate on at least one paper during the postdoctoral term. It doesn’t always work but there’s at least some concentration of responsibility.The Wisconsin system has downside too — it makes it harder for us to hire postdocs who’d bring a lot of interesting math to the department but to whom no individual faculty member is close enough to commit."

Of course it's not as simple as we're pretending here, but, as you yourself suggested in your question, why would they want to hire someone doing something no one there cares much about (short of superstar PR stuff... pretty rare...) when/if they could use their definitely-finite resources to hire postdocs or tenure-track people whose work is already clearly of interest to the people there?

It is also true that a post-doc or tenure-track person who has no real senior-faculty support is in a bad situation for subsequent jobs and/or getting tenure. Like an orphan.

Yes...I should probably try to transition to some other area then. Because I'm worried that 2 years from now when I apply for jobs, my application will not align closely enough...

This is a good question to discuss with both your PhD advisor and your postdoc advisor / host / mentor, who are presumably writing you recommendation letters, and who presumably know more people whose research interests mirror or approximate your own.

Ok, packaging-up some comments... First, the original title-question has an easy answer: look at the faculty web pages (if you don't recognize their names from papers you've seen... if not read...).
Second, a more substantive aspect of the question-context is about plausibility of job applications to places where there maybe aren't any senior (or tenured) faculty doing anything much related to one's own work. This is tricky. On one hand, something close but a little "edgy" may sometimes provoke people to think you'd be interesting to have around. On the opposite hand, if you're an orthodox practitioner of a specialty that's of no obvious interest/relevance to the faculty, well, ... given finite resources, you'll almost-surely lose out to someone who has more affinity.
And, for that matter, it is not a good career move to go somewhere where you'll be "solo" or some kind of "orphan", without adequate mentoring, encouragement, and protection from weird political stuff. You'd need someone to stand up at the critical faculty meeting and speak in your favor!
But, also, yes, there is more to say about many places where they may be wanting to broaden their competency, and their criteria are ambiguous. I do not know so much about such situations.

OK, because I do have some restrictions on where I would like to live. I think that I should look at the list of faculty at the universities I am interested in and make sure that the papers I write will interest them.

@Gradstudent - Especially given the current job market - if you have sufficient restrictions on where you can live and what kind of job you would work at that you're looking at a few specific departments, you need to be considering non-academic job options.  It doesn't matter what you work on; if you're applying for an R1 job and don't have a Duke+ level paper (doesn't have to be actually accepted - people will take your recommenders' word), your chances at any particular job will be less than 1 in 10.

@paul garrett -Just wondering - how many people apply for tenure-track assistant professor positions at Minnesota?

@Gradstudent, in aggregate, at least a couple hundred people apply for our tenure-track positions. Some of them are probably just doing it because MathJobs makes it easy to do so... without any specific interest in people here.

Here's an example: Do you have to work on the analytic theory of automorphic forms to get a number theory position at the University of Minnesota?

@cgb5436, um, well, it's not only "analytic" theory of afms, but also "arithmetic". :) But, yes, as anyone can see, such things are a big fraction of what "number theorists" in MN do. In particular, then, "we" can more easily understand the virtues of the work of people doing such things, rather than other, more distant parts of number theory. Also, it is more understandable that people doing related stuff would genuinely want to come here, rather than somewhere else. (Not talking about raw issues of unemployment, etc.)

@paulgarrett It seems that most math departments in the US have "clusters" of research areas. For example the PDE's people always want to hire another PDE person, and the PDE people have to fight with the automorphic forms people who want to hire the automorphic forms person. But if nobody in the department does, say, homotopy theory, then the homotopy theory applicant has no good reason to apply, because they have no chance against either the PDE or the automorphic forms applicant, at least at Minnesota. Is that an accurate statement?

Well, actually, some people in MN do do homotopy theory and related stuff, especially in a contemporary sense. But, yes, in the scramble for job offers, if there's no local cluster to support an applicant, they'll probably lose out. I don't think this represents "bias", because hiring is about "best for our department", not some abstract sense of "best".

And, yes, this is a slippery slope, since also "best for our department" is hard to make objective.

I see. The department I was in had no faculty in representation theory, so I guess there is no reason for a representation theorist to apply to that department unless they can demonstrate how they can add value.

@cgb5436, yes, that's probably right. People already have (reasonable) interest in maintaining or building strength in things of immediate interest to them... so "orphan" applications (and, heaven-forbid, orphan faculty), are in a bad situation. It's not "bias", really, although sometimes some bias issues can be entangled with hiring stuff... DUH! (And often are...)

OK. Also, do you actually review every application? My impression is that the first hurdle is to even get the application looked at.

Yes, we do look at every application... Of course, sometimes it's relatively easy to make preliminary judgements either way, which influences how much further attention an application gets. I think currently we have fairly elaborate "rubrics" that the hiring cte is supposed use to appraise every application. Part of the idea is to "be fair", that is, to avoid acting on biases.

First of all:

In other words, I think I need to get someone on the faculty to be enthusiastic about my application.
It seems that it is not enough to just do good research to stand out. I have to persuade the faculty that I should be hired over everyone else.

