text:
Got accused of plagiarism due to a reference lost during copying my own writing
Summary
I was assigned to write an autobiography for a course and copied some sentences from a personal statement for an application.
Those sentences in turn included material by somebody else, which I referenced in the application, but I failed to reference in the autobiography.
Due to this I was accused of plagiarism by my professor, who I feel is making a mountain out of a molehill.
What happened
I am a mathematics PhD student. I am taking a course outside of the math department in the education department. For the first week of class we have to submit an assignment essentially showing that we're in the class for financial aid purposes and what not, creating the impression that the assignment is not necessarily for credit. My professor wanted us to write a short autobiography for this assignment. It was about 1% of the total grade.
I had previously done an intense personal statement for NSF-GRFP, a prestigious fellowship.
I took one paragraph from that personal statement for this autobiography assignment and forgot a reference that I had included in the NSF-GRFP personal statement.
Unfortunately, the plagiarized portion was not in quotations and just merely had a footnote in my original NSF-GRFP proposal that I mistakenly overlooked.
Thus, two sentences (out of the five paragraphs) came up flagged as plagiarism and my professor indicated that they were going to submit this to the student-conduct office. Now needless to say I'm freaking out. I understand what plagiarism is, and I understand it does not matter whether it is intentional or not, and I do not what kind of sanctions will be placed on me for this oversight. This all happened today and I'm meeting with my graduate adviser tomorrow to discuss what actions need to be taken.
What the professor and the rules say
I went to explain my situation to the professor. Before I could even finish explaining I was interrupted and told that I committed self-plagiarism as well by taking material from my NSF-GRFP personal statement. This professor is now completely unwilling to hear me out and told that I will be assigned an "F" for their course in addition to whatever penalties the university places on me.
Upon reviewing my institution's self-plagiarism statement, it says that the assignment/paper must be submitted for academic credit. Clearly an NSF-GRFP grant proposal is not for academic credit. So the self-plagiarism issue should be resolved rather quickly, I hope. I emailed my professor and she said that she will still be reporting me to student conduct for plagiarism and that she would give me a 0% on this assignment and take 30% off of my final course grade, i.e. if I get a 100% on every assignment for the entire term I can pull off a 70% "C" passing grade. I'm confident in my abilities but I'm sure I would end up losing a point or two along the way and end up with a "D" or worse. So that much has been retracted.
What my graduate advisor says
I met with my graduate program adviser, and he indicated that there is nothing that he personally can do about the matter as the instructor of record has the right to submit any form of plagiarism to student conduct at their own free will if they have any form of evidence. He indicated that there is nothing the department can really do about the matter and that I need "roll with the punches." I found this quite discouraging.
On the other hand, he mentioned that I will not lose my position (graduate teaching assistant) in the department due to this, and that as far as he is aware, the grade I receive in the course won't impact my graduation or progression through the department. However, he fears that if the university places severe sanctions on me (i.e. semester probation, expulsion) that there is nothing that can be done.
All in all, his advice was to simply go through the procedure and do not fight it.
This conflicts with advice I have received from some other professors that I am in good terms with in the department, they said at worst I should receive a failing grade for that assignment and nothing more. However, it all boiled down to their mere opinion of the matter. I still have not heard from the student-conduct board, but I anticipate to receive that email on Monday if not sooner.
If I choose to appeal I have seven business days to put in a formal appeal plea. I guess my new crossroad is whether to: appeal or not? If the accusation is self-plagiarism, I will certainly appeal it because I have a strong case for that. However, if it is merely plagiarism I don't know... I guess it comes back to the title of this question: where's the line between plagiarism and missing a reference? The student handbook at my university defines plagiarism as:

whereby another’s work is used or appropriated without any indication of the source, thereby attempting to convey the impression that such work is the student’s own.

Taking away all the circumstances of this event, I have done that. Considering how this actually happened, it was more of a clerical error. I will update again after I receive the official email from the student conduct board.
Question
I do not know what to do or what I even can do right now.
I actually have aspirations to one day become faculty at a university. Moreover, I am on an assistantship through my university teaching courses and I fear that I could lose that position and thus my stipend money.

I do not know what to do or what I even can do right now. Find out about the appeals process at your university.  Talk to someone who is familiar with it; many universities will help students find someone to represent them in the process.  Go to the meeting with your advisor and don't do anything until then.

So these two sentences were a quote written by someone else? Was it in quotation marks? Also is self-plagiarism as serious a charge as plagiarism at your school anyway? (even though it clearly doesn't sound like it fits) In any case the person is a major jerk for such severe penalties over two sentences in an assignment, even if you intentionally plagiarized them. I'd submit everything he ever wrote to a copyright checker, especially including comparing himself to his own writings, and see how many sentences you can find. I'd bet many.

I'm not an academic, but @ASimpleAlgorithm's question seems on point to me: were these two sentences marked as quotations? If not, then their presence would be a problem even if you'd listed the paper they were taken from as a reference; surely including a citation is not a license to copy and paste prose from the cited work into yours as if you'd written it? If they were marked as quotes, then, while sloppy, it's not plagiarism to have included them even without the reference, because then you were not trying to pass off the other author's writing as your own.

The asker's real experience could be posted as an additional answer after the fact

Could you just withdraw from the class and avoid a bad grade altogether? You mentioned it's a class outside your major anyways.

The 30% reduction in grade seems excessive, and probably goes far beyond what the professor might be allowed to assess at a US school. You should at least try to appeal.

Something about your story is unclear.  You talk about missing a reference, but I want to understand the situation with those two sentences.  Were those two sentences copied from another reference written by someone else?  Why were they flagged as plagiarism?  You mention those two sentences weren't in quotes.  In your GRFP application, did you quote/copy from another source without putting it in quotations and without indicating that it was quoted/copied from another source?  (A citation/reference is normally not considered a substitute for quotation marks or other indication of quoting.)

The discussion about self-plagiarism, comedians, jokes, and similar has been moved to chat.

I would expect the self-plagarism charge to go away on its own, once the relevant bodies find that one of the places the text appeared was not an assignment or a publication. If not, I'd appeal.
As for the other - technically you did plagiarize, I guess, but hopefully common sense will prevail and people will see that it is (a) minor; (b) accidental. Whether common sense exists in your school on such matters, I don't know.
I'm not sure that anybody here can provide a canonical answer as to what you should do...

Ugh.  I had some advice to give.  I'm not going to.  This question has been tarnished.  First, it was about an open-ended question of what to do.  Then the question evolved into something more specific.  Evolving questions lead to answers to original questions that aren't rewarded, and some answers applying to some versions of the question... the update should have just been a separate question (and perhaps have the questions hyperlink to each other).  As is, this is a mess like what I've seen elsewhere on StackExchange, and I intend to not touch this question in its current state. Repeat: Ugh

@TOOGAM: While there are some chameleon questions on this site, I fail to see this as one. A few details have been added, but it is as open ended as it was when it was posted (not that this is necessarily a good thing).

"I understand it does not matter whether it is intentional or not" It actually matters a lot in practice.

@pmf It's also blatant nonsense even in theory, given this particular school's definition of plagiarism. They define plagiarism as requiring that the writer is "attempting" to pass off another's work as their own. You can't unintentionally "attempt" something; an intent requirement is baked into their definition due to that word choice. The idea that the OP could by guilty of plagiarism due to accidentally omitting a reference is thus incompatible with the school's definition. Guilty due to copying and pasting others' writing into his prose without quote marks, on the other hand...

Were the two sentences in the original NSF-GRFP application/proposal delineated as part or whole of a block quotation, perhaps? That might explain the lack of " ".

@aeismail Sanctions this severe are not at all uncommon as university policy in the US. See my comment to your answer.

While you are technically guilty of plagiarism for forgetting the reference, you are not guilty of self-plagiarism—the work you have plagiarized is not published anywhere, nor is there an expectation that material submitted for a grant proposal cannot be recycled for later use.
Therefore, the professor's response is overblown and is not likely to survive a review process. As Nate Eldredge mentioned in his comment, you need to see your institution's appeal process for academic violations and pursue that. You should expect to get zero credit for the assignment, and there may be a penalty against the remainder of your grade beyond the zero, but an automatic F for the course is clearly, as you said, making a mountain out of a molehill.

