text:
Is it valid to feel uncomfortable with questions unrelated to the grading of your performance?
I recently attended an online seminar related to building scientific writing and research skills. The TA started by saying he wanted us to introduce ourselves and asked each of us to tell everyone where they were born, currently live and what they do in their free time.
Is it valid for me to having felt uncomfortable with sharing personal information? I fail to see how this information was relevant for completing the seminar. From my point of view, it may introduce bias, if the TA dislikes some of the things he hears from an attendee.
Moreover, not everyone may have a socially acceptable answer to the question what they do in their free time. This leads to an uncomfortable situation where you either lie, not answer at all or say the way things are and face the consequences.
For clarity, one could, as an extreme example, imagine someone suffering from severe depression/crisis and university related work being the only thing they do. Or someone has unconventional interests. Being asked this question puts them in an uncomfortable postion.
I wanted to confront the TA with my concerns and not answer the questions, but I feared that it may have impacted the grading of my performance, so I didn't. I feel it's unethical to, even indirectly, "force" students answer questions that may put them in an uncomfortable position by using your position of power. Am I missing something or is it valid to feel this way? How could I go about dealing with similar situations in the future?

What country?  (Yes this matters!)

Related: Is there a polite and professional way to decline answering personal question?

I'm grateful for this question because it makes me more aware that some perceive these kinds of questions as problematic.

One thing that gets too little attention is, in my opinion, the topic of the seminar "... related to building scientific writing ... skills". The TA doesn't really want to know about you, they'll have forgotten your place of birth and hobbies by next week. What they do want to know, because it relates to the topic of the seminar, is how well and concisely you're able to describe a topic when you don't struggle with facts.

One thing of note which is both unrelated and crucial here: You're asking "Is it valid to feel uncomfortable with...", and the answer is "Yes, it is valid because all feelings are valid". This does not mean, however, that asking the question was inappropriate on the TA's part (and I would agree with the answers saying that you're within your rights to politely refuse to answer, but there's nothing wrong with asking). To be able to deal with these situations better in the future, it could be worth exploring where your anguish at the question is coming from.

I feel your pain.  I finally worked out a trick: I say my name and that I'm with/from whatever reason I'm there (the company, or my division or region) and then I add 'and I'm intensely private'.

I would make the statement that one's feelings are ALWAYS valid to themselves

Hi, I must preface this with: you are accepted and appreciated as you are; this comment is by no means a suggestion, and I didn't mean to be obtrusive. I just sensed, that one day the change of a username may emerge as a relevant thought for you. If that ever happens, here are the results of my research about it: https://meta.askubuntu.com/q/19490/1157519

I am answering this on the basis of what it would be like in Canada. It may be very different in other cultures.
I fairly strongly disagree with many of the answers, and very strongly with many of the comments.
The situation here is supposed to be professional. It is supposed to be an instructional session in a professional activity. It is not a social occasion.
It is offensive to suggest that “you are going to face a long hard road in all avenues of your life” because you don’t want to spill out your life story at a seminar. This is essentially social blackmail, i.e.: Do what we are all doing or you are a pariah.
Turn it around. If you can’t handle being told that invasive questions are invasive, then your road is going to lead to some mighty dark places.
The personal questions that would be acceptable would be things like name, academic level, school or institution, and such. If the TA had asked something like “what do you hope to get from this seminar?”, that would be very different.
But “where were you born?” is not acceptable. I have worked with people for twenty years, gone to their weddings, and I don't know where they were born. And "what do you do in your free time?” is just plain invasive.
I agree with the OP that these questions were out of bounds.

Moderator’s notice: I edited the answer to tone down accusations of other users and removed some bizarre and unclear statements that are causing nothing but controversy and do not appear to be substantial to the answer. (@BillOnne: If you want to keep these statements because you think they are essential to your answer, you need to clarify them.) […]

Moderator’s notice, part 2: I also cleared all the comments as they are either obsolete or discussion. Please read this FAQ before posting another comment. In particular, if you have a differing opinion that can be as well posted as an answer to the question, post it as an answer (or upvote a matching existing answer). Take the discussion to chat.

and asked each of us to tell everyone where they were born, currently live and what they do in their free time.

These are routine questions that you should be(come) comfortable answering. No, it is not unethical to ask students to answer questions like this. Classes do not happen in a vacuum; even in a math class, it is fair to expect students to have basic skills in other areas, including basic social skills.

I fail to see how this information was relevant for completing the seminar. From my point of view, it may introduce bias, if the TA dislikes some of the things he hears from an attendee.

The TA was probably trying to create some rapport with the students. Having a go-to fact about each student might help the TA to remember names. And having the students speak aloud might help wake them up, especially in an early-morning class.
In a larger sense, I would try to worry less about the TA's opinion and bias -- the TA is just a student a few years older than you, what do you care what they think? It seems pretty unlikely to me that the TA would hate your answer so much that it would affect their grading. On the contrary, to the extent that the TA cares at all about your answer, it is probably that they are hoping for enthusiastic, genuine responses.

How could I go about dealing with similar situations in the future?

Have stock responses. For "what do you do in your free time," a good quick answer is "what free time?" But it's a good idea to think of something genuine you are comfortable sharing. For example, if you like dogs, a fair answer is: "I like to play with dogs." It doesn't matter at all if you don't actually spend much of your free time playing with dogs -- the point of the question is not to audit your timecard. Rather, the point is to state something that you enjoy doing, so that others can feel like they know something abut you.

Some TAs might even have been advised to do such things (TA training) to build rapport. Especially if they will meet the same group pf students throughout the term.

There are things people will never be comfortable doing, and they owe nobody an excuse.  The reasons don't need to be rational, and nobody has any business asking about them.  "Learn to get over this" isn't always possible.  "I feel very uncomfortable answering personal questions" is a perfectly acceptable approach that should go unchallenged.

OP certainly could say that, and a college TA should respect this if they choose to do so. But more generally, social skills are important for nearly all careers. Deciding to respond to all polite chit-chat with "I feel very uncomfortable answering personal questions" will be a career-limiting (and life-limiting) move. OP might not be able to "get over it," but it's certainly worth investing some time and effort into developing strategies (such as stock responses) for dealing with this situation more gracefully.

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I'm surprised as to why a lot of the answers and discussions revolve around lecturing me on basic social etiquette and diagnosing me with social ineptitude. I do not lack social skills, didn't struggle to "play along" and didn't ask for forecasts about the oh-so "hard" future ahead of me. I was just uncomfortable in this particular instance, and, as others pointed out, the TA could have made a better effort of building rapport. Although I deemed it irrelevant to this particular seminar.  I don't know if I should be amused or offended by some of the rather insensitive and rude replies here.

@Disillusioned Overall, I think most answers here 1) acknowledge that it's okay to feel uncomfortable even if the instructor had no intent to make students uncomfortable, 2) explain that this is likely meant to build rapport, help the instructor learn names, or just get people comfortable talking (and maybe knowing these motives will help you feel less discomfort) and 3) suggest some alternative ways to answer the question. I think these are meant to be both reassuring and pragmatic, rather than insensitive.

@Disillusioned - To be fair, you said that these remarks made you "uncomfortable" and were "unethical," and you considered "confronting" the TA about them. If you had instead said "I personally didn't mind the questions, but I wonder if they are really useful," then the answers may have gone in a different direction.

What if the OP were to answer (and I DEFINITELY don't know that this is true) "a slum outside Mumbai" Now, no matter how much effort the OP has put into lifting himself up and out of the proverbial gutter, he can be pigeonholed by his truthful answer. If the OP is uncomfortable answering personal questions, unrelated to the seminar then they should NOT be further ostracized from the group. Period.

@CGCampbell nobody would be forcing you to answer in this way. This person could just say "India" or "Mumbai", and in a general introduction round follow-up question is unlikely.  This is just the point about preparing stock answers that are somewhat close to the truth but do not give away more than a person is comfortable with. Sharing too much detail in such a situation would be seen as weird anyway.

These kinds of ice-breaker exercises are common in academic activities and also in the professional workforce.  They typically involve sharing basic details about your background and interests so that others can get to know you.  (In this respect, they are not atypical of the types of questions people face in ordinary social situations.)  It is a good idea to become comfortable with these exercises as a basic form of sociability.  If you have hobbies, interests or life-circumstances that you don't feel comfortable sharing, learn to give some stock answers that get you through these questions without disclosing details you're uncomfortable with.
I would recommend that you take a more open-minded view of this activity and consider that it is probably designed to help people get to know each other, in order to facilitate greater collegiality or enjoyment during the seminar session.  The vast majority of people take the answers to these questions in good spirit, so unless your hobby is cutting the ears off puppies, you are probably going to be fine.  It is fine to feel uncomfortable in these situations (some introverted people do).  However, while it is not impossible that disagreements over background, personal activities, etc., could lead to bias, focusing on this highly unlikely outcome at the expense of the more general positive effect strikes me as a kind of paranoia.
(It is also worth pointing out that your position here has all the hallmarks of the deleterious effects of "call-out culture".  You seem to be taking a relatively innocuous social situation, confecting a very marginal possible negative outcome based on presumed discriminatory intent, elevating that hypothetical negative to be the sole focus of attention, and then expressing a desire to "confront" the "unethical" action of the identified malfeasor.  In such a circumstance, I would suggest some introspection on that aspect of the matter and some reconsideration of whether that is a good long-term strategy for dealing with people.)