Yes. That is literally the definition of a job interview. If you get the job, then nobody else will. So you do have to convince the deciding people that you should be hired before over anyone else. You do not earn magic job-points when you do good research that you can cash in at your local university to get a free job. You have to convince the hiring people that you should be hired. I do not understand why you would state this as if this were some terrible hidden secret about academia. It works like this everywhere. I'm sorry to be so blunt, but you are going to have real problems getting a job if you keep this attitude.

But sometimes I don't know who the faculty are, I've never met them at a conference, etc. My feeling is that if I work on something that none of the faculty are particularly interested in, that will sink my application.

The onus is on you to get yourself informed about who the professors at that institution are. Why are you applying there at all? There must be a reason. If this is a personal reason rather than an academic one (e.g. "it's my hometown", "my fiancée works in this city", "I like the beach"...) then this will definitely be a hindrance unless you can find a way to turn this into a positive.
Not knowing anybody at the institution will not necessarily "sink" your application. But it will handicap you, for sure. They don't want to a complete stranger that will do research that doesn't interest them. They would much rather hire someone to whom they can at the very least talk to about research.

Actually some of the job descriptions explicitly say that they prefer candidates that match the interests of the department. Why would a department hire candidate X, who works in some out of left field area, when they can hire candidate Y, who works on something that interests faculty there?

Why indeed? If even you cannot answer this question, there is a real problem.

I had the impression that hiring committees look mainly for potential, strong recommendation letters, a strong research statement, etc. Also it depends on how broad the topic is. It's difficult to find someone who works on something very close to what I had in my research statement, but it may be in the same general area. For example, would someone who does very good work in Iwasawa theory appeal to someone who works on automorphic forms? There do exist connections, and they're both, broadly speaking, number theory. The demarcation lines are blurry...

I guess what I am saying is that I thought they are looking for potential superstars, not necessarily potential superstars that work in the 6 or so specific areas that the faculty mainly care about.

Hiring committees are looking for strong faculty that meet their department's priorities and ambitions.  In particular, they are looking for junior faculty that are likely to thrive in their department enough to obtain (and deserve) tenure. That's a considerably lower bar than "potential superstar".  They may have learned from experience that lone wolves who don't have (or don't take advantage of) more senior collaborators / mentors within the department have a harder time thriving.  or their department culture may place a premium on internal collaboration....

...or they might prefer to build strength in a few key areas instead of trying to cover everything.  Every department is different.  Moreover, regardless of any particular department's priorities, nobody gets hired into a tenure-track faculty position anywhere without someone inside the department strongly advocating on their behalf.  There are just too many qualified applicants.

My feeling is that if I work on something that none of the faculty are particularly interested in, that will sink my application.

Postdocs (and to a larger extent PhD students) typically work on a faculty member's projects, rather than their own projects. I do not recommend applying for a position when no faculty are particular interested in your work.

In other words, I think I need to get someone on the faculty to be
  enthusiastic about my application.

I think you need to find a department that has faculty working in your area.

I think in math it is different, though. Not entirely sure. In Europe you're in a research group and it's essential. But, for instance, would an algebraic topologist be interested in hiring an algebraic topology grad student as a postdoc if they are working on the same general field but different topics? At the end of the day there are only a handful of mathematicians who work on stuff that's closely related to what I've done. And I do plan to branch out during my postdoc.

@Gradstudent Life isn't absolute...


text:
How does one keep informed in a field that relies heavily on scholarly books?
Given that the cycle for writing scholarly books is usually much longer than journal articles, how do professors and students stay informed about their peers' current research? Are there any pathways outside conferences and personal correspondence?

The pace in such disciplines tends to be slower. That is not necessarily bad. Those disciplines tend to prioritize careful thought out arguments over the newest, coolest, most hyped finding. It is not how I and my sub-discipline works, but I recognize that it is a legitimate way of working, that has complementary strengths and weaknesses over a more article or working paper based sub-discipline.

there is no answer for the question

I assume you mean that my answer does not answer Kevin's question rather then that Kevin's question has no answer. My answer is implicit: the pathways he mentioned are pretty much the ones used, and a reliance on books will slow the process down in such disciplines, but that is not considered a problem.

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


text:
What to do about a student whom I suspect of having plagiarized but who claims not to have?
I caught a student plagiarizing on a programming assignment by copying someone else's code and replacing some variable/function names. I gave the student a zero, and shortly afterward he emailed me maintaining that he's innocent and I'm falsely accusing him of cheating.
What should I do?

I got falsely accused of plagarism by a CS prof in college. I turned in an assignment that was identical to another student's assignment. Down to the variable names. The catch is that completing the assignment was about 50 LOC and the variable names were pretty obvious given the problem domain. I assume the assignment was non-trivial? Or is there a decent possibility that two students came up with almost identical solutions?

You felt strongly enough that he cheated to give him a zero, but not to expel him from school? Does your school not automatically expel cheaters? Mine did.

How did you catch him? Is it without a doubt an infallible claim that he plagiarized? Can you present him with this evidence?

@corsiKa Many schools do not impose such a harsh punishment for a first offense, cheating on a minor assignment, etc.

@JaredSmith you even had identical indenting and bracketing style?  That's actually really hard to believe even at 50 LoC.  This is one reason I always convert to white space 2 space indenting in Notepad++ instead of default.