I'm not sure I'd expect a zero on that assignment (at least not if I'm expecting something fair), unless it was his only citation that he forgot. You just don't give zeros to a student who was obviously doing acceptable work in good faith and made a human clerical error in the process. You give zeros when you believe there's been conscious misconduct or gross/reckless negligence, which clearly doesn't seem to be the case here.

@Mehrdad While I agree in principle, policy may not make such a distinction.

Maybe this is just me living in a bubble, but I would be utterly shocked if it was true in a non-negligible fraction of schools that the professor didn't have the authority/discretion to not give this student a zero.

" nor is there an expectation that material submitted for a grant proposal cannot be recycled for later use."
Indeed, universites would be empty if this were true!

@Mehrdad If it doesn't go to an appeals process, then perhaps. But many schools in the US are adopting "uniform" policies to respond to the rise in plagiarism and cheating.

I'm wondering why you say "technically guilty" of plagiarism.  If the poster copied two sentences from another source written by someone else, without indicating that they were copied (i.e., with no quotation marks), then that sounds like actually guilty to me, and not just a technicality.  It's more than just forgetting to add a citation -- it's also failing to indicate that the sentences were not their own.  Am I misunderstanding something?  Or do we just have a different sense of how problematic that is?

@Mehrdad we don't know anything about the professor except what applies to the OP's situation. He/she may be operating in CYA mode for reasons that the OP knows nothing about!

@alephzero: The sentence was "you should expect a zero". Expectation is, by definition, not a worst-case analysis. Yes, he should consider that there is some chance he may get a zero due to. But if he does, it is certainly unexpected, and should be unexpected by him.

@NicHartley, Let's set aside the self-plagiarism as that's now moot, and focus on the 2 sentences. It sounds like when writing the GRFP, the original poster copied two sentences from someone else, word-for-word, without using quotation marks, but did add a citation.  That already is plagiarism.  It's not enough to include a citation.  One must also indicate that the material is a quotation and was written by someone else.  Then, when writing the essay in class, they copied those 2 sentences again, this time without the citation.  If that's what happened, that's plagiarism, both times.

@Mehrdad You'll have to be utterly shocked then. It's not that uncommon, at least in the UK, that the person teaching a course does not have the authority to go against university policies. To me it's far more shocking that the prof thinks they can unilaterally apply major penalties to unrelated assignments.

At my university (US), a student plagiarizing in this fashion would, without exaggeration, at a minimum: (1) be required to attend an on-record in-person hearing with a dean of students, (2) be placed on academic probation (with a two-strikes and you're out policy), (3) face a monetary fine, (4) perform an additional scholarly project for said dean, (5) and have all subsequent coursework at the university subject to audit. Values about plagiarism vary, but the OP should not be surprised that heavy-handed sanctions are in line.

@D.W. "Or do we just have a different sense of how problematic that is?" ― it is possible (and consistent with my experience) that mathematicians (such as the OP and some participants in this discussion) have different standards for attribution. For example, a mathematician might say that two sentences of prose do not constitute a meaningful [scientific] contribution, whereas stealing a proof technique would be much more serious. Acceptable practices vary greatly between different fields, which I think is an important contextual factor to consider (regardless of whether you agree with this).

In my opinion, "self-plagiarism" is an oxymoron invented by crooks and publishing houses. To hear that a professor makes such a fuss about it is quite sad. Besides, it is teaching, not Final Judgement. Unless you had a history of plagiarism, not including a reference should be at worst viewed as a mistake more or less equivalent to making an arithmetic error in a long computation, IMHO. A few points off, a gentle rebuke, and a clear explanation of what is expected is all it really merits.
Alas, this opinion is easy for me to say but hard for you to use. Looks like you'll have to go through some formal appeal procedure. Just go the the department chair office, explain that you got into a conflict with your teacher, state the situation in a matter-of-fact way without emotions, accusations, or attempts to defend yourself, and ask for advice and formal appeal rules and procedures. You should definitely be given the information on the latter but if you behave nicely and the chair is not in a terribly bad mood, you may get a former too.

Self-plagiarism in education has even less merit. The assignments should help you develop skills and check if you have developed them. Of you have already done it before and can just hand in a result - perfect!

I have seen people publish essentially the same paper over and over again. Sometimes identical, sometimes with small differences in a page or so. Never mentioning all the prior occasions. It seems like a genuine, serious problem rather than just "an oxymoron invented by crooks and publishing houses".

The question isn't asking for your opinion on whether "self-plagiarism" is a good name for the practice that it describes.

The question was a little confusing so I had a re-read--it sounds like the initial problem was an actual quotation or reference which was not cited (someone else's work). The OP explained to the instructor that they forgot to cite it because they re-used it as part of a larger section that they copied from their own work, and forgot to copy the citation over.

@DavidRicherby It is not about names. I openly declare that I have nothing against the practice of reusing one's own creations as many times as one feels appropriate. There is no reason why one should duplicate the effort on the same task and IMHO there is nobody else who has any right to accuse one of "stealing" in this case.

OK but (1) it's not an accusation of "stealing" (just because a behaviour is not theft doesn't mean it's appropriate) and (2) the question isn't asking for your opinion on the general concept of self-plagiarism anyway.

As I said in another answer, self-plagiarism is not a special case of plagiarism (which is what makes the name so horribly confusing, to the extent that you are somewhat justified in labeling it an oxymoron), but it is still unethical as it involves misrepresentation. Fedja, surely you will not “openly declare” that it would be okay for me to take one of my published papers and submit ten identical copies of it, each with a different title, to ten different journals, without disclosing that I am “reusing my own creation”?

@DanRomik: I mean, I don't think ethics is what prevents people from doing that. If their copyright agreements let you do that, by all means go ahead.

@Mehrdad it seems like you are badly misinformed. Either that, or we're talking about completely different things. Ethics is precisely the reason why the behavior I described is unacceptable.

+1, although I think that term can be valid in certain contexts, when it's expected that what you're writing is something novel that no-one has thought up before.

@AndrésE.Caicedo: That's very bad, but it's a different problem! It's not the problem of not giving due credit, it's the problem of misleading the reviewers about the novelty of the result.

For the purpose of this answer I assume that the original reference in your application was flawless – which is you have to ascertain yourself.
If we ignore the existence of your application for a minute, the professor would have a strong case against you for committing plagiarism. Yes, you can say that you forgot a reference due to a clerical error, but that’s an easy claim to make in hindsight and is usually not considered a valid defence. This would be your typical case of plagiarism that is usually severely punished for a good reason. The only thing in your favour is that this is only about two sentences in a minor assignment.
Now, thanks to your application (which is probably on record somewhere), you are in the fortunate situation that you can actually prove that you only committed a clerical error: You copied some context which includes the offending two sentences; you lost the reference in the process. While this opens the door for accusations of self-plagiarism, this is a lesser offence and can be easily dismissed for reasons you already noted.
This is how I would build my defence: Acknowledge that you can understand where the accusations are coming from and that this is brought before the student-conduct board. However, state that the alleged plagiarism did not happen out of malice but merely was a clerical error – which you can prove.
As already mentioned by others, it might be wise to seek for support from the student union or similar for the conduct board’s inquiry.

“is usually not considered a valid defence” — That entirely depends on whether there’s a pattern of doing this. Accidental plagiarism (i.e. forgetting to properly quote or reference individual sections) is somewhat common, and most reasonable people should accept OP’s description of the events that led to it as plausible (most people here do, after all). It’s nothing less than excessive to assume bad faith and to treat such a simple mistake as intentional fraud.

@KonradRudolph: That entirely depends on whether there’s a pattern of doing this. – An autobiography does not leave much room for even having a pattern. Also, as far as I know, a considerable number of fields (especially those who would give an autobiography as an assignment) have a strong anti-plagiarism policy, which I can understand given that they hold phrasing and similar to a much higher value than say scientific fields – in which the kind of plagiarism we are talking about here is not a relevant problem. Finally mind that I did say usually and the last sentence of my fist paragraph.