"From my point of view, it  MAY introduce bias[...]" There is a big difference between "may introduce bias" vs. "likely".  "May" mentions a possibility, and "likely" makes a judgment on the probability.  If "assuming this to be the likely outcome strikes me as a kind of paranoia." is meant as a general statement, I agree.

From that "may introduce bias" you then go on to posit that the ice-breaker activity is unethical and determine that you want to confront the TA about this.  Thus, you are seemingly considering the slim possibility of bias to have a much larger impact than seems reasonable to me.

(I have now edited that sentence so that it no longer refers to a likely outcome; instead it notes your focus on that outcome.)

Bias, aside from privacy concerns is one of several concerns I talked about. I can inform you as the OP, that I considered bias as one of the smaller concerns and, like I said, just a possibility.  I hope it helped clarify that your conclusions are incorrect.  I'm surprised how easily unfriendly assumptions are made. One could assume that the information from my question, introduced some bias toward me :)
That's everything I have to say about that.

@Disillusioned "I'm surprised how easily unfriendly assumptions are made." - But it seems to me that the entire basis of your question is your own assumptions about a TA who was just trying to be friendly. The assumption that you would be maligned or punished (or otherwise face "consequences") for simply saying "I'd prefer not to answer" is quite uncharitable.

@Disillusioned Ethics aside: these ice-breaker activities are present in every class and every job, and you will never escape them, period. The overwhelming majority of people have deemed them to be normal practice in society, like bowing or shaking hands. Your feelings are valid, but the practical advice is to understand that you probably need to conform somewhat, unless you're okay with the consequences of people's judgements. I feel your discomfort, but this is fighting an ingrained element of society that has always existed and likely will always exist.

I disagree strongly with your first sentence. I’ve only once experienced personal questions in a work meeting (25 years in IT and several years in retail and food service before that) and I’ve never been asked where I was born except for a security clearance. Birthplace is PII from my point of view and I’m not even a refugee or an orphan or otherwise potentially triggered by thinking about my birthplace. In university classes, it is ubiquitous to share name, major/concentration, and usually "some fun fact" on the first day, but the third category has always been optional IME.

Usually people don't insist on getting every question answered. If you feel uncomfortable answering your origins, just skip the topic and tell more about your hobbies or your pet. If you don't want to share your hobbies, watching TV or listening to music is always an option.
People want to get to know with whom they are working. They are not interested in your personal secrets or inner struggles. Don't get intimidated by such questions, they are not posed in bad faith.

I think this best asks the implicit question which is more like "I feel uncomfortable talking about this, how can I handle it gracefully?"

Is it valid to feel uncomfortable with questions unrelated to the grading of your performance?

Yes, definitely. Note that "Are there legitimate reasons to ask this question?" and "Is it legitimate to feel uncomfortable with being asked this question?" are completely different questions. You are completely entitled to your feelings, even if they include discomfort at legitimate questions.

I fail to see how this information was relevant for completing the seminar.

People tend to find personal interactions aid collaboration. Even if the content of the personal interaction is not relevant, the mere fact of there being personal interaction is therefore relevant.

From my point of view, it may introduce bias, if the TA dislikes some of the things he hears from an attendee.

Yes. And the degree to which personal interactions help varies from person to person, and from moment to moment even for the same person. While an extrovert may find the questions fun, a shy and/or neuroatypical person may find the questions to be a completely unnecessary and sadistic spoon expense. The question of how to balance this issue with the general usefulness of personal interaction is not a simple one. Creating an environment where people don't feel put on the spot should be a consideration, such as making it opt-in, or giving participants various options. In the case of "where they were born, currently live and what they do in their free time", the TA could have phrased it as "Tell me about yourself, such as where you were born, currently live, or do in your free time". That phrasing would make it seem more like suggestions of what to talk about, rather than a checklist that they have to get through.

I wanted to confront the TA with my concerns and not answer the questions, but I feared that it may have impacted the grading of my performance, so I didn't.

There should be a means of providing anonymous feedback; if there isn't, that's even more of a concern than the personal questions themselves. It's perfectly valid to share your concerns and ask the TA to take them into consideration.

I feel it's unethical to, even indirectly, "force" students answer questions that may put them in an uncomfortable position by using your position of power.

It's not exactly forcing them, it's just making them uncomfortable if they don't want to, and the catch-22 about consent is that it's difficult to ask for consent without making someone who doesn't want to give it uncomfortable.

How could I go about dealing with similar situations in the future?

Look for when you might be dealing with an X Y problem. When someone asks you for Y and you're uncomfortable giving Y, consider whether there's some X that is really what they want. Your TA says "I want you to tell me what you do in your spare time" and you hear "I need to say what I do in my spare time". But the TA's ultimate goal isn't to collect dossiers on what the students do in their space time (probably), it's to have personal interactions. Asking what people do is a means, not an end. What they're really saying when they say "I want you to tell me what you do in your spare time" is "I want to have a personal interaction with you". So have a personal interaction with them. Tell them what your favorite subject is. Tell them your pronouns. Tell them about your pets. If you spend several minutes talking about yourself, is the TA going to pipe up at the end and say "Hey, you never told me what you do in your spare time"? Possibly. But quite likely not. If they do, they're showing they're prioritizing sticking to a formula over teaching the actual people they have as students.

Importantly this question is definitely not asking someone to talk about themselves for minutes: you should respond with one sentence. "My name is, I'm from, I like to".

+1, I'd like to emphasize: IMHO it would be important to give the TA feedback. To me, the questions OP cites are unnecessarily on the personal side. In my home culture, "where are you from" is a stock small talk question, and (importantly) one can choose in answering whether one wants to tell about one's continent or country of birth, the Land(state/province) where one grew up, or what quarter of the town one lives or even "I live on campus" or "I live a little bit east of here". If it's a professional training, one may even answer without location and instead say "I come from $subfield".

... In contrast "where were you born?" is a far more personal question.

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I suggest you look at the false dichotomy between extroversion and neuroatypicalty implied in your third paragraph in case that was unintentional.

"Is it valid to feel uncomfortable ...? Yes, definitely ... You are completely entitled to your feelings." If someone asks you the time or asks you what time this train leaves, is it valid to feel uncomfortable, or angry, or overjoyed, or sorrowful? Those would be strange reactions and not very reasonable.

For a shy person or someone from a minority or someone ... yes, these can be disconcerting at first. Eventually, if you work at it (the shy person especially) you can get over it.
But no, you don't need to tell the truth and certainly not all the truth. Nor do you need to be very specific. What do you do? Well, I read a lot. What do you read? Popular fiction and tech stuff. Where are you from? The Middle East (Africa ...). Where do you live now? Ohio (Finland...).
The general answers reveal little and the asker will move on, though it is good to have at least one follow up.
Now that you know this happens, you can construct some non-committal answers.
There is no reason to take offense, though. I ask everyone where they are from, but because I like connections. Generally, connections are good, even for introverts. But they develop over time, not as a result of simple questions like these.
Also, it is important that you reach a point where you feel comfortable interacting with them. Asking questions, especially.

Some questions are off limits, however. Questions about medical issues or about performance in other courses.

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-For you is there no real difference between "where were you born?" and "where are you from?" I give different answers to those questions, if I answer them at all. IMHO birthplace is objective and somewhat personal. Where I’m "from" is more up to me to decide what I think of as "home". I ask because the question says "born" and here you wrote "from". I also understand some people feel prior restraint about discussing their origins, because at least in America there are many racist and nationalist people.

Many comments were moved to chat, but I think it is worth recording that some people think it is OK to tell small lies, and some people think it is not OK and it is easy to think of something to say to these questions that is truthful while still avoiding revealing too much about yourself if you don't want to reveal things.

I’ve been reading about the origins of the human species, lately. So now, when asked “where are you from”, I say “I’m from Africa, same as everyone else”.

First of all, you don't need to ask anyone permission for what you feel. If these questions make you uncomfortable, they make you uncomfortable, and that's valid because it's true.
A few people have given you suggestions as to how to handle this situation: it's a social opening, not an interrogation, so you're allowed to deflect, skip, (gently) lie and otherwise disengage. Learning how to use these techniques will be helpful in general. "Grow a thicker skin" is obviously neither helpful or constructive, but such a strong reaction as you're having can be a symptom of deeper issues, and if you think this is the case, I encourage you to seek some support.
But also, your discomfort is not that unusual. I have done a little bit of training in "audience management" as part of a job in healthcare - a field with perhaps more attention to sensitivity and empathy than academia. Like your TAs, we were encouraged to use "icebreakers", but we were advised to ask "small" questions: not "what are your passions" or "where are you from" (this in particular was highlighted as a rather uncomfortable question for many people), but stuff like "what is your favourite biscuit" or "share a cool fact that you've learnt recently". The aim is to give people a "hook" to introduce themselves, but at low stakes - nobody cares if you say ginger biscuit when in reality you like custard creams better, and you'll probably find it easier to share these tidbits than a significant aspect of your personality, like your hobbies or your origin.