@Nelson It may be the case that the course suggested preferred indenting and bracketing style to make to easier for reading through, everybody else's code ... and make it harder to distinguish plagiarism from indentical results

@corsiKa When I studied Physics in Germany copying homework was usually tolerated, with similarly lax punishments. The logic was that homework only serves to prepare the student for the exam, and copying the homework means that you at least looked at it, which is still better than not doing it at all. Some mathematicians even divided the total points by the number of students with identical solutions and gave each that partial credit.

The "I suspect of having plagiarized" in your title is at odds with the "caught a student plagiarizing" in your body text. If you have no evidence (i.e. lengthy comments copied verbatim?) and did not catch the student red-handed, you cannot do anything. Innocent until proven guilty.

@Nelson the assignment was in assembler, so those 50 LOC didn't really do much. People are going to move values into and out of registers, add contents of registers, etc. I have no idea if the formatting was identical (was just going off what the instructor told me when he made the accusation) but I would imagine that the other student and I both formatted it the way the examples were formatted (modulo tabs vs spaces).

@Nelson The number of bracket styles and indentation styles is limited. Moreover in some languages there are strong preferences towards certain particular styles, and even about naming of functions/variables etc. In other words: chances of producing the same 50 loc program are actually pretty high.

@ff524 Cheating on a minor assignment was still technically an expulsion, although the academic ethics committee would often reduce the sentence to failing the class, and automatic academic probation.

@Moriarty Something that many people seem to misunderstand is that "innocent until proven guilty" is only true for criminal courts. Civil courts (which this is the closest you'd have here) have a rather different conception there.

@Voo I would not punish a student for plagiarism unless I was certain beyond any reasonable doubt that (s)he had indeed plagiarized. Hence, my comment. The law isn't really a factor there.

how do you know which student plagiarized the other's work?  are you giving them both a zero?  if not, how are you choosing who gets the grade and who gets the zero?

Sounds like an excellent opportunity for the student to talk to the department about what is a serious accusation which appears to be without merit (simply because you "suspect" the student of it is not proof). I hope you learn a lesson from this.

You follow your department/university's policies on plagiarism, instead of asking random people on the internet for opinions.

Just out of curiosity, was the person whose code was copied also in the class? If so, did you also give them a zero? If they were in the class and you didn't also give them a zero then why not? If the person whose code was copied was also in the class then what do they have to say about the issue? If the code was from online then how much was obviously a direct copy? If they learned an algorithm by looking at online code then I would think even if they then rewrote based on their understanding then it may still be similar.

@Voo: Actually, innocent until proven guilty holds for both (at least in the USA).  What varies is the level of proof required: "beyond a reasonable doubt" (e.g. 99.9...9% certainty) vs "preponderance of the evidence" (e.g. 50.1% certainty)

@Ben "innocent until proven guilty" means a presumption of innocence which again is equivalent to "beyond reasonable doubt" for me. You can see that in many charters, say the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms where it says "Everyone charged with a criminal offence shall be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law". If you just have a preponderance of evidence you have not proven the claim. Interestingly enough apparently Anglo-american law differentiates from English common law (or Continental European) there though, so it really depends.

@voo it has nothing to do with the standard for evidence... "innocent until proven guilty" forbids imposing punishment prior to the trial of evidence (which includes the chance to present a defense).  Note that tentatively assigning a grade is not really "punishment", while submitting it to the university as a final mark would be.

@Ben Not the way I've seen it used in Europe. Obviously far from a perfect source, but wikipedia says the following: "The presumption of innocence [..]  is the principle that one is considered innocent unless proven guilty". "In many nations, presumption of innocence is a legal right of the accused in a criminal trial[...]Under Justinian Codes and English Common law, the accused is presumed innocent in criminal proceedings, and in civil proceedings (like breach of contract) both sides must issue proof"

@voo but if the law says that the standard in civil proceedings is "preponderance of the evidence", then once preponderance is established in the correct venue, it is indeed "proved according to law"

@Ben You mean the earlier quote? The point there is that it clearly specifies criminal offence and does not make the same statement anywhere for civil proceedings (I know that proof by negative is flawed, there could be other reasons to not mention it, despite it being assumed yes). Also note that the wiki article explicitly points out that Anglo-American law always presumes innocence in all kinds of proceeding (didn't know that, interesting) - which wouldn't be necessary if it was true everywhere.

Please take extended discussion to [chat].

Inform the student of the school's official procedure for appealing an accusation of plagiarism, and suggest he follow that procedure. (Also see: How can I prove that I didn't plagiarize.)
Policies and procedures are there exactly for situations like this one.
Generally if the student chooses to appeal, the procedures involve other parties (a dean, or a committee dedicated to such matters, for example) evaluating the student's side of things and your side of things (your reasons for believing that the student plagiarized) and then deciding on next steps according to school policies. (Here's an example.) So if you think the student is likely to appeal, you can start to prepare your side of things - the "evidence" - in the meantime.  (Personally, when in this situation I also like to let the department head know that this appeal might be coming.)
Note that you don't need to have caught the student on videotape, or anything like that. You'll tell the committee what you know, they'll make the decision as to whether it's enough evidence, and they'll make the decision as to whether the consequences you have imposed should stand. Deciding whether your evidence meets "standards of proof" for an appeal according to school policy is their job, not yours (they have much more experience than you in this matter.) Assuming you made your accusation in good faith, you don't need more evidence for an appeal than you did for the original accusation.