I think that this is the cleverest strategy to follow. I would not be concerned about the self plagiarism accusation, since the document was not published anywhere and was never submitted as an assignment.

I don't have personal experience with this, but if it were me I would go to my faculty ombudsperson and explain the situation just like you did to us here, and ask him(/her) for advice.
Most likely he'll suggestions on what you should do. If he seems particularly sympathetic, and you get slapped with a harsh punishment (in my eyes, a zero is too harsh if (a) the assignment is worth a lot, (b) you only forgot one citation out of many, and (c) your work otherwise didn't have major problems) then you may hint if there's a chance he could informally chat to the professor and see if he could impose a lighter penalty (e.g. maybe X% off and letting you redo the assignment with original content?) so that it doesn't affect your grade so disproportionately.
Barring sympathetic faculty members to talk to privately, I would just try to stay calm and go through the process. For a first offense I just don't see a humane punishment for an unintentional oversight like this that goes beyond that assignment, and frankly your professor will likely make himself look bad if he can even manage to push for harsher punishments on this.
Whomever you talk to (including but not limited to the professor), ask them if there's a chance this could make it into your permanent academic record. I have no idea what the consequences are, but I know if it were me I would plead them to help me avoid that when I was clearly doing my best and not anything wrong. But see what they say.

To offer some thoughts that go in a different direction than @aeismail’s excellent answer, I am somewhat taken aback by your description of the assignment:

For the first week of class we have to submit an assignment essentially showing that we're in the class for financial aid purposes and what not

You haven’t said what kind of class this is, and I don’t know what institution you’re in (or what you mean exactly by “what not”), but I think you may have a legitimate claim that the mere act of assigning you a task that is completely unrelated to the topic of the course (if the impression I’m getting is correct) constitutes an abuse of the professor’s authority. Financial aid may be very important and all, but I don’t think it’s within a professor’s authority to force students to take any action to apply for such aid or to help their department or university claim aid on their behalf. There are all sorts of legal and ethical concerns that this raises. Admittedly, I’m not a lawyer and cannot say anything authoritative about whether this is okay or not, but I’d advise you to look into the matter by consulting the university ombuds office, your student union representative, other friendly parties, or even a lawyer.
If my intuition about this is correct and the professor has abused their authority, you may well have a strong counterargument to help you in your defense. While this wouldn’t necessarily invalidate the claim of plagiarism (since two wrongs don’t make a right as we all know), pointing out that the professor should not even be allowed to base your course grade on irrelevant and illegitimate assignments would certainly complement your other defense arguments (which also sound pretty reasonable) nicely and increase your chances of success. Good luck!

My reading of that part is rather different (and more benign) than this. I understood it as this being an assignment that was meant to be essentially trivial to complete, because students would not be officially considered to be taking the course until they hand in an assignment, and their (i.e. the students') financial aid is dependent on being actively participating in the course.

"and whatnot" is just an informal version of "etc." (Not sure if you were unsure of the meaning of the phrase or if you were unsure of what was included in "etc.")

@DavidRicherby the latter.

@Tobias the question is not how trivial the assignment is to complete but whether it has any pedagogical value related to the goals of the course. If it doesn’t, the student (and other students who are not accused of plagiarism but are annoyed at being assigned work that has no value) would have a reasonably good case to argue it should never have been assigned, that assigning it is a (perhaps mild, but still relevant in the context of the question) abuse of the instructor’s authority, and that its grade should not factor into the course grade. In other words, it is not “benign”.

@Tobias to be clear, the information provided in the question does not make it clear whether the assignment has pedagogical value or not. I simply suspect that it doesn’t based on the OP’s description. This is also consistent with the instructor sounding like a person who may behave unreasonably in other ways as described by OP.

I agree with the latter part. But if an assignment is needed at the earliest possible time to ensure financial aid, then requiring an autobiography seems like it could provide useful information to the instructor for their teaching, while not requiring the students to first learn a lot of new stuff. As said, though, I find it absurd to have such a pro forma assignment factor into the grade or to turn it into a big plagiarism case.

(Began writing the above comment in between your two comments. It seems like we mostly agree here).

Clearly we don't have all that much information, but "I'm not sure I see a ton of academic value in this assignment" is a far cry from "professor is engaging in abuse of authority and/or legally/ethically questionable practices". I just don't see the justification for the latter here (at least with the info we have).

@BradC you are correct, we don't have enough information to say whether my suspicions are justified. That is why they are only suspicions, as I have said.

I figured that it was like a 1-credit "Welcome to College" class or something like that which could be a required course for the type of aid the OP has (although that has been edited out of the quesiton).

Yeah, this answer takes some huge leaps.

It's hard to tell exactly what the facts are, but if they are what it sounds like, I'm not sure you fully appreciate the seriousness of the situation yet.
Let's set aside the self-plagiarism as that's now moot.  Instead, I am going to focus on those 2 sentences. It sounds like when writing the GRFP, you copied two sentences from someone else, word-for-word, without using quotation marks, but you did add a citation. If that is indeed what you did, that is plagiarism.  It's not enough to include a citation. You must also indicate that the material is a quotation and was written by someone else.  When you don't include any indication that those sentences were written by someone else, you are giving the impression that you wrote those sentences.
Then, when writing the essay for class, it sounds like you copied those 2 sentences again, this time without the citation. If that's what happened, that's plagiarism, both times.  You should be realizing that it violates academic integrity policies.  In particular, when you copy material written by someone else without indicating that it is a quotation, you are "convey[ing] the impression that such work is your own", and that directly violates academic policies.  This is true even if you had put a citation at the end: to indicate that it is someone else's work, you must both mark it as a quotation, and also credit the source (e.g., with a citation).
If these facts are correct, the problem is not that you forgot the citation; or it's not just that you forgot the citation.  The problem is that you copied  material written by someone else, without indicating that it was copied -- and you did it twice.
What should you do now?  If I've understood the facts correctly, you should stop minimizing the situation.  Stop trying to minimize it by calling it "unintentional", "a clerical error", "merely two sentences out of five paragraphs", or saying that the professor is "making a mountain out of a molehill".  This is a mountain.  Universities take academic integrity policies very seriously, for good reason, so it's not likely to help your case to suggest that violations of it are unimportant.
Instead, I recommend that you take this seriously.  Recognize that you screwed up.  We are all human; we all make mistakes.  It happens.  Arguably, what matters most is how we deal with it when it happens.  Rather than minimizing, learn from this situation.  Learn about academic integrity policies, what they require, and why many in academia care about them so strongly.  Apologize sincerely to the professor.  Tell her that you are sorry and you realize you screwed up; and make no excuses.  You'll have to work hard over the semester to recover from the mistake, but I suspect you'll find that you can put this behind you.
I agree that you might want to appeal any self-plagiarism finding.  But while it might feel harsh, 0% on this assignment and 30% off the course grade doesn't sound like an outlandish penalty for the plagiarism (those two sentences), and it might be within the realm of what discretion is afforded to the instructor.  In many places, I suspect the policies allow for penalties up to giving you an F for the course or suspending or expelling you from the graduate program if you violate the academic integrity policy.  So, I am not sure I would recommend appealing the plagiarism violation.  A poor grade on this one course won't end your life and won't sink your career chances.  Take this as an opportunity to learn and show good character for the future.  If you learn the lesson and demonstrate that you work hard and take your studies seriously, then I would imagine that there's a good chance you can put this behind you and reach your career goals.

Oh come on it's not a mountain it's a class assignment. I agree the student appears to be spin doctoring the story. But this is terrible advice.
If you had followed the whole story, the professor did initially seek to fail the student, and they have argued their way this far. They might get even further if cooler heads prevail.

The OP says, "Unfortunately, the plagiarized portion was not in quotations," which I take to mean it wasn't indicated in the text itself in any way that he was quoting someone. I'm not an academic, but I really don't see how that is ever acceptable. And had he properly quoted the text, it would have been obvious to the prof. that, though the reference had been dropped, the OP was not trying to plagiarize another text. I think that this answer is correct: this minimization is a serious problem. That may explain why the OP is getting punished so harshly.