+1 for the low-stake questions. (Personally, I'm rather sensitive to such questions, and the one OP cites are IMHO unnecessarily personal and narrow/closed. However, "where are you from" would be easier for me than the cool fact, since [in my culture] it's a stock small-talk question, so something where stock answers are given AND acceptable level of detail ranges from extremely extrovert/almost exhibitionist all the way to keeping one's privacy ("I'm from north of here", "Oh, I'm from right here" - here being quarter or country...) - the cool fact to be shared would require more thinking)

IMHO there are better questions than about hobbies - but from the stressed answerer's point of view, there's the advantage that the course subject may suggest a safe answer: e.g. answering "I like to read" in a scientific writing course is not revealing anything (@OP: and having a stock answer "I like to do $X" is well worth while).

BTW, if it's about an icebreaker to get the attendees interact among themselves (as opposed to with the instructor) I've found that a topic-related and rather open group work question with (pseudo-)random assignment of groups works well: leave more time and state that it's fine and intended if they go on to get to know each other a bit/do some networking and have some small-talk.

@cbeleitesunhappywithSX yes, you need to read the room - in a group with patients, I wouldn't use the cool fact question (but I would be ok with the biscuit one, or one about pets, nature, or something they like about the town they live in). I agree that it helps to be prepared for the stock questions, no matter how annoying it is to be asked "yes but where are you really from" for the 100th time.

a field with perhaps more attention to sensitivity and empathy than academia - well you must not have been in medical school

@AzorAhai-him- indeed, I said “attention to”, not “success in”… sometimes I suspect all this “patient centred” training we get is just to undo those years of damage.

@Ottie yes, quite probably

It's an invitation to participate in an elementary social interaction. You can either accept that invitation or effectively refuse it by providing a minimalistic response along the lines of "I like reading books and watching movies" or "I like the outdoors" or "I don't really have much free time these days". Realistically, no-one is going to pry for more detail.
Yes, some people find it difficult to imagine that others might not enjoy such interactions. Conversely, some people might find it difficult to imagine that others do benefit from or expect such interaction.
I suggest that what's going on here is that you are (i) misunderstanding a request for engaging an elementary social interaction as an attempt to pry into your privacy, and (ii) vastly overestimating "the consequences" of "saying the way things are". In other words, you are overthinking it. Just provide a polite non-answer and move on.
As an aside which might not apply to your situation, people are sometimes uncomfortable with such questions not because they fear "the consequences" of "saying the way things are" (really, what do you imagine these consequences to be in an online seminar on research skills?), but because they are in some way or another ashamed of "the way things are". For example, they feel that they should have an interesting hobby and that it reflects badly on them if they don't, or that they should lead an active social life and that it reflects badly on them if they don't. I would venture to guess that this is far more common than an actual fear of "consequences". In that case, the best thing to do would be to confront such feelings of shame rather than trying to blame the situation which instigated them.
Anything may make someone uncomfortable. Someone could be self-conscious about their voice and might prefer to stay silent. Someone might not want to share their name. Someone might detest being asked where they are from. Someone might despise being asked anything at all about their childhood. There is no obligation on people to avoid doing things that may make someone uncomfortable. If you have an unusual thing that makes you uncomfortable (such as stating what you do in free time), it's on you to be able to handle such elementary interactions, not on someone else to foresee this. Just because someone might have, say, social phobia does not mean it's some sort of illegitimate power play to expect them to engage in elementary social interaction.
All that said, I do sometimes find it obnoxious when people do this and I find it's better practice to ask a more open-ended question and explicitly indicate that there is no obligation to answer. That is, tell us something about yourself if you like rather than where were you born, where do you live, and what do you do in your free time.

It's just meaningless small talk so you are allowed to interpret things as broadly as possible and ignore some questions as long as you give some answer, any answer to most of them. For example: What do you do in your spare time could be answered with something you like, even if you don't have time to do it, even if it's not an activity. For example, "I like cats/dogs/cars/animals/food". You could even just ignore some questions and just say something else about yourself instead. No one is going to call you on it because no one actually cares. It's not an interview.

I think most of these answers are failing to make an important distinction.
The question "What do you do in your free time" (or variations of "Tell me about yourself" or "What's a fun fact about you") etc. can be answered with graceful evasion. Nobody really cares, it's just a chance to make a connection with people with similar interests. If OP is concerned, it would be wise to have a harmless stock answer prepared. (Though there's always the risk of exposure as a result of enthusiastic follow-up questions, however well-intentioned.)
On the other hand, the question "where are you from" or "where were you born" can be colossally loaded--so much so that it isn't even legal to ask it in US job interviews. Members of groups who are frequently discriminated against get asked variations of this all the time--and even if the TA doesn't mean it this way, that can potentially remind them of every time they said "Cleveland" and then had the follow-up "No, but where are you really from?" Apart from that--I'm writing this in October 2022; can the other answerers really tell me that saying "I was born in Russia" is guaranteed not to lead the TA and fellow classmates to draw prejudicial conclusions? I think not.
Whatever the TA's intent, asking questions that can potentially cause disproportionate discomfort to members of minority groups is neither appropriate nor an effective means of building camaraderie.

As I said above, I think the "say your hobbies" question is more neutral and manageable, and thus more permissible. But I think other answers have underestimated the risks posed to those who give unconventional responses. I can point to two actual situations where people were asked these questions in job interviews and were passed over, in part as a result of the response.
In one case, the interviewee answered a "what are your hobbies" question by saying they were interested in locomotive engineering. The interviewer asked a follow-on question: "Oh, what interests you about that?" The interviewee didn't know what to say and responded "It's just a personal interest." Interviewer pressed further but interviewee couldn't come up with anything else and just repeated "Oh it's a personal interest"--shy, neuroatypical, polite fiction, who knows why? But the interviewer talked about how they "obviously wouldn't be able to work with that weirdo" and shared it as a "funny story" for a long time afterward.
In another instance, the interviewer noted that the interviewee had a two-hour-long commute, and asked what he did to pass the time. He said he liked to "just sit and think about things," which the interviewers thought made the candidate seem sufficiently unrelatable that it was a factor in making them choose someone else.
Obviously that's an interview situation and not a seminar icebreaker, but I think other answers to the question have been a bit too dismissive, even of OP's concern over admitting to an unusual hobby. It's probably a better practice to favor more open-ended questions (or ones more specifically focused on trivia) and to give participants advance notice that they'll be asked to share something, in case they need to make something up.

It should be noted however, that this was not an interview so the risk involved is much lower and the chances that no one cares what the answers are, if they are even listening to begin with, is much, much higher.

I'm open to being convinced to the contrary, but I don't think it's actually true that it's illegal to ask place-of-birth in job interviews (in the US or elsewhere).  I've heard this assertion made but never seen it backed up by legal analysis.  My understanding is that it is typically unlawful to discriminate in employment on the basis of place-of-birth, and that asking about place-of-birth in an interview could potentially provide some evidence of discrimination; I am not aware of it being illegal in and of itself.

More on hobbies: not all of them are socially acceptable to an equal measure. Using all the free time to play video games may be completely fine in most places and to most people, but some of my profs were seeing red whenever they heard it. And this is not the only undesirable outcome possible: one would not necessarily be comfortable with sharing certain hobbies, either. I certainly felt uncomfortable when people were too prying about my poems back in a day. Sometimes you just don't want emotional connection of any kind, even if it happens to be unsolicited praise.

On place-of-birth, it's connected to national origin, a protected class in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-1964). The text of the law does not specifically forbid asking it, but the EEOC (the enforcement body created by the same law) considers asking about it to be presumptive evidence of discrimination unless the employer can show business necessity (see e.g. https://labor.idaho.gov/dnn/Portals/0/Publications/GuidetoLawful.pdf bottom of p6).

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the TA should not have asked these questions. It's too personal, not to mention risky, if answered. Tiercelet's answer explains why the first two are not harmless. This one explains why the third question is also a dangerous one to ask.
People do things in their free time that not everyone else approve of. This does not mean "illegal". There are plenty of legal things that others can find uncomfortable. Examples:

Maybe the student is politically active for a cause they passionately believe in, but the majority are against it. For example, maybe they think everyone should stop eating meat because it's animal cruelty.
Maybe the student believes in some evangelical religion and spends their free time spreading it.
Maybe the student writes erotica for leisure, perhaps publish the work under some pen name. Maybe the student even works as an escort/stripper. Imagine the consequences if the student actually says this, with the implicit offer of their services to the class. One could easily get complaints to the university.

Some answers above suggest the student might be able to give some stock response instead. The problem with this is that it's lying. Even if one is willing to bend personal moral codes to avoid a scene in class, all religions are likely to prohibit lying. Once religion gets involved then all bets are off.
The TA should not have asked these questions. Given that they already did, then perhaps the best the student can do is to say they won't answer in public but can tell the TA in private after class if they really want to know. This should warn the TA that they are treading on thin ice. If the TA is perceptive, they might swap to less controversial questions as a result.
I once witnessed a similar conversation where someone asked what they must have thought was a perfectly innocent question. The second person said "are you sure you want to know?". The first person said yes, then after getting the answer, they realize that they didn't actually want to know. C'est la vie. You live and learn.