By the same token, the OP should then look into what he needs to do to defend his claim of plagiarism/cheating, should it be formally contested.  I would expect that "oddly similar to" is not an adequate standard of proof, though a preponderance of circumstantial evidence may suffice.  If you had a TA there who also witnessed the behavior, or if the student cheated off of is willing to testify about the behavior, etc. you may need to produce this for a formal inquiry.

Policies and procedures are there exactly for situations like this one. Well, I think you put a bit too much faith in policies and procedures. The fact is people sometimes get wrongly accused of cheating, and the committee will not always save them, so the OP is quite reasonable to be concerned about how to proceed. However I agree with everything else you wrote - great answer and +1.

@DanRomik He never made a claim about the infallibility of the system.  Simply that it exists for a specific purpose.  The policies and procedures to handle plagiarism accusations is exactly "how to proceed".  Humans are fallible and subjective by nature, so mistakes will happen.  There tend to be policies and procedures for that, too. So I'm not exactly sure I understand your objection.  I also kind of wonder if you are confusing the OP as the accused, when he is the accuser?

@zibadawatimmy I never made a claim that she (ff524) made a claim about the infallibility of the system. (And yes, feel free to reply that you never made a claim that I made a claim that she made a claim, etc.) However, it is true that I think ff524's answer seems to put a bit too much trust in the system working as it should. Note that OP is wrestling with a question of conscience: should he proceed with punishing a student who protests his innocence? ff524 essentially says: follow your instinct, and let the system do its thing. ...

...(continued) I generally agree with this advice, but I was trying to emphasize that OP as the accuser still has a responsibility to make sure his accusations are standing on firm moral ground; the fact that a committee will review the claims does not absolve him of a duty to be very careful. This is all the more true in a world in which committees are fallible, and would be less true if all committees were guaranteed to be made up of amazingly professional and reliable people, which they aren't.

Sounds very much like the American legal system. If you plead guilty you get a small punishment. If you go to court and lose you get a huge punishment, so going to court is not a better idea even if you'd win with high probability.

@CodesInChaos The only way your analogy holds is if the student could potentially get a harsher punishment (than the zero on the assignment) if he appeals and loses. Depending on the school's policies, that may or may not be the case - in some schools, if the student loses the appeal, all that means is that the instructor's original punishment stands (in which case, the student has nothing to lose by appealing the accusation.)

The advantage of this method is that many students who did cheat will not want to embarass themselves by going to a meeting with senior professors and blatantly lying, and will just drop the matter. Those who pursue it will at least be discouraged from getting into the same situation again.

In my first college programming class (Pascal) after the midterm another student and I were called in to meet with the professor and the Dean.  We were accused of plagiarism. The other student was a girl from a mid-eastern country, conservative, scarves, etc.  She completely broke down crying.  While she cried, I assured the professor that she and I had literally never even spoken to each other. He then showed me the programs that she and I had written.  They were almost perfectly identical, even to variable names.  My academic career on the line, I suggested that he give each of us another programming challenge, and see what happens; that perhaps we just have similar programming styles.  He did so, and he watched me while the Dean watched her in a separate room.  We both completed the task within a minute of each other (I know because we all showed up at the printer at the same time).
Again, our programs were almost entirely identical.  I think all but one of our variables had the same name.  She and I were two of the best programmers in the class, and apparently we just wrote programs very similarly.  We actually ended up having the professor inform the rest of the department, so we wouldn't have the same problem in future classes.

Great story! It seems that there may be a real epidemic of instructors falsely accusing programming students of plagiarism based on purely coincidental code similarities. A scary thought, and I'm happy this question creates a record of several such stories that future falsely accused students may be able to find and refer to.

@DanRomik And, though not applicable in this case, it's entirely reasonable that students in a curriculum may have legitimately worked on group projects in earlier classes together, and have developed similar coding styles.  That's usually a good thing for professional coders;  I've heard it said that in a good team with good coding conventions, one person's code shouldn't be distinguishable from another's. (In a senior level course, another student and I used to compare our independently written programs to ensure that they were different enough to not trip naive similarity tests.

That's interesting!  I've compared many, many student assignments and never seen any case where there was such similarity and there was no plagiarism.  Good to keep in mind, especially with the better students!

Because computer languages are far more constrained in their grammar and usage than natural languages, the tendency towards similarity is much higher.  For many tasks, there are very specific steps that have to be performed for correct completion of the task, and especially for smaller more trivial programs, the possibility for high similarity is there.

The title of your question does not match its content, since they are each asking different things. The title asks:

What to do about a student whom I suspect plagiarized but claims not
  to have?

If you suspect that a student plagiarized, you should investigate the matter further to see if you can come up with solid evidence. The student should be punished (with a failing grade and/or reporting to your university's student judicial affairs or equivalent unit) if, and only if, the evidence points to the student's guilt with a reasonably high degree of certainty.
Given that you already decided to give the student a zero grade for the assignment, and that suspicion alone does not merit such punishment, you should reverse the decision and grade the student's assignment as if he had done it himself. It may be appropriate to nonetheless tell the student that you have suspicions that he plagiarized the assignment, and give him a stern warning that from now on you'll be watching his every move and that he should not try to play any more such games.
On the other hand, the body of your question tells a different story:

I caught a student plagiarizing on a programming assignment by copying
  someone else's code [...] What should I do?