@ASimpleAlgorithm A student who has gotten all the way to a PhD program without figuring out how to properly cite text is a mountain.

@Fomite It's not a mountain if it can be resolved with a warning and an hour of reading on the student's part. I completely disagree with this  dualistic mindset that tries to categorize people into defective and defect-free.

I'm assuming you are in the US and had a US undergraduate education given your NSF application.
First, you should stop minimizing the offense and rationalizing your violation of academic standards with comments like "mountain out of a molehill" or calling it a "clerical error."   If you were an undergraduate at any reasonable US institution you would be subject to sanctions for what you did in your NSF essay if you had turned it in since you failed to use quotation marks.  This is something that you should know at high school graduation and certainly at the end of your first semester or year in college.   Undergraduates get 0s for just a few words without quotation marks not to mention several sentences.
As a graduate student you should hold yourself and be held to even a higher standard; care in writing should be second nature.  For example any college graduate should be assumed to be familiar with and able to apply in their writing definitions such as that given here. Just search the web for others.  As a potential faculty member you are actually charged with implementing this in practice.
So the first thing you need to do is to admit that you did the wrong thing and apologize to the professor, and accept the appropriate punishment. Not a fake apology, a real one. Of course if you really don't understand or agree with your university's policies on academic integrity by all means, make a stand, but know that those documents and procedures represent years of faculty and legal discussion and consensus building. This is reflected in the way your advisor says that this is up to the other faculty member. Faculty are absolutely going to support their peers' right to handle these matters even if they would handle them differently.
However, you have compounded the issue by being dismissive of the importance of the assignment, which is a standard first week kind of task for a discussion based class especially where students are from a mix of departments and backgrounds. These assignments are helpful for the professor to understand the class.  I'm also guessing that since you said the class was in education that the professor is modeling a way that you as a future possible professor (or TA) might gather information about who the students in the class are and any concerns they might have.   This has nothing to do with financial aid; it is insulting to the professor for you to characterize her assignment as some kind of busy work.
The bigger issue is that you are acting as though the faculty member in the class is not in charge of determining what is important or not important, and that is very insulting to the faculty member.  This is not helping your case at all, beyond being rude and obnoxious.   You don't want to be in the class? Guess what, the undergraduates don't want to be in your college algebra or calculus recitation.  You are still in charge if you are the instructor, and it is not okay for them to be rude to you.
You need to apologize to the instructor for not taking her assignment seriously. I hate to say this but you are living up to stereotypes of mathematicians who think that they are much smarter than people in every other discipline, in your case even as a first year student encountering a faculty member.  If you are male and (as indicated by the pronouns in your question) she is female you should also be aware that she is probably assuming that the patronizing way you are treating her and her course is not just because it is not a mathematics course but also potentially because of sexism on your part.  You have made numerous bad mistakes in your interactions, and you will have to work very hard to recover. When you go into that classroom you need to be positive, take the work seriously, and be willing to learn and not be a passive aggressive presence.
My feeling is you should even now just say to her that you accept the punishment and say that you hope that by being a positive and constructive contributor to the class over the rest of the semester you will make up for your mistake.
In terms of appeal or not, you probably should consult with the designated person about this. There should be someone who serves in the role of advisor to you. If there isn't go talk to someone in Student Affairs. If you do appeal, obviously the facts are against you, the only thing would be to appeal the severity of the sanction.  If you appeal you can throw yourself on the mercy of the board by expressing remorse and asking for a chance to finish the course with the possibility of a passing grade (and you can point out that 30% punishment means that this leaves no room for error).
tl;dr
Stop insulting the Professor.
Throw yourself on the mercy of the instructor and also when you get whatever you get from the conduct board you should also apologize profusely. Work very hard all semester and be a positive contributor to the course.

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Severity of the "crime" matters, and it can be debated on logical grounds. So if you are to defend yourself in front of a committee, make sure that you can show to them to the best of your ability that "it was a clerical error" indeed, as you write, and nothing more. Was it? How central/critical to your assignment were these two sentences? What would you stand to gain by plagiarizing these specific two sentences?
Some punishment towards creating an alertness reflex for the future may come down on you, but the principle "punishment must fit the crime" is almost universally accepted, and it warrants a "quantification" of the crime.
Also, the extend of the crime matters. If these two sentences were not that critical to the work, well, they are only two sentences after all. This is a second way to quantify the crime.

copied ... included material by somebody else ... failed to reference

For a "brief autobiography"? That's enough. At 1% of the grade, the instructor was not expecting perfection or a great deal of work, but it was the start of a new course, and you were supposed to write at least a little something original about yourself for the course. The copypasta just doesn't make the grade.

There is only so much original that I can write about myself. Next I send my CV off to get a job and get accused of self-plagiarism. "You listed the same previous jobs as in your previous CV, clearly plagiarised".

Wait, let me get this straight: This Professor wants to bring you up on formal disciplinary charges for a mock autobiographical text which is a homework assignment in some class, because you had a few sentences in there that you didn't write yourself? And you're a Mathematician (i.e. not training to become a biographer)?
That's patently absurd. The most ridiculous thing I've heard since, well, Donald Trump's last tweet I guess.
Here are some hopefully practical suggestions. They are quite assertive and confrontational - but we're not dealing with reasonable action towards you, so some boldness is called for:

Find friends, colleagues and class-mates who support your position.
Talk to your graduate student union / graduate employee union. They should want not merely to protect you, but to prevent the very dangerous precedent of frivolous disciplinary procedures being countenanced by senior faculty (or later on, disciplinary authorities). It is also something that should be politically easy to do, since no funds or employment condition changes are involved.
Your graduate program advisor was brushing you off when he "indicated that there is nothing that he personally can do". What he should have said that this is an abuse of the course teacher's position, a distortion of the regulations, and that the regulations regarding plagiarism are intended for academically meaningful cases. He could and he should talk to that course teacher, demanding that this case not be reported, telling the teacher he would protest, formally and in writing, such a report; testify in your favor at any procedure; and initiate an administrative procedure against said teacher.
In fact, you should check how you yourself may be able to "counter-sue". It's better if a member of the senior faculty supports this/sponsors this/co-signs this; and it's better yet if it's the graduate student union.
One of the things the union should do for you is assign a lawyer, or an experienced defender in disciplinary procedures, to help you form your defense (and possibly a counter-suit). Other answers suggest what certain defense lines might be, and of course it depends on the specifics of your university bylaws and state law.
If you have enough classmates annoyed about this happening, they could disrupt the course classes until the Professor promises to not report / rescind the report of the incident. Union support can help this happen, including possibly by gathering more people to support such an effort.
If you have enough people supporting you overall, get them all to write letters of protest both to the course teacher and to your graduate program supervisor. If you have been reported, these could also be letters to whoever is running the disciplinary procedure, demanding that it not be conducted.
If you have enough people supporting you overall and/or union support, and there's a disciplinary hearing, then in addition to mounting a defense - you want to have a noisy crowd in and outside the room/hall where a hearing is held, protesting it.
If you have enough people supporting you overall and/or union support, the union or one of your supporters could first threaten, then carry out the threat, of involving news media (both inside and outside campus). But don't do that, nor be too threatening, before the incident has been reported.

I could write more but you catch my drift.

I'm assuming this is a sarcastic answer, but I'm not so sure that OP has the skills to know it is a sarcastic answer.

@Elin: Nope, no sarcasm here except perhaps for the Donald Trump reference.

Okay than I am downvoting since it is such terrible advice, likely not only to get him an F but also to damage his professional reputation for years to come including when looking for a postdoc or faculty job.

@Elin: Care to try to explain why this is terrible advice in your opinion?

As I  said it is not only likely to backfire short term, but it will damage their reputation for the rest of their career.  Whenever someone asks about them (not to mention searches their name on the Web) the best case scenario will be "nice guy except that he plagiarized in first year grad school" worst case would be "trouble."

-1. Academic integrity issues are not resolved based on being able to bring a contingency of supporters to make one's case. Quoting someone else without putting quotation marks around it is plagiarism, plain and simple. This is extremely bad terrible advice.