I find it hard to believe that someone, whose main hobby was E.g. writing erotic fiction or being involved in radical politics, wouldn’t be able to say something mundanely trivial which isn’t a lie, like ‘I like eating nice food’ or ‘spending time with friends’ or even just ‘relaxing on a weekend’.

@user438383 that's lying by omission, which is still lying.

I agree with @user438383. If the question was "Tell me everything you do in your spare time," then just saying "I like eating nice food" would be a lie. But if the question was "Tell me something you do in your spare time," or "What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?", then it would not.

@Oliver882 the wording as given by the OP is "what [do you do] in [your] free time", which implicitly asks for what you do the most.

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I have bad GRE scores because of a disability, but cannot afford the cost to prove that I need accommodations for the test. What can I do?
I am applying for a PhD in Sociology. My schools "require" scores of about 300ish and I scored 270. My reason for the poor score is that ETS requires medical tests I cannot afford (more than half my monthly income) to be given accommodations, so I was unable to  use any accommodations. ETS was also very careful to say this to me over the phone, so I do not have any records of it. I am unsure of the best way to explain this.  Without them, I don't see myself testing better.
I could hardly afford the test with a waiver to reduce the cost, so I am not sure I could pay for the test again. I am also obtaining my master’s degree and studying for the test has severely impacted my life. I know that is a "cost" of being in graduate school and this is a time balance issue that I should not be having. For the schools that have a "can you explain bad test scores" section, I have written out that I was unable to use my accommodations, which had a serious effect on my score.
If I have strong LORs, ten years of working experience, almost three years of research experience, am involved in multiple honor societies, have presented at multiple conferences, and am working on publishing something do I still have a chance to get in? I know that I have the potential to be a strong graduate student, but I am worried with such low scores that my applications will be tossed away.
Has anyone had a similar experience or have any advice?

@MikaylaMarker I edited to clarify based on yours and GoodDeeds' comments. Hopefully I got it all right.

Can i assume from your mention of medical tests costing money you are applying in the united states?

I think you have a few steps to take-

prioritize schools without a GRE requirement
ask your advisors/mentors/letter writers to reach out to schools directly to make sure “your application gets a full look” despite the low scores
work with others to come up with a short one sentence explanation of why your test score doesn’t reflect your aptitude (there may be a place for “other comments” where you can include this)

At the same time, I always advise students who are looking at a PhD to get a full sense of the opportunities available to you with a masters degree and your current experience. This advice goes double for those who are having trouble with the “gate keeping” around admissions to PhD programs. It may be that you do not need a PhD to pursue your goals. Plus, the academic market for Sociology is quite dismal (you probably would need to be in a top 20 program to get an academic job), so you should also be exploring research jobs outside of academia, which may not require a PhD.

I think your three points are good advice. I think the last paragraph is very poor advice. I was once told that I had the potential to succeed in a community college, but probably not higher. My math doctorate proved them wrong (and idiotic).

Let me revise- this is advice for anyone considering a PhD and frustrated by the gate-keeping process.

The answers by @Buffy and @Dawn here are very good, but I wanted to add some examples to further the point that GREs are just a minor part of admissions, and an even smaller part of your chances of succeeding.
A good friend and college roommate got a GRE score so low that a university told him that while he had been admitted, they did not want to publish that they had admitted a student with such a score. So they asked him to retake the test during his first year as a grad student, and they'd backdate the test on their report. He did, and he's now a tenured professor at an R1. I should note that by the time he decided to do the PhD, he was already recognized as an expert in the field, so there was no risk from the university's side.
Other friends have dramatically improved their scores with a little studying and preparation for the exam. These are people who are genuinely smart, competent, and hard working, but are not used to US-style standardized testing. I think Americans underestimate how much the GRE and other standardized testing is a test of cultural competence. BTW, after improving their scores, they completed their PhDs and are now tenure-track or tenured.
Like others have said, your best option is to broaden your search. However, I think it's a tactical mistake to disregard the possibility that with a modest but consistent effort, you could substantially improve your score.
You didn't mention which type of accommodations you are requesting, but be aware that the issue of requesting accommodations due to learning disabilities has become a minefield. Abuse is rampant. A colleague told me that in her daughter's classroom all but 2 out of 30 students get accommodations during exams. Universities and institutions have pushed back by requiring more and more evidence, in effect just raising the cost for students with legitimate disabilities, while not stopping any rich kid from just spending more money on the right doctors. Since you have stated that you cannot afford the tests anyway, with even more emphasis I suggest that you retake the test so that your score is just above the threshold then leverage your other skills to gain admissions.

I honestly think you will be fine if you cast a broad net for doctoral programs. This would be especially true in the US, I think, where GRE is at most a small consideration among a host of others, with letters being very important. Your experience and letters will carry you pretty far and a modest deficit under your circumstances can easily be overlooked.
But don't limit your search to a narrow range of institutions, especially a narrow range of top schools. Your letter writers can help you explain the somewhat low GRE and if they project your success in doctoral study you should be OK.

I think this is fine advice, but the Op should also be advised that without a top 20 placement, they will be most likely to be in industry after the PhD.

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Paper got rejected without feedback
I had submitted a research paper to an IEEE conference recently. It's a new conference; the first occurrence of this conference. I submitted it, and did not receive a response from them even until a day after the day they said we'll receive our acceptance notification. So I called up the college that was organising the conference, and they said that my paper was not accepted, but I never received any results of the peer review process for the paper.
Before this paper, I had submitted one paper to an IEEE conference which was the 4th occurrence of that conference. My paper had two accepts, one reject, and finally the paper was rejected. But before that, I had received the comments of the peer reviewers. I know why that was rejected, made changes accordingly before submitting it along with some more results of my research to the 'first conference' I was talking about.
So my question is: Is it common to not receive the results of peer review (two of them according to their website), if the paper is rejected? Does it mean that my paper was desk-rejected due to something like incorrect formatting, or could it be because it's the first time they are organizing the conference so things are hectic for them?
One possible reason could be that I had first written the paper using LaTeX. Then I saw their website and realised that they required both a PDF and a Word file, so I copy-pasted everything from the Latex file to the Word file. As a result, a diagram went to the next page in Word and the text written after that diagram in the LaTeX file went to the previous page in the Word file. So there were slight differences in the formatting of the Word and PDF files, but does that reason make a paper incapable of even going to peer review?
For more context, I am a student pursuing B.E. in Computer Science and this paper was regarding my final year project.
PS: I am asking this just to get an idea whether it's a shortcoming on my part, so that I can correct it before submitting it the next time. My question here is about why I didn't receive the comments of the reviewers and not why the paper was rejected.
Apologies if these are too many questions, I would always be ready to split it or provide more information if required.

The fact that a conference is IEEE means nothing these days, as giving their name to conferences is a business model for IEEE, and conferences with that label greatly differ in quality. You should not pick a conference only for being IEEE.

Due to the five-tag limit, I removed [tag:publications] to add [tag:computer-science] which is important context for conference questions, as conferences are different in CS compared to much of the rest of academia [I never get feedback on conference submissions.

@AzorAhai-him- You don't get feedback on CS conference submissions? I know that for physics, and possibly biology, but CS conference usually give reviews, so it sounds strange. Maybe it's subfield-specific.

As a rule of thumb, a CS conference that requires Word submissions is not high quality.

@CaptainEmacs No, I don't submit to CS conferences.

@AzorAhai-him- Ah, ok, then I understand your response.

Frankly, acceptance notifications being late and past the announced response date is nowadays common, no reason to lose sleep on that.
As for the referee response (or the lack of it), write to the chairs and ask if there is any feedback as to the reasons of the rejection.
If it were desk-rejected (i.e. rejected right away because of formatting or other reasons that are visible before detailed review), I would have expected a rejection right away, not after the notification deadline. Anyway, if they cannot give you reasons, you know one conference you won't submit your papers to in the future.
However, since you are a Final Year student, you will have a project supervisor. That's the first port of call for questions like these. I hope you had asked them to give feedback on your paper before you submitted. As an inexperienced student, you are likely to capture 95% of problems at that stage (rather than after submission, at refereeing stage).
There are students with excellent ideas, but who haven't learnt to write up yet. Improving the writeup can turn a desk-rejected paper into a best paper award candidate (I speak from experience).
Use that resource.

In addition to the quality and acceptability of a conference paper is that a conference has a maximum number of slots in which to allot papers. This is due to cost and venue restrictions as well as time.
It may be that your paper passed muster, but in the final analysis, was judged somewhat below or less relevant than other papers that filled the slots. This would be a last minute decision on the part of the conference organization, so that even they didn't know you would be rejected until the end of the process.
Combine that with the overhead of contacting people and it could just be a delay in your receiving feedback. I agree with Captain Emacs that this is unlikely to be a summary or desk reject or you would have heard much earlier.

If that's the case, the organizers are really unprofessional. Copy and paste 1 sentence: "While your paper reviewed favorably, we had 987 submissions for 123 presentation slots, and unfortunately we are forced to reject your paper due to this reason."

Just another possible explanation:
If this is the first instance of a conference, chances are that the people organizing it might not be very experienced in conference organizing. While generally desk rejections should be communicated straight away, maybe the inexperience led to ALL acceptance/rejection communications being sent out at the same time. And being one day late with sending out notifications is actually not that uncommon, as depending on the number of abstracts received, deadlines often get extended last minute or reviewing of abstracts and subsequent decisions take longer than expected. People are not perfect.