This is substantially different from what the title was asking. If you don't just suspect the student plagiarized but believe you "caught the student plagiarizing", i.e., you have what you consider to be solid evidence and are willing to defend your accusation in the event that the student challenges it, then you may consider your decision to have been an appropriate one. In that case, ff524's answer gives very good advice about how to proceed. However, I would strongly caution you that we humans are fallible beings, and in particular we have a distinct tendency to be overconfident of our own judgments. This overconfidence is known as the illusion of validity (described here, and more in detail in this wonderful article by Daniel Kahneman, the behavioral economist who coined the term).
I saw this effect with my own eyes in a plagiarism case I was involved with at my university, in which an instructor suspected two of his students had shared code because the plagiarism-detection software he used flagged their code as having a high similarity score. As an objective party who inspected the two students' code (and being more than knowledgeable enough about the programming aspects of the case), I was far from convinced that any of them had committed plagiarism, and after also interviewing the students I was close to 100% certain that they hadn't. Nonetheless, throughout this process the instructor who had accused them of plagiarism (a very smart and accomplished computer scientist) remained adamant, quite bizarrely in my opinion, that some misconduct must have occurred.
The bottom line is that your decision to punish the student should be based on more than just your own feeling of confidence that your suspicion is founded, since such feelings have been scientifically shown (by Kahneman, who won the Nobel prize for such work, and others) to be extremely inaccurate. If that means letting a potential cheater go unpunished, that may be annoying but it is still much better than punishing someone for an offense they did not commit.

Ugh, plagiarism detection software. Any instructor who uses it should be forced to put all of their own publications through it, just to see how "useful" a "similarity score" is.

@ff524 I never used such software myself but I believe it has its uses. However, one should know how to interpret its output since invariably there will be many false positives, which is something the instructor in question was not good at recognizing.

@ff524 I always wondered why plagiarism detection software don't use tried and tested statistical methods of p-value based detection, much like what BLAST does for hits in its database. A mere %ident doesn't really say much in the absence of other information.

"reverse the decision and grade the student's assignment" - not needed. If it's indeed identical by coincidence, it deserves the same grade. Side benefit: this helps you step over feelings that may unduly influence your grading.

@MarchHo: I don't think anything short of blatant copy/pasting is going to give you alpha < 0.05, which means you'll still have instructors applying punishments with alpha > 0.05, or you will have students "getting away with it."

@Kevin Actually, modern homology detection algorithms such as PSI BLAST are capable of detecting very low %ident levels (down to 20%). Of course, the problem of balancing false negatives and false positives always exists, but implementing such a system would likely reduce the likelihood of either occurring.

I would call him in and go over the assignment.  Have him explain the code and the decisions he made in coming up with the code. You should be able to get a pretty good feeling from that conversation whether this was actually his code or not.
Also, is it possible that someone cheated off of him instead of the other way around?

Just to muddy this up a bit more, I gave up on finding out "who cheated". I realized that what I care about is that they understand what they handed in, regardless of having copied it from somewhere or written it up themselves.

Well, this brings back something that I had long forgotten. When I was 8 years old, I was accused of 'copying' by another child and disciplined by the teacher. We both wrote about going to a circus in the snow.  The fact was that there had been a circus and it snowed on one of the days. Clearly we had simply visited the same event. I was unable to convince the teacher of this and it rankled for a very long time.
If the code is messy and contains exactly the same errors in exactly the same places then maybe it was plagiarism. If however the code is optimal then it could simply be a case of convergent evolution.
I suggest caution.
P.S. How would you know which of the two was the plagiarist?

"If however the code is optimal then it could simply be a case of convergent evolution."  I have never seen two people write code that is exactly the same except variable/function names. Number of spaces before and after "=", number of lines between variable declaration and start of code, location of parenthesis, things like that are always different. Your point abut which of the two is good though although most professors consider both cheaters, the one that allowed their to be copied is almost or just as bad.

It depends how lengthy and complex the code is. We aren't told.  Also the OP says that one student was given zero. What about the other student?  I don't think there is much point in us guessing -- only the OP can fill in the details. I'm just advising caution. Maybe the student was caught red-handed stealing the code from someone's laptop. If so then the answers here are going to be different.

@Sam: If the students both used the same IDE, and both clicked "Fix code formatting" before handing in the assignment, then things like spacing, indentation and brace placement very likely will be identical. Other things could still differ, of course, but if both students also e.g. followed the instructor's / textbook's coding style on things like variable naming and scoping, and perhaps based their overall code structure on the same examples in the textbook, then (nearly) 100% convergence is possible.

@IlmariKaronen: Even if they didn't, while in some languages you see more acceptable styles than in others, better programmers will (by then mostly sub-consciously) use a single consistent style throughout, their choice biased by personal preferences, prior exposure and which style the template / given code followed. So no need for that auto-formatter, though it helps getting there.

There are two sides to the question: how can you prove that plagiarism occurred, and how is plagiarism dealt with in your institution, including the amount of evidence required and the weight of the consequences for infringement. Dan Romik raises excellent points, in that you should always err on the side of caution.
I will only focus on finding statistical, objective evidence. If, from amongst N students, student A's code is overwhelmingly similar to student B's, and other similarities form a clear gaussian, then there is

objective proof that the assignment was not so trivial as to only accept variants of A's answer.
objective proof that, among all possible student pairs, A-B merits special interest

I have seen colleagues use AC to perform this kind of analysis. Other free programs exist (although they don't go so much for the visual aspect, at least last time I checked). It appears to perform tokenization prior to comparison, so that comments, spacing, and renamed identifiers are completely ignored.