@Just_to_Answer: Luckily, this is not an issue of academic integrity. And as for your definition of plagiarism, I always like to say quoting someone else without putting quotation marks around it is plagiarism. What a terrible plagiarizer I am, now aren't I ?

Ha ha, hilarious! But considering I was the moderator in an academic integrity case very much like this at a mid-tier US institution and the committee voted to fail the student and put the student in probation, I would say it COULD be an issue of academic integrity at many institutions.

@Just_to_Answer: 1. I'm not sure it was very much like this case, considering your presentation of this case to be similar to a typical plagiarism case. 2. Assuming it was - that's exactly what my advice is intended to prevent. If OP could follow my advice, s/he would likely never face that committee.

The gist of this case being "unfortunately, the plagiarized portion was not in quotations and just merely had a footnote in my original NSF-GRFP proposal" was very much like the key issue that I dealt with. I am going to stop commenting further on this because I am afraid I might be divulging private matters. Nevertheless, as with any legal-type matter, the interpretation of the rule book at any particular academic institution may vary (even year to year) and suggesting a young graduate student to take an egregious defensive posture is certainly not what I would recommend.

@Just_to_Answer: Well, then, it seems your case was not about a homework assignment on writing autobiographical sketches; and assuming that's true, your case was entirely unlike OP's. Having said that, I think OP should certainly have gotten a grade reduction for his homework assignment - just not a disciplinary procedure.

+1 — I agree with some of the comments here in principle but the professor’s behaviour is so beyond the pale that this may warrant such a response.

What outside news media is going to care about a minor plagiarism dispute?

@AzorAhai: "University graduate student union threatens mass disruptions claiming student abuse by professors using 'insane staged trial' ".

@einpoklum What's happening here is not nearly as interesting as that.

This is pretty much concentrated bad advice. The idea of trying to "counter-sue" on a plagiarism disciplinary action is not only silly, but there's very likely no mechanism to do it, and almost certainly no mechanism where the university is handing out legal counsel.


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Were there consequences for the reviewers or editors of Andrew Wakefield's MMR/Autism paper?
Did the reviewers of Andrew Wakefield's MMR/Autism paper suffer any consequences (for not being thorough enough)?  What about the editor(s) of the Lancet?

I recommend that you assume the audience is not familiar with this case and provide the summary and a link.

In the meantime https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud.

What sort of ‘consequences’ should there be. They acted as if the paper was in good faith, as they should. It wasn’t.

Is it clear that the reviewers weren't thorough? Supposedly, "The Lancet's peer reviewers had raised concerns about the study's methods and interpretations, as well as about the dangers of undermining public confidence in immunisations. Dr Horton insisted that the paper was revised to clarify that its authors had no proof that MMR caused autism, following which it was published under the label of ‘early report’ to ‘highlight its preliminary nature’ "

Here is the original paper https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2897%2911096-0

What kind of "consequences" could even be possible for the reviewers, given that they are anonymous volunteers?  The journal has no power to fire them or cut their funding, nor could it publicly shame them without violating confidentiality.  The journal could decide not to invite them to review in the future, but I am not sure what you imagine could be done beyond that.

@JonCuster I don't know, not being in academia.  Shame, maybe? Anyon says the peer reviewers "raised concerns about hte study's methods and interpretations".  That satisfies me.

This article https://web.archive.org/web/20210624033729/https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-the-lancet-lost-our-trust describes several other incidents that harm the journal's credibility.

To be honest, if reviewers be made responsible for fraud or negligence by the authors of a paper, that's enough reason not to agree to ever review again. Not being paid, spending possibly days on someone else's work with likely no relevance for oneself, and then being punished if there turns out to be some major issue with the authors? Life's too short for that. Short of collusion of reviewers with the author, their work should be considered in good faith. As is the core assumption about scientific authors. If you expect people to do forensic-level investigation on any random paper, pay up.

Whenever something bad happens in peer review, it's the editors that take the heat, not the reviewers. Why? Because usually the reviewers are anonymous. Granted every now and then a reviewer is willing to identify themselves, but it takes a gutsy reviewer to say yes I reviewed this paper when the blowback is very public.
As for the editors, they definitely came under fire, but as far as I can tell nobody accused them of negligence. That's because peer review is not supposed to catch fraud. You can't send someone to the author's lab to verify that they actually conducted the research they said they did. The Lancet editor-in-chief said as much when retracting the article:

Wakefield "was dishonest", said Horton. "He deceived the journal." The Lancet had done what it could to establish that the research was valid, by having it peer-reviewed. But there is a limit, he said, to what peer-review can ascertain.
"Peer review is the best system we have got for checking accuracy and acceptability of work, but unless we went into the lab or examined every case record, we can't ever finally rule out some element of misconduct. The entire system depends upon trust. Most of the time we think it works well, but there will be a few instances – and when they happen they are huge instances – where the whole thing falls apart."

For what it's worth, The Lancet remains one of the most prestigious journals in the whole of science, so there is no lasting damage.

We should remember that Lancet did not just ignore the allegations for 12 years before retracting in 2010. For example, here is a 2004 paper, discussing various allegations, and allowing the authors to respond to them. https://www.thelancet.com/pb-assets/Lancet/extras/statement20Feb2004web.pdf

Worth noting, this isn’t just saying “peer-review carries no responsibility”.  Some kinds of problems should certainly be caught, and it’s a serious lapse of judgement if a referee and editor let them through — though as noted in the first paragraph, it’s only editors who can be held accountable.  But the problems in this specific study (primarily conflict of interest and very cherry-picked data) are not the sort that peer-review is necessarily expected to catch — they’re not apparent in the text of the paper alone, only with extra context, some requiring investigative journalism to uncover.

Accountable to whom, though? Peer review exists because there is no higher authority to appeal to that would be able to judge the subject matter.

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Difference between tenure-track/tenured positions in universities and research scientist positions in national labs
I am trying to evaluate pros and cons for working at universities as tenure-track (and eventually, hopefully, tenured) and research scientist at national labs. I realize that not much is discussed on what it means by working at national labs (except a few specific questions such as Are faculty positions more competitive than government research lab positions?), unlike working at universities. I wish to start by asking about job security, salary (US universities usually pay 9-monthly and expect profs to cover the remaining 3 months from the prof's grants. Is there any such thing at national labs), any other things? Working with research students (all the way to completion of their degrees, as opposed to as your interns for a few months) is of course rewarding at universities. But probably too much teaching and administrative work may be negatives at universities too - any comparison with national lab jobs?
I know that this may be slightly broader question, and a bit subjective too, but I believe answers from different perspectives would help researchers like me who are at critical juncture at their career and need to decide one way or another.
Edit-1: I also came to know that some research labs in the US may have different classifications. e.g., is National Renewable Energy Laboratory same as NASA etc.?
Edit-2: How about 'redundancies'? Can these labs use 'lack of budget' or some other (non-disciplinary) excuse to remove the permanent staff?

Vaguely related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/13170/must-an-academic-reference-letter-be-from-a-university-employed-researcher-or

I think this question presents a false dichotomy.  The difference between two universities can be just as great as the difference between a university and a lab.  I know quite a few people who enjoy working at both a university and a lab, either in parallel or in sequence.  Often these are large institutions offering a wide range of employment conditions.

@AnonymousPhysicist, I am just asking if there are significant differences between the two. I haven't asked if which is more enjoyable etc. If there is no difference, then also it would be helpful if you give details on the specific things I have asked (job security, salary, redundancies/tenured, etc. and possibly with pointing out right sources. Your comment doesn't answer my question yet.

@John that is why it is a comment and not an answer.  I am saying your question does not have a "correct" answer.  It is like asking "Should I work in finance or health care?" when what you really want to know is "Should I work as a teller at Wells Fargo or as a customer service representative at Blue Cross Blue Shield?"  You need to compare specific positions.

@AnonymousPhysicist, no, that is not even a remote analogy for my question. I am asking specific question about the same researcher working at a university and a national lab (both in the US). This should have been clear from the context since Mephistopheles and others have correctly addressed my question, with clearly saying that their answers are based on their own specific experience. My question can have a specific answer. e.g., is the salary based on 9-month or 12-month in national labs, or is a permanent job in national lab same as a 'tenured' job at a university.