OP states that it's the 4th occurrence, which, in my world would still make it a conference in its infancy but not the first.

@BryanKrause The one that was the 4th was the one they did get feedback from. The one they did not was a 1st.

@TobiasKildetoft Doh. Reading comprehension fail. Thank you.


text:
How to prove that papers were presented when conference programs are not in English?
In preparing my application to PhD programs I have the following question:
I have presented papers in two distinct large-scale local conferences. However, I am not sure how to list these on my CV in a verifiable way, since the conferences' websites and programs are not in English.
For journal papers I can simply provide the corresponding links, while for conference papers I have not come up with something helpful.
The difficulty thus lies in: How to convince the reader of my vita that these papers are conference papers?

That they aren't in English should be largely irrelevant. If in a Western script, they are still readable. If in a non-Western script, some of us can still read them. And there's always Google Translate.

Just thought about something: One of the conference I attended has the program post embedded in their website. So how may it be translated?

Did you try the url in google translate and see what happens?

Not everything on your CV needs to be verifiable via an Internet link.
I have many items on my CV that would require some interaction with a human to verify: degrees I've earned, summer research students I've mentored, seminar talks I've given, classes I've taught, etc.
As long as you can, on demand, provide contact information for someone who can confirm your presentation (e.g. conference organizer), I don't see why this is a concern.
If you want to provide a link to the non-English conference program, go ahead; someone who is sufficiently motivated can surely get it translated.
(I'm sure this goes without saying, but since I've seen a shocking number of CVs that say "Presented at Conference X" without further information I'll say it anyways: you must include the full details of each presentation, including its title, co-authors if there were any, full name of conference, date, and city.)

Co-authors might be redundant. I don't list them for my conference talks in my CV as, in my field, all conference talks are accompanied by a paper, so my co-authors are listed in that part of my CV.

Yeah, that part seems to be highly field-dependent, and even depends on the conference: sometimes they strictly list only the speaker (mostly on very small meetings).

This is a non-issue. Apart from anything else, almost none of the conference talks I've ever given is verifiable by following an internet link. The conference programmes invariably give the full author list of each paper and I don't recall any that has indicated which of them gave the talk.

"I don't recall any that has indicated which of them gave the talk." That sentence is probably field dependent. As an example, see the full program of the upcoming EHPRG meeting. In the PDF document the presenting author's name is underlined.

@WillieWong Yes, I'm obviously talking about the conferences I've presented at. But my point is that there are plenty enough cases where you can't verify who gave the talk by looking on the web, so the asker shouldn't worry about their particular case in which you can't verify who gave the conference talk by looking on the web.

I think the OP is not so much worried about who gave the talk, but that a talk was given. It would be a bit hard for me to navigate a conference website in, say, Portuguese or Hindi, to find even a list of the talks presented. And even after that there is not guarantee that I can parse the list to see if the talk described by the OP is in the list. I think that is the main concern.

Conversely, in mathematics, conference programs often list only the speaker and not any coauthors who may have been involved in the work.  (However, it is usual to acknowledge coauthors in the abstract, if an abstract is printed.)  Note that in math, conference talks are less formal, are not considered to represent "publications," and may not correspond directly to published papers.

@WillieWong At least in my field, it's a rare department that doesn't include at least one professor who can read Hindi.  And Google can translate Portuguese well enough.

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Is it bad to ask the editor about the status of a submission on seeing that referees' reports were submitted a week ago?
This question is about inquiring regarding paper status.
I had submitted a paper, and recently I just discovered that the manuscript tracking system shows that the editorial committee has received the referee's report. But, this status has remained for over a week and I still have not heard from the editor handling my paper.
Should I then email the editor as a reminder? Would this act instead be taken as urging?

Related (but not a duplicate, since it's not about the etiquette of contacting editor): How long does it typically take for editor's final decision after reviews are completed?

Once reviewers reports have been returned, the editor has to assess the reviews in light of the paper and provide the author with indications on how to proceed. Exactly how this come through will differ between fields and editors. The main point, however, is that a certain amount of work is usually needed to process the reviews before passing the manuscript with comments back to the author. Since editors also handle, sometimes, quite large volumes of papers in parallel, your manuscript will be placed in a queue and the editor will likely take each manuscript in order. In addition, many, if not most, editors do their editing in parallel to ordinary faculty jobs which may at times further limit their available time. It is thus reasonable that this process may take several weeks. In "my" journal we as editors have three weeks for this process before being reminded by the electronic submission system that the manuscript is "due". We often make this deadline, but not always depending n workload.
So, one week is definitely too short a time to expect a response. Three weeks seems to be reasonable in my field but I would maybe allow even additional time to pass. It is probably good to talk to your peers who may have experience with the particular journal and also your field to get feedback on what is considered reasonable.
Added to clarify a comment: it is never "bad" to contact anyone, but it is only fair to allow a a "reasonable" (in the sense of the field and specific journal) amount of time to pass since the early contact will not likely yield anything productive. What, on the other hand, is bad is rather the attitude with which some contacts are made. Insights into appropriate time frames will help to keep communications as fruitful as possible.

@ff524 I think this is a excellent answer (+1 for that). Anyone reading this would understand not to contact the editor (now) and that is bad to do so (now). After an unreasonably long period, what the OP should do is a different question all together.

A week is not a long time for an editor to take a decision. He might need to go through the paper in more detail than previously, in order to check on the reviewers' criticism. It might even be that the reviewers have diverging opinions or brought up some points that need further clarification, so that the editor needs to seek further advice.
If the overall time since the paper has been submitted is still reasonable, I wouldn't inquire at all for the moment. If the paper has also been under review for a long time already, it may be reasonable to wait for another week or two and then inquire about the status of the submission.
An inquiry might be perceived as urging by the editor if he has the feeling that everything is in time with the paper. If the paper has been in review relatively long and you make a general inquiry, it shouldn't leave any bad feelings.
In professionally managed journals, the professional editorial staff would take care of such inquiries without involving the scientific editor at all, so you don't need to really worry in these cases. Just make sure to address the contact point where you got the submission receipt from, and not the editor from the general journal information page.

No, there is absolutely no need to send a reminder after one week. The editor might be busy or on vacation or whatever or, maybe, he is deciding that he needs further reviews to decide.

When thinking about contacting an editor you need to consider the costs and benefits. In all but the most extreme circumstances (where the editor has completely lost track of your submission), the the editor is not going to be happy about a request for a status update. Responding to status update requests are in general not a huge deal, but they essentially are saying "you are behind and my time is more important than yours". In terms of the benefit, a few more days delay until publication usually has little cost (accept the anxiety knowing a decision is coming). In rare circumstances, a few days can matter a lot. For example, a resubmission where there is a high likelihood that it will be accepted and therefore "in press" and you have a grant deadline (or job application) in the next few days, would have a potentially large payoff. Similarly, a submission that has been stuck in the same state for too long (whatever that means), and there is real worry that the manuscript has gotten lost. It is not unheard of for electronic systems to have bugs or editors to leave or get sick. I would say a week in the final decision stage does not qualify as anywhere near "too long".

Echoing other responses, one week is really not all that much time for a paper to be sitting on an editor's desk, and it's not worth sending a query.
The only exception to this is if the paper is expressly on a fast-track publication schedule or some sort of deadline that might matter to the journal is rapidly approaching (for example, the publication of an article on the same day the results are presented at a major conference).

The editor has to decipher what the reviewers mean.  Few publications use a check-list system, which the most comprehensive and clearest way to handle reviews, so the editor has to figure out whether the reviewers are saying "publish", "modify and resubmit" or "reject completely - unsalavageable".
If you don't hear anything in another week then email the editor saying that you apologise for the intrusion but you've been having problems with your email system and were wondering if an email to you has gone missing.

Ah, much appreciated. Strategic! :)

I think even 2 weeks is being pushy for most systems that consider ~3-4 weeks to be typical.  Unless there is something explicitly indicating a short time frame, be patient.

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text:
Should one avoid erudite vocabulary in statement of purpose?
I am not a psychology major.
I came across this paper
that shows that using erudite vocabulary will not do one good.
What makes me want to ask here is a case study in the paper. Long story short, a bunch of admission officers, unaware of being tested, reviewed the application documents such as statements of purpose and were asked to rate them. It turned out that those documents using big, learned words instead got somewhat lower rating than those using simple, direct words.
Though this research seems convincing, my concern is: Is this phenomenon general enough to suggest one should avoid using erudite vocabulary if one does not use the erudite words in an affected way?
If you are experienced admission reviewers, would you please throw some light or insights on this issue?

I am a native English speaker with a 98th percentile verbal GRE score, and I had to look up the meaning of "erudite." If that's the kind of vocabulary you're thinking of using, I definitely vote "avoid."

@ff524: Ah I see. As a non-native English speaker, I do not really know what is the boundary of understanding :) I recalled that one time I occasionally used the word "obviate", and the person I talked to, who is an educated native English speaker, said she had to look up a dictionary for the meaning. However, there are lots of short words, which may be natural for you, unknown to me.