Image, from the above site, with a histogram where bars on the left represent very similar submissions, and at the right very dissimilar submissions. You can see a bell-shape to the right of the current selection; the graph display is displaying all currently-selected edges. Clicking on them would open a code-comparison window.

Not directly answering the question, in my opinion, but I upvote anyway for highlighting a great tool that is somewhat related.

I'm not going to address whether or not the student is actually guilty; I will only answer regarding the procedure, which is what I understand your question is really getting at. At my university, there is a very specific procedure for professors to follow when they suspect cheating. Two relevant steps in the procedure are:

We need to prepare a formal case and submit it to the Dean's office. This 1) gives the student the ability to explain themselves, appeal, etc; 2) it shields professors somewhat from the emotional impact of sobbing/angry/denying/pleading/story-telling students; and 3) it protects students from unreasonable professors.
We are not allowed to exact any penalty on the student. The Dean's office handles this. This has two main benefits: 1) penalties can be made uniform for similar offenses by different students; and 2) repeat offenders across different classes can be identified and penalized accordingly.

I don't know what is the case in your university, but I suspect that they have a precise procedure to follow as well. Did you follow it? If you did not follow the procedure precisely, then you are making a mess for yourself. I am not assuming that it is the same as my school's procedure, but regardless of your school's specific policy, I see a major problem in your description: Students should at least have the right to explain themselves if they are accused of plagiarism (even if it is just with the professor). Apparently, you went ahead and made the decision and penalized the student without even letting them explain themselves. This is not just to the student.
I know that plagiarism is a huge hassle to handle (trust me, I have much experience in this), but we have to be just to our students and follow the policy. Perhaps you have exacted such a penalty in the past and guilty students kept quiet, but such an approach doesn't protect innocent students in case you make a mistake. They should have the right to such protection, and you should not take it away from them.
I recommend that you contact your department chair or dean's office to learn the formal procedure and then follow it.

How many possible creative solutions exist to complete the assignment? As someone who's gone from a creative environment to a technical one, I see programming as a bit of world that goes between pure math to pure Art, and how you approach it academically really depends on the level of complexity you're trying to teach. As pointed out in the comments below, a long assignment requires so much consideration. If this is a thesis level piece that requires several pages of code, then yes, you have a case. If the assignment is short and the answer can be found in a textbook, you'll find a lot of your students will look at it, decide it is correct, and hand in some version of that code, and I think you'll be doing more of a disservice to the student by getting them expelled for that.
I have a personal case for learning by copying:
I was taught programming by a manager who fully believed in 'figuring out the solution for yourself' - his code was terrible. There was a lot of 'reinventing of the wheel' simply because he wouldn't look up common methods. After I got out from under his rock, I proceeded with the 'copy,adjust,test' method of learning, and picked up many things much faster. I found out later that what my former manager did happens often - and I've seen code get tossed because it was so full of unique methods for common tasks that it was unmanageable.
I realized that the way I learn is by reading and understanding the 'good' version of it. That's how most musicians and writers learn - we don't go to a textbook, we go to the stories and the music, and there's going to be a little 'copying' until they've been exposed to enough code to get really creative.
If you can see this happening with your assignments, you might want to make them a little broader or include a 'comments' requirement that will force them to explain how their code works.
P.S. teaching them to write comments in their code now will probably make the world run better in the long run.

There is a huge difference between avoiding to reinvent the wheel and plagiarism. Good programming assignments will specify to what extent you may and shall resort to existing libraries and similar. The whole point of training programming is often that you can solve programming tasks where it is impossible to resort to existing libraries (because they do not exist). Allowing the students to bypass this goal by copying everythign makes the assignment pointless and the corresponding grade meaningless. There is a difference between understanding somebody else’s code and producing your own.

Wait, did you really just imply that coding is not creative...?

"so often there's really only one right or best way to achieve the goal." I assume you have never worked on a project more than 3 lines then. What is "best" or "right", fastest? lowest memory use? easiest to understand? easiest to maintain? Cheapest to produce? Least likely to fail? Engineers creatively balance all of these objectives on a daily basis.

well, Sam, you told me! I'll edit the answer.

There is also a huge difference between demonstrating your skill in writing code from scratch and producing the best code in the shortest time.  Classes ask for the former, for relatively simple problems; in that context, copying other people's code is inappropriate.  Companies ask for the latter, for far more complex problems; in that context, copying other people's code is effectively required.

It depends. Do you suspect that the student plagiarized or did you catch the student while doing so? Do you have evidence? If it is only based on a suspicion, I suggest you gather some incontrovertible evidence to support your claim before you bring the case further. If the student did plagiarize, it will not be so easy to win an appeal if you have proof to back up your claim.

I would hope the OP had more than just idle suspicion before giving the student a zero on the assignment.

I hope so too, but still best to play safe and back it up with evidence.

It's not up to the OP to bring the case further, it's up to the student. If the student appeals, then it's up to a committee (who is much more experienced in these matters) to decide whether the OP's evidence is enough to enforce the punishment. The OP doesn't need more evidence for the student's appeal than for the original accusation.