The answers cover specific jobs, just as @AnonymousPhysicist tells you is all you can ask for.

My experience is purely through my work at NASA, so take that with a grain of salt.
There are (roughly) two levels of employment at NASA Research Centers (not labs like JPL): civil servants and contractors. If you're looking to become a research scientist at NASA, you want to become a civil servant, though there are plenty of scientists on contract.
Contractors are just that, they work on a specific research project that has allocated in its budget a certain amount of money for a project. Usually these contracts are administered under huge omnibus corporations like Millennium Enterprise Integration, who take something like 200k in overhead, per contractor.
What this means is contractors can be extremely expensive to a project, and that, as a result, contractors usually split their time (and cost) on two or three projects. If you're a contractor at a NASA center, you'll need to maintain a decent porfolio of projects that cover your salary. It can be stressful, but also less regulated than civil servantship
Civil Servantship is a pretty sweet gig if being a tenured professor was your reason to enter academia. If you get hired as a civil servant, it's virtually impossible to fire you unless you commit the equivalent of a felony (which is easier than tenured professorship, see below). Basically when you're hired congress agrees to pay your salary for the rest of your working life.
You can apply for money to do projects, including internal funding that academics won't have access to. With that you can hire contractors or buy equipment, but not pay yourself. Instead you have this new unit of labor called Full Time Equivalent (FTE), which is can also be part of a grant award, and represents your salary being paid for a full year. FTE vary depending on the center you're at, Alabama FTE is going to be cheaper than Bay Area FTE, but at some centers there's a significant surplus of FTE going around (no idea why). All not having FTE means as a civil servant is you might have to go ask someone for FTE, which means you're effectively working for them.
I said before it's easier to commit a felony when you're a civil servant, and that's because you're effectively a representative of the U.S. government. That means you can't take money from companies (gifts are limited to $20), and a whole host of other rules that have been put in place because essentially every form of graft and corruption that you can possibly imagine has already been done by someone in the government. It's actually pretty amazing.
Also the pay for a civil servant isn't that great (still better than grad school!), and because of the rules you can't really supplement your income. That's why it's not unheard of for civil servants to actually switch to contractors sometimes- the caps for compensation are much higher for contractors, and can be influenced by a competing offer.
oh and also you don't have to teach, but that's one of the few places where civil servants can make extra money (lecturing at local universities).
But in terms of an environment where 1) you can pitch research and it will get funded and 2) you'll have job security that tenure used to match, there is no better place, as far as I can tell, than NASA.

Great answer! Is the salary for public servant scientists 12-monthly at NASA? And comparable to 12-monthly (pro-rata from 9-monthly) salaries at R1 public/private universities in the same region? Also, can you officially advise ph.d. students with nearby universities?

JPL isn't owned my NASA, it's a private entity managed by CalTech on behalf of NASA. It subsists entirely on massive, multi-year, multi-million dollar contracts like the rovers. Anything else I know is baseless rumor so I won't say more.

@john students being advised by NASA scientists is a thing, but it depends on whether the department is willing to allow it. A relatively recent invention is the NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship, which is comparable to NSF GFRP, with an additional requirement that students spend 10 weeks at a NASA Center (they get $10k to cover costs, on top of a stipend). it's probably the best fellowship a grad student can get (I'm biased, I am an NSTRF), and it encourages very close collaboration between students and NASA mentors.

also FTE is for the fiscal year, so full 12 months. The salary does change based on the region, and can be found online (it has to be released publicly, since civil servants are public employees). It depends on your level of education, whether you're a veteran, assessed value to the goals of the center, etc.

I couldn't answer regarding the state of other labs. NASA's level of "science" vs. "engineering" varies based on the center (each one has a set of core competencies). Some centers do mostly operations (Johnson), while others are mostly research (Glenn and Ames). But they're all going to have their own specific expertise that relates to a different aero/astro problem.

@Mephistopheles, Thanks. Can NASA go for 'redundancy' of the public servant scientists for any reason?

@John I don't think so.

I have worked at a number of universities and national labs.  It's hard to make many generalizations because the culture differs so much from institution to institution.  However, a few things are generally true--you see fewer graduate students at national labs (more postdocs) and you do not spend as significant a chunk of time teaching or doing "service."  You do not spend as much time applying for grants and in fact are not eligible to apply for many.  The focus of research has to be something that advances the lab's mission.  Your project can be canceled, or you can be moved to a different project/subject.  Unlike academia, you have a boss, and the boss has a boss, and yes you can absolutely be fired or laid off (and I don't think it's as hard as people think, as I have seen a number of people go).  I also don't agree with a previous comment that scientists are not paid on the GS scale.  Many agencies do pay on the GS scale.  Others use the similar ZP scale.   You get a 12 month salary, not 9 months plus grant.  There is not a tenure application process as there is in academia.  The atmosphere at most federal labs is very different than at a university...you wear an ID badge at all time, there are various layers of security, you often cannot install things on your own computer, etc.  This is even more true at military labs.
Overall I would probably choose the federal lab, but it depends a lot on your personality and how much autonomy (and job security) you need.

What are the typical situations when people get fired/laid off, @ccbb ? Drastic funding cuts from the Fedral govt? Or some other subtle reasons?

Priority shift that makes a project obsolete.  Underperformance including repeated bad evaluations.  Insubordination.  Leaking classified or confidential information.  Not showing up at work.  Etc.

I'd like to point out something you haven't mentioned. A few national labs have a number of institutional duties that somehow constrain their research activities, leaving, in a certain sense, less freedom to their researchers with respect to the academic environment (which is not necessarily a bad thing or a limit to the possible achievements).
For instance, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), which is under the umbrella of the Department of Commerce, is the national metrology institute of the US. Main duties of this institute are thus the realization and the dissemination of the units of the International System of Units (SI), and the work of many of its researchers is aimed at fulfilling these duties. This might involve also the participation at various international committees.
Such constraints might be an issue for someone, less for others, depending on their character, but I think they should be kept in mind when choosing between the two options.
Another point worth noticing is that in some labs, depending on country, goals and funding sources, there might be less (sometimes much less) pressure to publish with respect to the academic environment.

My experience in Australia:

Salaries are for the full 12 months in both academia and government research.
Salaries and benefits are about the same in academia and government research.
Job security is not that different (academic tenure in Australia is not as strong as in the US).
There is less opportunity in government research to work with graduate students (though there is still some opportunity). I see this as a disadvantage in itself, and it also hurts your publication rate in the long run.
On the other hand, it is easier to work in large, interdisciplinary teams of experienced scientists on big problems.
Government researchers do not have the same freedom of speech that academics enjoy. We can be fired for publicly questioning government policy in our area of expertise.
Our research is designed to answer specific questions asked by governments and industry clients. This is both good (our work has an impact in the real world) and bad (it's not always as scientifically interesting as what we might prefer to work on, and is usually not the most efficient way to produce interesting papers).
We spend less time writing grant proposals than in academia. We still need to write proposals and still rely on external funding for much of our research, but the sources of funding for which we are eligable are different, usually require shorter proposals, and probably have a higher success rate.
Where I am, our external funding has to cover our own salaries and substantial overheads, as well as operating costs. This means that we are expensive for research bids that put us in direct competition with university researchers. On the other hand, it also means that we don't usually need to sweat the operating costs, as they are such a small component of the total.
At the same time, it's not like being a contract researcher at a university. I have indefinite tenure and my employer can carry me through some lean periods in funding, and will also write me into large projects organised by others.
There is more bureaucracy in government research than academia, but we also have more support to navigate that bureaucracy. For instance, I'm not allowed to put up my own web page describing my research, but I can work with communications staff to produce something polished. I'm not allowed to sign my own copyright transfer forms when I publish a paper, but there are contract staff to negotiate changes to contracts when needed. I'm not allowed to submit a paper to a journal without having it internally reviewed and signed off by my boss, but there are accountants to help me manage my research project budgets.

great answer! I am sure many of these points should also apply to US national lab jobs. Can't you (co-)advice graduate students at nearby universities? Say with an adjunct prof position at that university? This seems a common practice at least in some national labs in the US. Also, in case of funding cuts in your particular branch of research, is it usual to have lay-offs at national labs? I guess since a university prof would still keep teaching courses, so funding cuts may not affect terribly (it won't to a tenured prof for sure).