@ff524: Moreover, I have a native English speaker friend who told me that using those words considered erudite may help me considered trying to be cool. I am innocent indeed :). I told him, since English is not my first language, and since my learning of English is almost in academic context, so naturally I think, my English expression gets more and more academic; or one would say, unnatural or affected. But trying to be cool is never my motivation...

I see :) maybe it would help to watch lots of English-language unscripted TV? (only half kidding!)

@ff524: Since we're throwing impressions around -- i.e., don't take anything too seriously -- I am a bit surprised by your reaction.  I don't find "erudite" especially obscure or ostentatious.  In fact I had a quite different reaction: in my opinion, the phrase "erudite word" is not proper usage.  "Erudite" means "Having or showing knowledge that is gained by studying :  possessing or displaying erudition".  Thus it applies to people, not to words.  I think that is the sort of thing that the OP is worried about: if you use big words even slightly improperly, it creates a bad impression.

@Pete I don't know, Princeton Review seems to think erudite vocabulary is correct

"Erudite vocabulary" is at least somewhat better usage: a vocabulary is the set of words possessed by a person.  A person who possesses a large vocabulary therefore shows erudition.  (Moreover, if I'm being totally honest, I don't find Princeton Review to be the height of erudition: "word smart genius" is certainly not an eloquently turned phrase.)  It's still not great: having a large vocabulary shows erudition; the vocabulary is not itself erudite.

@Pete I don't see why one's words can't indicate one's erudition, in the same sense that one's vocabulary or one's work can ("an erudite work" also seems like a common usage, per Google search volume). Google book search yields some hits for "erudite word", it does seem to be used in formal writing.

@ff524: Pertinent advice, thanks very much. I think I am to take time to watch movie so as to gain more feelings about how native English really runs :)

One's choice of words can indicate erudition.  That doesn't make the word erudite: in the phrase "erudite word", there is not a person anywhere in sight.  A "work" can show learning and knowledge (on the part of the person who created it); a word cannot.  Anyway, as with many matters of English usage, the ultimate test is whether erudite people actually use the word this way: can you find "erudite word" being used in an academic context?

@PeteL.Clark: Thank you. I just wanted to avoid constantly using "vocabulary". But, clearly "words" is a poor choice as an alternative for "vocabulary".

@Pete Yes, it does seem to be used in an academic context

@ff524: Okay, the phrase is occasionally used in formal writing.  That doesn't make it great, of course.  In fact I will end the discussion by noting that Jose Saramago (a really great writer whom I myself admire) says in his memoirs "given that it was such an 'erudite' word": note the quotation marks around erudite!  He is calling attention to the slight fishiness of the usage.

@Pete well, he also used that phrase in this lecture; I don't see any indication that he used air quotes during that talk. I'm concluding that it's a perfectly acceptable usage in practice :)

Your google skills are most impressive.  I have to concede that a fair number of people use this word in a way that I think is slightly wrong.  Oh well: is the world still turning?

Update: our sister site has a great discussion of the word "erudite" that I totally endorse: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/168099/can-erudite-be-used-to-describe-things-other-than-humans.  The answer to the title question is "yes", but such usage is metonymic.  As they say, it's acceptable to describe a school as erudite because clearly what is intended is the people in the school.  Similarly for a work or a lecture: the true referent is the creater.  But now try this out on a "word": is the metonymy meant to extend to all those who know the word?  That's a big stretch.

On a different note, what is the significance of the first line of the post "I am not a psychology major"?

@New_new_newbie: I tried not to distract the readers. For, if without the first sentence then readers may ... You know? :) This is just some lesson I have learned. You do not have to be distracted by that~

Another point: in many fields there are significant numbers of non-native English speakers, which means that language should be simple and direct in order to maximize effective communication with the community. In one paper I was writing, we took out the word "ephemeral" after my coauthor gave a talk and some Russian audience members didn't know what it meant.

Erudition and eloquence are useful tools for academics to possess.
However, excessively erudite writing can become opaque. That's not what you want to achieve in scholarly writing. Scholarly writing should be lucid, informative, and as direct as possible. Thus, using "five-dollar" vocabulary when "fifty-cent" words will do probably distracts from your writing overall. On the other hand, if that five-dollar word is exactly the word you need in a given situation, don't be afraid to use it. It's better, in my opinion, to moderately challenge the reader in a concisely written text than to be long-winded.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the
  difference between lightning and a lightning bug. - Mark Twain

What You Shouldn't Do
As I explain below, the article does a good job of illustrating what you should not do: do not, under any circumstances, write out a statement of purpose and then have a computer blindly replace words with longer synonyms taken from the Microsoft Word Thesaurus. A word is not better merely because it is longer - but sometimes a longer word is the better word. Your goal is to communicate, and you should seek to impress with your message and communication skill - not your ability to find really long words and use them poorly.
Problems With Interpreting the Research Article
First of all, I must say that I love the title of the article you linked: "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective
of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly". From a psychological/cognitive perspective, however, it is not sufficient - or even suitable - to use to draw a conclusion on how one might wish to write a statement of purpose.
An excerpt from Experiment 1 I think will help to understand this. Which of these following sentences is best?
1) I desire to go to Graduate School so that I can learn to recognize literature satisfactorily.
2) I want to go to Graduate School so that I can learn to recognize literature well.
3) I want to go to Graduate School so that I can learn to know literature well.
Here's the problem: these sentences, while similar, do not convey the same precise meaning and attitude!
In the first case, the sentence gives the impression that a person wants to "recognize" literature "satisfactorily". This sounds like a person aspires to be able to read something and say, "Ah, this is definitely a kind of literature."
Moreover, they want to be satisfactory at this skill? If a person wrote a letter of reference for you that read, "This student's skills in English Literature were satisfactory" you'd be damned by faint praise! Here, satisfactory sounds an awful lot like "average" or "met minimum expectations".
This is all for an essay to try to get into Stanford - by any measure a competitive school. You don't need to go to Stanford to be satisfactory at a minor skill. Next applicant!
The next sentence is a little better, as a person wants to be able to do something "well". This is a conservative, but still potentially ambitious, way to say that you want to be actually good at something - superior to the average. "Well" and "satisfactory" may be synonyms (and thus how the word was chosen), but they don't have the same precise meanings or connotations in every context.
The final example sentence says that they want to "know literature well." Knowledge is a higher goal than mere recognition. Compare the phrases "I recognize her" with "I know her" and you get the idea - similar meaning, but not at all the same.
The funny thing is, sentence 1 is marked as "highly complex", 2 is "medium-complexity", and 3 is "original" because word length was used as a proxy for complexity. The originals tended to be marked higher than their "more complex" counterparts, but in every case included in the appendix I found the originals were superior to their algorithmically-derived versions.
At least in Experiment 1, the research shows that replacing words blindly with their longer synonyms results in a poorer quality product than that produced by an intelligent human writing a statement of purpose to try to gain admittance to a competitive University.
Before I go on, I wish to point out that this article is good research and interesting, and helps to build the field, and I do not criticize the authors for trying something and reporting their findings; these findings are a step on the road to greater understanding. But this paper alone is not suitable for drawing conclusions.
How You Should Actually Write
In most fields the goal is actual, genuine communication. Most professors and admittance personnel aren't looking to recruit low-quality bullshitters - they surely think they work with enough of such people as it is! So you need to decide what you are: a brilliant bullshitter with an extraordinarily artful grasp of the language and rhetoric, or a genuine communicator. There is a demand for both sets of people (in some fields more than others -cough-), but you need to decide: which extreme are you closer to fitting?
If you choose to showcase your genuine communication skill and interests in your statement of purpose, write it out from the heart first, and then you can go in and agonize a bit more on word choice. Some things will inevitably need to be made simpler, while sometimes a few big-money words will suit just perfectly.
What always dominates an appraisal of writing is the appropriate words. If I say "I'm going to peruse your missive and aggrandize some terminal verbiage" ... those are big words, but they are also supercilious, awkward, and downright poor choices. It would convey the meaning that I am trying to compensate for a lack of actual intelligence and understanding by trying to baffle you with more obscure parts of the lexicon. [Great, now I can't stop doing it...] Or I'm trying to be funny. Or I'm a bit of an ass... thanks in part to the fundamental attribution error, such inappropriate word choices can doom an application.
Get Advice and Feedback
Statistically, only 1 out of 10 people are in the top 10% of ability in written communication skills. Even for those in the top 10, advice and feedback from others on their actual written work is invaluable and there is no perfect substitute. This applies equally to native and non-native speakers - don't stumble in the dark when you can just turn the light on!
Asking someone to review specific word-choice and phrasing is great, and some people have greater editing skills than others so you'll likely need more than one or two pairs of eyes. A good rule of thumb is if someone is willing to spend the time to write a letter of recommendation for you, they are probably willing to spend a little time going over a letter of purpose with you. After all, they wouldn't want their own words to fall on deaf ears, would they?
Career centers, student-employment departments, English tutors/clubs/Professors, and college application workshops are all potentially great sources of help and review, and if you can bring a written draft of your statement with you then the time might prove extremely productive.
As a parting word of advice, I find that busy people who only spend a few minutes with your writing can be very good sources of help on matters like this, because if they can't understand something or don't like the wording in such a quick read the people who actually read your application probably won't either!