Unless the committee consist of professional, experienced programmers, I still think it is safe if the OP, as a subject matter expert, provides the committee with complementing evidence to ensure that the committee do come to the right conclusion. I surely hope that no committee or board will ever conclude on plagiarism unless it can be proven beyond reasonable doubt. That said, it should not be difficult to prove, with the proper programming expertise.

@ff524 your confidence in the committee's professionalism, much like the OP's confidence in his accusations, may be excessive IMO. As someone who sat on such committees I can tell you not all people deciding such cases are super sensible or experienced, and many will not have a technical background. Of course they will be well-intentioned and will do the best job they can, but it's still OP's responsibility not to make frivolous or unsubstantiated accusations. So, you are correct the OP doesn't need more evidence, but the evidence for the original accusation already needs to be very strong.

You should reverse the decision until you can prove that the student plagiarized.

The phrase is "innocent until proven guilty" for a reason.

If you follow the current leading answer (by ff524) you have a good chance of simply bullying the student into accepting a 0.  I met a lot of people through college that would rather take the hit than make a big issue of it.

I faced this problem once.  I didn't begin by confronting the student, though; I began by taking the problem to my supervisor, who pointed out that it's not very feasible to prove cheating on this kind of assignment, no matter how certain the instructor may feel about it.  He advised me to just focus on the exams.  He arranged for a special room for the final exam, so the suspected student could be seated well away from anyone, in a very observable position.  The suspect failed the final miserably.  He had some other poor grades in the class (quizzes, midterm exam), so when the weighted average was computed, he ended up getting an F in the course.  A low enough grade that he had to repeat the course (because he needed it for his major).  The reason I know he repeated the course: I saw him from time to time through my office window the following summer; and he ran into me once and was very bitter about having to be on campus for summer school to repeat the course.

Although changing the exams won't help if the assignment on which the student appears to have cheated is the final exam, or the last major programming project of the course.

I don't think the OP's problem was related to the final exam.  Basically, what I'm saying is that if the student isn't able to do a homework or project, it might be easier to apply an effective consequence through careful exam proctoring.

If these are programming students, they will succeed or fail as a team in their future careers.
Why not get them used to this mindset by borrowing a page from the military? I'm sure many will consider this too draconian,  but it will be surprisingly effective if the entire class is penalized.
If you have objective and effective criteria to identify when plagiarism has occurred (a big hurdle, I know) I see no reason why you cannot give the entire class a zero on that assignment.
This will build camaraderie among the students as they will have a common enemy (you), will encourage collaboration and teamwork since they'll have to check each other's work (to ensure that it is not too similar) and teach them to watch out for each other and become self-policing.  All of these are critical for their future success as a programmer.

This will build camaraderie among the students as they grab their pitchforks and torches and storm the department demanding your head on a pike.  And then they'll learn the value of teamwork when the department gives it to them.

So you accept to go to jail because your neighbour murdered his wife ? It will teach you camaraderie by making the law your common enemy. More seriously, have you actually witnessed military commanders making themselves enemies of their men ? It seems quite suicidal.

If I saw my neighbor in the act of murdering his wife or knew that he had plans to do so - and did nothing about it - then yes.  I would expect to be deservedly sent to jail.

Following your logic, and so every member of the entire class saw one student in the class cheating and did nothing about it? How are you supposed to prove that everyone witnessed the cheating? Do you seriously believe that?

authors: 高铁一等座有免费餐么_高铁商务票和一等二等的区别

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


text:
Discussion of hiring practices and underrepresented groups during interviews
I am searching for a job at a small liberal arts college in the United States, and I was recently interviewed via Skype by a search committee.  One of the questions I asked was "What things are your institution experiencing/initiating with regard to recent trends in the STEM fields?"
The interviewers covered a variety of topics in their detailed response, and one in particular stood out to me: "We are really trying to hire from underrepresented demographic groups in our discipline, for instance, someone that is X, Y, or Z."
That statement led me to the following questions, which I would like to pose to academia.se:

While I wholeheartedly agree with the principle behind their statement and I realize that most departments have this objective, is it considered appropriate for an interviewer to be so explicit about that preference?
Given that I was doing a Skype interview, it was fairly obvious that I did not fall into any of the categories named by the interviewer.  What would be the best way for me to respond to a statement like that?

I can see job ads including an "equal opportunity" statement, but I can't say I've ever heard it stated during the actual interview. It's almost begging a candidate from the non-represented group to respond. I think under those circumstances, it's best to simply say "Yes, I noticed your commitment to those efforts in the job ad" and leave at that.

Discussions about how to improve participation from underrepresented groups in academia are not uncommon in interviews, even when the interviewee does not come from such a group.  That a department has a strong commitment to hiring people from underrepresented groups is an important thing for the interviewee to know about the department.  After all, if the interviewee is hired, they are going to be expected to be part of the departmental team that is working toward broadening participation.
If you are interviewing for faculty positions and are not part of an underrepresented group, it is still a very good idea to have thought carefully about the underlying issue.  When the issue comes up in an interview, you should be able to voice your support for broadening involvement in your field.  You should also have some specific thoughts about why this in important and, most crucially, how you can help.  Hiring you may not represent direct progress toward the goal, but you have an opportunity to show that you are enthusiastic about recruiting students from underrepresented groups and working to hire people from those groups when you are part of the faculty.