Yes, we can co-advise students and even base them here rather than at the university. I have one PhD student here currently and some summer interns. It can be harder to get funding for them, though, and we don't have much contact with undergrads, so it's harder to find good students. Yes, when there are funding cuts, we have lay-offs. My organisation has lost 20% of our staff over the past 3 years! But I have seen similar things happening in universities: whole departments cut.

Sigh: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/climate-will-be-all-gone-as-csiro-swings-jobs-axe-scientists-say-20160203-gml7jy.html

are you allowed have at least some, though small, fraction of time (well, i mean out of the official working hours) to do research of your own interest at your national lab, @Significance ?

@John Yes and no. I have 20 days/year unallocated to projects, which is more than swallowed up by training, strategic planning, and scientific citizenship such as editing and reviewing activities and attending conferences. I can also put up proposals for internally-funded strategic projects. Some years, these have to be projects that will position us to get more external funding, some years there's more scope for following personal interest with these proposals, as long as they align with our strategy.

What happens if someone doesn't manage to get a grant on his/her own for several years then, @Significance. Can they still continue the job almost for ever? I know that he\she can work on others' projects to survive. But does the failure to bring funding on one's own affect the job in some way?

@John, it depends how senior the person is and what else that person is doing for the organisation. If you are content to stay at a junior level and are in demand for other people's projects, it's no problem. Your promotion prospects may be limited, though. If you are already more senior and not bringing in funding, you need to show your value in other ways: line-management, valuable stratagic work and strong international reputation.

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Do PIs ever get outside help when writing grant applications?
PIs can have students assist with grant applications, but do they ever hire outside help?
I have heard of freelance grantwriters who work for non-profits outside of academia, does this ever happen inside academia? Do any types of universities or departments do this more often than others?
My interest is in biology research, but answers that extend into other fields may be helpful for other people who come across this question.
(A similar question)

Are you interested only in cases where people are explicitly paid as a freelancer by the PI, or more generally soliciting external help as well?

I don't know, in what sort of situation would a PI get external help?

The research company where I work is organized much like a soft-money university, in that we are largely organized around PIs who fund themselves and the others working on their research by writing proposals to external funding agencies.
One of the ways in which things are different, however, is that the PIs have a lot of help to draw on in writing proposals.  It's not "freelancers," because we're generally drawing on others at the company, but it's still help from outside the research group and can be extremely valuable.  In particular:

Our library staff can prepare templates and proposal checklists to make it easy to comply with formatting requirements and to ensure that the proposal writers address all of the points needed for the proposal.
We run proposals through two stages of review by people not involved in the proposal: the first is early at the "story-board" stage to make sure the narrative is coherent, the second is a week or two before submission to make sure the final proposal is really good.
Some of the company publicity folks can also be drawn upon to make nice proposal art
We used to have a professional copyeditor on staff, though I don't believe that we do any more.

These sorts of things can help a lot in producing a nice proposal, and I wish my university collaborators did this sort of thing more often themselves.  When collaborating, we often offer to organize the review stages, for example, because they really help; many university PIs, however, do "last minute" scheduling that makes it difficult to use these processes.
There is nothing to prevent a university researcher from using these sorts of resources, whether internal or external---at many universities, for example, there is a Writing Center that would likely be quite happy to help with copy-editing and the non-technical aspects of review.  Likewise, I have known professors who would review one another's proposals before they sent them out, in a less formal version of our review process.
It just takes some organization and pre-planning to do these sorts of things... and for many of us, that is lacking without an external framework that helps to chivvy us towards remembering.

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Would an online masters degree help me to become a professor?
This question seems to indicate the answer is no but I don't know enough to see whether being accepted into a PhD program equals getting a teaching job. I attended a private four-year school at which the professors did minimal (if any) research and spent a lot of time personally assisting students outside of class. Because I've never attended a large, state school, I don't know if this is what it's like but I've heard it isn't.
I am much more interested in what I described (teaching and helping students) than in having large, impersonal classes and conducting research.
Would an online masters degree increase my chances of getting a job teaching computer science (the subject of my four-year degree) in the manner described above?

No.
In the US, permanent university-level teaching positions in computer science, even at small four-year colleges, require a Ph.D.  As I explained in my earlier answer, an online master's degree will not help you get into a PhD program.
For some non-tenure-track positions, a master's degree with a thesis may be enough, but a terminal/professional/course-based master's degree won't be; whether that terminal master's program is online or on-campus is essentially irrelevant.
In short, if you want a permanent teaching position, you need formal research experience.

Your last sentence is awful (because it's true).

"...even at small four-year colleges..." I agree.  But at a two-year college / community college, a master's degree will in some cases be sufficient.

Probably not. Most teaching jobs require a PhD, and those that don't tend to be reserved for PhD students (my freshman and sophomore English classed were taught by PhD students, quite well, I might add). After many years of established practice as a computing professional, you might find yourself able to apply to teach at a community college in your area (if you're in the US) since your professional experience might substitute for the PhD. You might also qualify to teach a single special course as a adjunct professor in your narrow area of practice at a 4-year school, but it is doubtful that you would be hired as part of the regular faculty.
As noted in the other question, online master's degrees tend not to be focused on research, and so don't help much towards getting a PhD. We can argue about whether it is truly necessary to have a PhD to teach at the college level or not, but that is the norm in the vast majority of university education in the US and most of the world.

A master's degree would probably put you in a position where you could teach as an adjunct at a university. Adjuncts typically teach on a class-by-class basis, they are generally not full-time employees, and don't get paid very well. You might be able to teach at a community college as well (likely in a similar position).
Your master's degree program will probably influence your ability to get a job. While some online programs are good, many are not, and some come with "baggage" that might get in your way (for-profit degree programs for example).
If you still live in the same area as your undergraduate institution, you shoiuld mention to a faculty member you are close to there that you are interested in teaching as an adjunct. They would be able to give you better advice for what to do.


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How Does Funding for Graduate Students in U.S. differ from Undergraduate Scholarships?
I am interested in furthering my understanding of the process of applying for grants (funding) for graduate students and pursuing Engineering (STEM) Career. I am located in the United States and I am a U.S. Citizen.
My understanding of the process: funding opportunities for graduate students are more 'project' based (to pursue a certain line of thought or experiment) while undergraduate scholarships are more based on student achievement and designated major.
I received a few scholarships while an undergraduate, and my question is, what are the significant differences between funding for graduates and scholarships for undergraduates?

Note that the answers depend somewhat on what field you're in, and very much on what country you're based (or interested) in. Specifying those will make the answers much more helpful.

@E.P. - Good Point, Thank you and I have added this information to the post.

Eligibility: some scholarships are awardable only to undergraduates and never to graduates, or vice versa.
As a graduate you'll have access to more scholarships and awards, and lose access to others.
Also note that most graduate funding is merit-based rather than identity-based. Thus, it will focus more on academic achievements (published papers, presentations, GPA) etc. rather than being a Welsh American or something like that. (There are some external scholarships for minorities but far more of the funding is not based on this).
Specificity: at the undergraduate level, many scholarships are particular to a programme or degree, but can be awarded to anybody studying that programme or degree.
For example, a science scholarship could be awarded in chemistry, physics, biology, maths, geology, astronomy, and so on. An arts scholarship could be for literature, sculpture, photography, art history, or other areas.
Graduate scholarships are often more focused, not just on a programme or degree, but a particular field. This gets more particular at higher levels where scholarships almost morph into small grants.
For example, instead of being for sciences, it may be for science research related to a specific industry. Instead of being for art, it may be for work done in or about a particular style and technique.
This answer is a community wiki. Please add additional points of difference and a succinct description of them, as above.