Thank you so much for your detailed answer. :) You gave a comprehensive remark on the s.o.p. stuff. But I regret to have to say that the answer does not scratch where it itches. Incidentally, I am not the kids that you think and that try to impress others by big words. I think you should see this point if you browsed all those comments.

@Comeseeconquer My apologies if I conveyed that I thought you were - indeed, I figured you weren't at all! I just wished to convey that trying to impress others with big words won't, in and of itself, suffice - but that big words alone are not a problem. An excellent use of idiom, by the way, and I hope it will be of some help even if it didn't precisely hit the spot.

Much appreciated. The answer is helpful in any sense.

Your question reminds me of the days when I was a young schoolkid and had barely started composing articles, essays etc. I had a habit of picking up the dictionary and learning a new word every day, writing it down somewhere, and (embarrassingly) also revising my notes every weekend or so. Invariably, it got to a stage where these fancy words started entering the articles and I started getting appreciated for it. Since I wasn't the only one in my class doing it, soon it got to a competition of sorts - who can use more fancy language and impress the teacher and ''awe'' the (misguided) audience. In the process, we got to a stage where we were bending sentences to accommodate our sweat-and-blood, or worse still, writing sentences according to the new word. I'm sure this isn't too uncommon.
But now we look back at this and think that we were stupid (of-course we were schoolkids). Why would anybody do that? The purpose of having a good vocabulary is to have at your disposal the most-appropriate word for the intended purpose. And nothing more.
So, coming back to your question, the purpose of a statement-of-purpose is to convey certain information to the people on the other side of the table. They want you to convey this information using minimum clutter, and be as to-the-point as possible. Use the most appropriate words for the intended purpose - think over it and take your time in composing the SoP. It is extremely unlikely that any sensible person sitting on the other side would be so impressed on reading exotic, but inappropriate-as-per-the-context, words in the SoP that he will count that as an advantage over the others. However, it is more likely that if he will have the same impression of you as you get by reading my first paragraph. I don't think that's an advantage at all.
Hope that helps :)

I appreciate your sharing experiences and answer, thank you very much. However: 1) As a non-native English speaker, I don't even have the sense of "fancy". My use of those words that are considered fancy or whatsoever by native speakers is simply because I DON'T KNOW THOSE WORDS THAT ARE CONSIDERED NATURAL OR NOT AFFECTED TO NATIVE SPEAKERS.  2) I do not know the impression that my writing would give to its readers. 3) Therefore, your answer may not be applicable for me, it is more applicable for undergraduate native English speakers...

@Comeseeconquer - So, does my post above give you the impression that I AM a native English speaker? Nativity isn't important. Exposure is. :)

Well, I would say that nativity is unessential here; for your argument is based upon the ability to distinguish the connotation of words. Though it is not necessary that having such ability implies being a native English speaker, it is more probable. This is why I implicitly assumed nativity. :) Thank you for your time!

@Comeseeconquer - Right. But since you say that you don't get the meaning of ''fancy words'', I'll give you an example. (I was in the middle of composing it when you posted, so why delete?) A  ''non-native'' speaker may think that win and conquer are synonymous. However, as you probably know, with the second word, there is an undertone of ruthlessness, while the former may also be softer (as in win someone over). So, if somewhere the right word is ''win'' and if I use ''conquer'', perhaps because it looks more difficult, I will end up spoiling the intended meaning. (contd.)

(contd.) That's what I'm advising you to avoid. Of course, that was a very primitive example (which immediately struck me on reading your username). I mean in a more generalized sense. :)

@Comeseeconquer Do you know anyone that is a native English speaker that could read your Statement of Purpose  to help you pick up these unnecessary "fancy words"? I am a native English speaker that works with a non-native English speaker, and I often help her with her writing. She tends to use phrases that don't sound quite right in English, or aren't quite right in the context she is using them, rather than using "fancy words" but it is a similar thing.

@emmalgale: Thanks very much :) A pertinent advice. I will try to find.

Two things are important here:  1) having control of vocabulary, however plain-spoken or erudite it is, and 2) writing in such a way that your meaning is clear and your statement effective.
If you have control of your vocabulary, you will not use "erudite vocabulary" in an affected way.  If you understand the connotations and denotations and idiomatic uses of a word, you will use it correctly.  Don't use a word because it sounds impressive; use it because you know it's the right word in the right place.  If you have questions about vocabulary in your statement, run it by your academic advisor or a faculty member you work well with.
More important:  Make your writing as powerful as it can be.  Whatever vocabulary you use, choose strong subjects and active verbs.  Seems elementary, but it's essential.  Examples:

One reason I would be a good fit for your program is my background in biophysics.
My background in biophysics makes me an excellent fit for your program.

I must offer a correction to the previous poster's quote from Mark Twain -- the difference between that quote and this is like the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning:

The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

To quote NN Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes:

An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or
  consultant, the opposite.


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For writing samples, is it necessary to provide an English translation of a conference paper written and presented in my native language?
I have a paper, written in my native language, presented in a conference. If I want to use it as a writing sample in the applications to phd programs in the US, should I provide an English translation of that paper?


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Does ORCID matter for a person who would like to work in academia?
I just noticed the following words from arXiv:
"You are encouraged to associate your ORCID with your arXiv account. ORCID iDs are standard, persistent identifiers for research authors. ORCID iDs will gradually supersede the role of the arXiv author identifier."
I thus wonder if a person's profile in ORCID is really that important, given that the person would like to pursue a career in academia?

The last quoted sentence requires a leap of faith: if arXiv authors don't start using ORCID en masse, the arXiv will not use it to replace their author ID system.

@Jeromy Anglim: Thanks for the edits. It turns out that the "the" preceding "academia" is redundant. :)

Just FYI, in case you haven't seen, check my related question.

While I largely agree with Ian's answer (ORCID might matter in the future, but doesn't right now), I see one place where it may already matter and a reason why it should come to matter more in the future.
Right now, there is a strong implicit presumption of the uniqueness of a scientist's name, and all of the literature searches and citation databases, etc, of the world get rather confused when you have a person who either a) shares the same name as other practicing scientists or b) has a name that changes over time (e.g., marriage, gender identity change) or is represented differently (e.g., transliterated) in different papers.
On this site, we have a number of good, difficult questions dealing with the problems that name change and transliteration cause, which is particularly acute for academics in countries that don't use the Latin alphabet (e.g. this excellent question).  These problems will grow in importance as the number of practicing scientists grows and becomes more diverse, and as the duration of the readily searchable literature grows as well.
In short: there is a rapidly growing need for something like ORCID that makes it easy to distinguish scientists without context-sensitive text mining.  Whether ORCID is that thing, and how long it will take for it to be widely adopted and effective, are both open questions.

My personal opinion is that right now ORCID has pretty much zero traction in academia: when my university partnered with ORCID and pushed uptake quite hard internally (by its standards, at least) I was the only person in my department who'd even heard of it (whilst nearly all knew of, and used, the arXiv).
I think it likely that ORCID take up will increase, but in the short term it's of no importance at all.
Update: Here is a JISC report on the trial implementation of ORCID at a number of UK HEIs, including my own. It lists a number of benefits (the key ones covered in @jakebeal 's answer), but more importantly illustrates the high level (research council etc) support for ORCID. With my sceptical hat on I will note that I couldn't find numbers as to how many new ORCID IDs were generated by this pilot.

Please remember that such trends can be heavily field-dependent. I'm a geoscientist. Picking five of my recent co-authors at random, I just searched for them on ORCID and found that they all have IDs there. Conversely, I have never in my life used ArXiV, nor heard of any colleague doing so, as far as I can recall. Your observation clearly shows that ORCID uptake is far from universal, but I'd be wary of extrapolating it as broadly as "zero traction in academia" overall.

@Ian I just don't like the fact that ORCID sounds like a deliberate way to monitor someone, just one more thing to keep track of what you do and when you do it. It requires way too many information to sign up.

FYI JISC have just signed a national consortium ORCiD deal for the whole of the UK.  Italy have done the same.  It's of huge importance.

@user4050: I understand and second privacy-related concerns in general, but I have yet to encounter a researcher who perceives it as a bad thing that their publication activities can be monitored.

This is no longer true.

What do you think these days?

ORCID is now essential in my field I would say, and well supported. I'm not convinced this is true across all fields, but it's now useful across most.