Indeed. You can respond my acknowledging that you are clearly not the solution to this problem, but that you agree with the goal, that it is an important consideration for your as well, and that you have in the past worked on X, Y, and Z to improve the situation in the department you had been in before.

"You have an opportunity to show that you are enthusiastic about recruiting students from underrepresented groups" -- perhaps you could add "and supporting their success in the department."


text:
What should I do a potential supervisor doesn't reply after I send the research proposal to him?
A potential suprvisor (British university) gave me a positive response after my first email, and asked me to send a more detailed research proposal to him. I send it to him on the 14th of July, and only received an automatic response from him.

I will be back after 18th of July.

When time went to August, I still did not receive any response from him, so I sent him a follow-up email on the 3rd of August, but did not receive a reply yet, what should I do now?

Are you already admitted to the same university?

You say he said he will "return" in July, not that he will "reply" then. He may have needed a ping as your mail may be lost in a backlog catch up. You did that. Suggest a bit of patience.

It is summer, take it in mind

You went on a date with a girl, but when you text her some time after that, she does not respond. What should you do? Well, there is nothing you can do -- she is not interested in your application to be her boyfriend, and that is that.
Now, is it rude to just "ghost" someone and not respond even with a "I'm not interested"? Maybe. But you can't really make someone talk to you if they don't want to.


text:
Professor stopped replying after showing interest in introductory email
I want to do my Master's Degree from Japan, for which I sent an email with my research proposal on 3rd August, 2022. The Professor replied within 2 hours of email, showing interest in my profile and asking for funds, to which I responded positively (will be able to manage funds). It has been 10 days and I have not received any procedure for interview. Should I send a follow up email? Is there any holidays period in the University? How much time should I wait before directly calling the professor?

If you need advice on how to apply, consider emailing professor with this very explicit question. The professor does not know that you do not know how to apply. From their perspective, a student inquired about a possibility to do a PhD with them and received a positive response (subject to funds), student then confirmed the funds available --- all good, no further action required.

Sending him a reminder after about a week is certainly okay. Make sure to be polite and do not blame him for not answering. Re-express your interest and emphasise again that you have funding available.


text:
Decision time after Post-doctoral interview
I had an interview exactly two weeks ago for a postdoctoral position and my interview went extremely well with the PI. I was told that he'll get back to me in a week after interviewing other candidates, it's been two weeks, I mailed him last week enquiring about the same and he replied he's busy and 'he'll complete the application process this week'. I don't know what that means but tomorrow would be one week since he sent that message. I'm getting desperate since I dont have any other offers and I want this badly. Please let me know if should mail him again ? And how long does it usually take?

This will depend entirely on the person making the decision. Since you don't have any other offers, there's not much you can do besides wait and keep applying elsewhere in case the decision is no.

@Jay N  There are many similar questions here and you can read the answers to those.

Does this answer your question? How to get people to reply to emails and what to make of a no response?

Please check our archives; you are not the first to have this problem. But ultimately, this comes down to the specifics of your situation.

He'll complete the application process this week

Hiring a post-doc requires extensive documentation.
Since it is vacation time and yes, professors are extremely busy persons. Most probably (according to my intuition and experience), he has accepted you for the position. However, the application procedure, documentation and bureaucracy takes some time to complete, especially in this period of the year when admin staff and dean are not in the office regularly. The procedure to complete application process also varies university to university and country to country. For example, in China, in this time of the year, completing the application process takes 1-2 months. On contrary, the whole procedure takes 1-2 weeks during regular term.
I suggest you to be patient and kill your time in some other healthy activities. You'll get the good news soon :)
It is recommended not to bother him by asking about the application status.

Thank you for answer. It's been 20 days since the interview,  I had applied only through my resume and cover letter and I'm not sure how the application process would start without original degree certificates and references. But I'm hopeful and I'll wait for few more days.


text:
Can I publish something which is more like a study and which does not contain any concrete results?
I am a theoretical physics researcher. I have not published any papers yet, so I do not have that much experience in publishing a paper. Though I am a Ph.D. student, I am also working independently on another topic of interest (physics only) and trying to find out something. This topic is different from my Ph.D. topic, and I am doing this research on my own without anyone's help.  I have collected information from google (mostly some websites and from a few research papers), and based on this information, I am trying to do my research. My doubt is - if I didn't get any concrete results, can I still publish my work just as a study? Like publishing some article with the title - "Study of ----"? What if it is just collecting data from different sources and gathering it in one place, what if I didn't find anything new from my data analysis? Can I still publish it?

Are you trying to make a survey paper since you don't have results? These are fairly common in mathematical physics.

@CameronWilliams Are you saying review paper? No, I am not doing a review paper.

For the wrong reason, there is something called vanity press, where you publish a book on your own. The name is quite derogatory, but this way of publishing is not a bad thing by itself.
Your research without results fits in publishing a book on the topic, a kind of PhD thesis without results.

This seems unlikely if you mean publish with a reputable publisher. The difficulty will be finding someone, other than yourself who will publish it.
You can, of course, publish it yourself on arXiv or similar, though you may need some help from a professor to get an account there. Your university email address may be enough.
But formal publishers are looking for novel results and advances to the state of the art, which you don't seem to have at the moment.
Talk to a professor or to so that you understand the possible consequences of publishing early. On the one hand, your ideas get out there attached to your name. But on the other hand, others are also free to extend your work, even before you do.