Let me count how many academic IDs I have:

Google Scholar
ORCID
ResearchGate
RePEc
ResearcherID
Microsoft Academic Research
Scopus ID

They never agree on the counts of my citations, of course, or even on the number of published works, even though some of them cross-link to one another.
Google, Scopus and Microsoft are, of course, automatic. ORCID, ResearchGate, RePEc, ResearcherID require registration. I don't have arXiv ID; I've never been able to extract value from that service, and at the time I bothered about these IDs, it was purely mathematical, which did not quite ignite me, and it failed to compile my LaTeX code because I had graphs in my papers that exceeded the then-existing file size limits (something like 1 or 2Mb in early to mid 2000s?). I am sure I am missing another five or so academic ID services. I remember starting some of them, but never being able to populate them properly, because they said something like: "Oh, just push this button, and we'll search ISI WebOfKnowledge for you" -- guess what, they don't do it on their end, they do it on your browser, so you need to have access to ISI for that stuff to work.
Does missing any one of these services matter? This is probably discipline-specific; I would venture a guess that nobody in this thread heard of RePEc (REsearch Papers in EConomics)... but if you talked to economists, they probably would not have heard of ORCID in return. Given that you are coming from arXiv, you are probably a mathematician or a physicist, and arXiv is probably the default for these disciplines, with little to no need for other IDs. That is to say, if you only care about becoming a famous physicist through publications, stick with arXiv ID; if you want to be a good citizen of academia, so that other academics sort of recognize you when you step out of the door of your home department, or if you reasonably expect to collaborate with other disciplines, ORCID will probably help.
Coming back to the OP question, my specific suggestion would be to check what people put on top of their CVs in your discipline/in the departments where you are looking for a job. If it is an ORCID, you need to get one. If it is an arXiv ID, you need to get one. If it is a picture of their chihuahua, you... well, you get the drift. (My scanning of CVs in a discipline that has a sort of dual identity, sociology, when I was interviewed by a sociology department years ago, revealed that some of the faculty think of themselves as scholars, and list their published works under Scholarship, with these works being books or chapters in books, with few to no papers -- these would be doing sociology theory or some social forces or stuff like that; while others would refer to themselves as researchers, and list their published works as Research, which would consist, for the most part, of journal papers, which would be more likely to use quantitative methods. I don't know much about sociology, but I imagine there are internal tensions between these groups, with one not understanding the approaches and achievements of the other.)

I upvoted your answer, since the described experience with some of those services matches my light use. However, I find your suggestion on checking researcher IDs in other people's CVs quite strange, to say the least - I even thought at first that it's a joke. What is the rationale for this suggestion?

A piece of advice I received when starting a tenure-track job was to talk to people who were recently tenured to see what they did. This is a similar advice: look at people who are successful in the field to imitate. Looking back, the advice I should have been given is to talk to people who were kicked out of the tenure track -- you learn more for mistakes than success stories. You learn quite a bit about your discipline from the CVs of people practicing it, and you learn a lot about what is being valued from what people put on the top to reflect their highest priorities. So no it's not a joke

Thank you for clarification. My impression was distorted by you mentioning only focus on researcher IDs, which I don't find useful. The more general advice, as described in your comment above, makes total sense to me and I do that all the time (I refer to it as CV analysis). Of course, you can only learn so much from CVs, so academic career blog posts and similar resources are complementary useful.

NSF has just thrown out it's CV/resume system for grant proposals and adopted ScienCV (NIH's sysetm), roughly speaking. This system can, with a fair amount of work, mine your ORCID and setup your CV for NSF's grant proposals for the future. If you submit a proposal without using this "new" system, NSF will return it without review. ORCID is probably the easiest way to construct what NSF and NIH want in ScienCV, though I haven't completed mine yet (I've barely started it).
ORCID may never take off as a universal system for finding researchers and their latest publications, but US researchers who want to keep their jobs will be forced to keep theirs sort of up to date so that the granting agencies at the federal level can see them and use them for review. Whatever ORCID does, it still suffers from an/the updating problem.


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Is mentioning submission rejections in SOP wise?
I kind of want to mention in my SOP that I have been through rejections many times so as to hint the reader that I have a more mature mentality to persevere when I am a professional researcher. But, a question that naturally follows is: Would this act instead backfire?

I doubt the signal you will convey is that you persevere through your mature mentality but rather that you may lack the skills to perform science or write acceptable manuscripts of sufficient quality. This said without intending anything personal since only you know the reasons for the rejections.
Given that rejection rates in journals are generally high, 50% is not uncommon and higher rates exist, everyone has papers rejected for one or another reason. That said, however, repeated rejections signals something is wrong, in the most positive light it could mean your research is novel and have difficulties being accepted by the community (the problem is then the community or how you try to communicate) but as stated first, the most common reason is that there is some deficiency in either the research or the reporting (most often) of the research and this is most likely what people will pick up upon.
As a final note, rejections can be something positive if you learn from them to improve later manuscripts. To use them as a learning experience is therefore the best way to use them.

Pertinent, I see. The point you made is what I missed.

Well, since the times of rejections come from my productivity, is it still unwise to mention so? Thanks.

@Comeseeconquer Yes. There is no way that a committee will see "I have been rejected so many times" as a plus.


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How many people does it take to establish a theory?
There are often theories published by scientists in both the hard sciences and social sciences based on new understanding of fundamental science and better data collecting mechanisms that runs in opposite to the prevailing theories of the day (or it is not politically correct).
I am reminded of the case of Darwin and Galileo and many modern cases that presents alternative theory to a side of an argument that has long been thought of as quack science of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.
Science is all about objectivity, if we were to find that "gun ownership decrease gun deaths" or "sexual orientation can be changed later in life" or "our universe is 11 dimensions and made up of little vibrating strings" or "vaccination causes serious and incurable side effects" then scientifically speaking we should accept these results despite that they run counter to our intuition and are not exactly the most politically correct thing to say in our time. In fact, even mentioning this decreases my credibility in some circles.
Unfortunately, in some of these cases, when research is done it so happens that in the next few decades it captures little attention (again Galileo) or due to lack of interest or funding, so that there are literally only one or two person on one side of an argument.
When presenting these theories to friends or colleagues, I sometimes face scrutiny that this explanation has support from only one or two theorists (especially if those theorists are prominent i.e. Freud, Judith Butler, Zizek, Pew Research, Gallup) so it is not credible. People keep on telling me I should find more and more people to support my argument because "anyone can find quack scientists" or "anyone can find hollow earth supporters". When I find another study that supports a theory, people then tell me I should find even more people because only then "a hypothesis can become an evidence".
So how many scientists does it really take to establish a theory? What does it mean to establish a theory? i.e. the theory of gravitation, the theory of evolution.
Note: I am asking here because people are significantly more well read and objective than some other forums.

I assume you realize the obvious fact that there is no specific number. Also, this is arguably a question about the philosophy of science, not academia.

A new theory has to explain experimental results better than previous theories to become the new standard. For example, anti-vax conspiracy theories fail to explain any of the studies showing no increase in chronic diseases after vaccination. That is why they are not accepted. The current paradigm, that vaccines only very rarely cause serious issues, fits the data better. It's the same with all the other theories you mention. They are worse at explaining the outcome of actual experiments, so only quack scientists support them.

How many people do we need to establish that the Earth is roundish? Aparently, we are not there yet.

Unfortunately, the fact "people are significantly more well read and objective than other forums" does not make the question more appropriate for this forum.

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is a question about a subject studied within academia, not a question about academia.

Although superficially the question need not concern "academia" per se, in fact, perhaps, a saner reformulation (and tentative answer) can be given if the question is put into a "more academic" context, rather than "coffee shop" or "sports bar" context.
That is, deconstructing (?) the situation is helpful.
Unsurprisingly, the premise of the question is misguided, in the sense that one would suspect that your "critics" are not proposing rational critiques of whatever you're talking about, but are merely "stonewalling", that is, finding ways to object no matter what you say. The good news is that probably those peoples' worldviews ought not deeply concern you... oops, except that maybe they're your friends.
But, as in other comments, the question is not "how many people endorse it", although it may appear to be so. Indeed, disturbingly, some ridiculous things (essentially provably nonsensical) are believed by huge numbers of people, due to the appeal those beliefs have ... for other reasons. Not because of "evidence".
The underlying difficulty, to my perception, is something like this: we must assimilate some basic functions (walking across a room without falling or crashing into things, getting through the doorway...) to a very subliminal degree, or our minds would be too busy worrying about such stuff ("breath in, breath out") that we couldn't do anything else. However, this tendency seeps over into everything, so that "we" (human animals) try to make everything as automated/subliminal as possible. Ergo, desiring the simplest, most uniform notion of ... every idea. Pity that this is not quite feasible?
Especially young-ish people who've been a bit sheltered (good for them, in many regards! Experiencing hardship may be educational, but it's not a moral virtue!) "wish" that things would not be so messy as they (evidently, especially if one reads books, etc.) are.
There does seem to be a special anti-intellectual trend in the U.S., which is a bit complicated to account for. But, yes, in the U.S. ignorance is less an embarrassment than elsewhere, and this gets many idiotic discussions started...
If you could get your antagonists to be a bit honest, and consider the criterion of "explanation", as in @Johanna's comment, and disavow "number of 'likes' as evidence of correctness", you could have a discussion. The reality is that if those people are inclined to make the sort of objections they did, it's not on grounds that you had exercised shoddy intellectual methods, but that they simply didn't like the conclusions, for irrational reasons, and would find ways to make pseudo-legitimate, pseudo-intellectual objections ... no matter what you said.
The rhetorical devices, especially evasions, that people sometimes consciously use (cf. politics), and sometimes instinctively use, are endless...
The real answer is that people who want to believe something-or-other will not be persuaded otherwise by anything at all. So if you can speculate that that's the case, there's no point in having any discussion, either. Too bad.

A theory is "established" when it makes reliable predictions, has withstood all tests thrown at it, and for those reasons has been accepted as a practical working model of the system in question.
Note that a statement which can not be tested in a statistically valid manner is not science; at best it's philosophy.