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Has the popularisation of online conferencing tools made research positions at smaller universities more attractive?
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent confinements in various countries, there has been a tremendous development of the use of online collaboration tools (e.g. daily use of video conferencing with Zoom, Skype and the like, writing a paper  with co-authors for the first time using a shared environment like overleaf or google docs...).  Also, many online-only research seminars have been set up where entry is usually not restricted to members of a given university (e.g. researchseminars.org, see also the related panel discussion from mid-may 2020).
My question is: has this made positions at small research universities more attractive than they used to be given that daily interactions can now occur with lots of different colleagues worldwide(i.e. not just those of the small department) ? If so, is there any way to quantify this (amount of applications in the coming years, maybe?) Or was there already a trend for a few years?

Collaboration was always “easy”. Finding good students is hard

Thanks. I understand it is always a pleasure to have some great grad students, but I was under the impression that it wasn't the only factor.

I'll guess this is impossible to answer. The data is too new and too sparse. And the people it applies to are probably dealing with chaos and might provide different answers on different days. But small universities are always popular with a certain segment of academia. And the "department" size may be more important than that of the overall university. Advantages and disadvantages everywhere.

I see, thank you.

Don't overlook that such collaboration tools have been used for a long time already to communicate with geographically distant collaborators.

Yes. Regular seminars are new on the other hand : if one can attend a big shot MIT seminar from a remote european university, say, I thought it might change things somewhat.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Can poor grades in a bachelor's affect working in academia?
I am a first year PhD student working in molecular simulation and GPU research.
I have poor grades in my bachelor's (49%).
Will this poor grade create a roadblock for me in the future if I want to work as a research professor in academia?
E.g., This advertisement asks for transcripts of records for a PostDoc position.

In my experience, nobody pays attention to undergraduate grades once you have your Ph.D. But my experience is not all of academia.

The ad asks for transcripts, but I don't see as asking for undergrad transcripts. You will have transcripts from your PhD too.

I was recently asked for my GCSE results (i.e. the exams you take in the UK aged 16) for a lecturer position. I assume it was a standard HR thing but then again I didn't get the job so who knows...

No
Only the grades from your highest degree matters, and even then, not a lot.

We only care about the quality and visibility of your results. Publish strong papers and give brilliant talks at top conferences. Convince well-known active researchers to write letters raving about your work. Make a good product and get superstars to sell it for you. Do all that, and we'll definitely want to hire you, no matter where you got your degree.

Your poor BS grades can sink your application to PhD programs, but given that you're already a PhD student, you've passed that hurdle. Do well in the PhD and your BS grades should cease to matter.

The last paragraph is key. Once you pass a hurdle, you are in a new world.

"Your poor BS grades..." is perhaps not the best choice of phrasing. :-)

I've been asked for undergraduate transcripts when applying for tenure-track professor jobs at universities in the US and Canada. It's not very common. Out of probably 60 applications, I've been asked for such a transcript four times. So probably <10% of my applications, although it might be more common for teaching-focused jobs than research-focused jobs (I've applied to about equal number of both). Three of the times I was asked for it was for predominantly undergraduate institutions, which might make sense. I don't know why they ask for it, but presumably the search committee will consider it. But how much consideration it might be given will probably depend on the attitude of each particular committee member.
Being asked for graduate transcripts is much more common, although I'm still unsure how much they are considered in deciding on whether to offer you the job.
If you do apply to an academic job that asks for an undergraduate transcript, you could probably make it into a positive: you could say something in your teaching statement (or diversity statement) about your struggles in succeeding in your undergraduate academic work and how you could use that experience to help struggling students.
I would like to mention here that, in my experience, the people who did best in classwork do not necessarily turn out to be the best researchers and many successful researchers were not the stars of their classes. In classwork, there is essentially only one path to success, while there are many different paths to success in research. Some succeed in research by having marvelous people skills, building networks of excellent collaborators and efficient research teams. Others succeed by single-mindedly obsessing over important technical problems and solving them. Others get really good at understanding the dynamics of funding agencies and how funding is distributed (nearly all successful independent researchers need some savvy with funding). So don't let some poor grades make you think you can't succeed at research. Best of luck!

can second this. For me, it helped me narrow down which schools to apply to ;)


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Is there any real demonstrated benefit to the Dutch break out of the academic year?
Dutch universities have an arguably peculiar academic calendar: each semester breaks down in two blocks (actually 3, but only 2 are teaching blocks) so 4 blocks in total. Each full course is block-long (around 32-36 hours per block, usually 7 teaching weeks with 4-6 hours per week) which might seems short and "rushed". Each such course is 4-6 ECTS.
When I am talking with some other Dutch colleagues, they are not exactly able to justify this but they claim that "is about quality, not quantity". Sure, but how can you teach, for example, Calculus in 34 hours total including tutorials etc.? (I am using the example of calculus because they try to fit in such a course single and multi-variate calculus, series, differential equations etc.).
Anyway, I am wondering if there exists any particular study or report that argues that is more beneficial to have more blocks with fewer hours per block/course than the traditional break-out of the academic calendar.
I am not sure if other countries have similar systems, Netherlands is the only one I know so it might be country-specific.

In is there...any study [on] the potential benefits of such a system, what exactly do you mean by such a system?

Is this really a country-specific question? Can you generalise, e.g., are there any studies that consider the number of contact hours in relation to X? (I'm not sure what specifically what the OP is asking, hence, I'm unsure what X should be.) If so, then maybe generalise and use the Dutch example to illustrate a particular case.

@user2768 well, as the question suggests, I ask if there is any benefit on having more blocks with short duration instead of the normal system of 2 semesters.

Can you edit to make that clearer? As written, I can't see that's your question.

Perhaps the block system is great for learning in the humanities, but not in the sciences ... or vice versa?

@GEdgar I do not know. They seem to apply this system even on hard-sciences but I have never seen any hard fact about its merits.

Given the range of non-Dutch systems, all of which seem to work to at least some degree, why are you questioning one particular system which seems to work to quite a reasonable degree?

@JonCuster I am asking if there are any studies/results that justify this choice. Definitely the Dutch based this decision on something but I do not know what is.

I'm not sure at this point if anybody could really tease out at this point in time why (and to what benefit) one university chose semesters, and another chose trimesters, or all the various permutations on summer courses, or...

@JonCuster maybe yes, maybe no. But it is not a single university, but rather an entire country. Personally (as being part of the Dutch academia), I cannot find a single benefit, but nobody ever gave any credible answer. So, I really wonder.

Well, an entire fairly small country (where I live now it is a bad weather day if I can't see the mountains across the valley, about the distance Amsterdam-Eindhoven)! I suspect the University of California system (mostly, perhaps all on the trimester system) has more total students, and the trimester system is a minority in the US. I worked at an FOM lab, so was oblivious to the undergrad system...

How long has this system been in use? because the Dutch have invented some good stuff over the years - bluetooth for one...

Googling 'the impact of the academic calendar on student performance evidence from the uk' leads to a variety of documents, many focused on pre-college. One quote: "The main finding of this literature review is that the evidence base is weak. Although there is a great deal of advocacy for the benefits of calendar change, there is relatively little recent research on the subject. "

To the people voting to close as "primarily opinion-based": The question specifically asks, " I am wondering if there exists any study or report that argues that is more beneficial". Asking for evidence as to the benefits of a way of organising academic terms is clearly not opinion-based, and IMHO is also clearly on-topic. Voting to leave open.

If you edited your question to read less like a rant you would probably receive better answers.

@user2705196 Thanks, but there is nothing "ranty" about my very simple question. I added some personal experience regarding the subject of my question to give particular context.

What is your field and where are you teaching? I completed both a bachelor and a master in The Netherlands, and I now teach at master level here, but I've never been in this system. Generally speaking, 40 hours counts for 1.5 ECTS. So a course of 6 ECTS takes 4 full time weeks. Some of that is allowed to be self study  and it can be spread out over more than 4 weeks, though for me it never was. Disclaimer: I'm in the exact sciences and I have heard contact hours can be far less in the social sciences.

@Maximus Maths. A typical course consists of about twelve 2-hour lectures plus a set of six 2-hour tutorials. In this duration it is supposed to cover the entire content of a semester-long course (which typically is 48+ contact hours). As you can imagine, there is no topic that we can afford to cover in any depth. I am wondering what is the rationale behind this choice.

You have misunderstood this system or are working at an institution that is doing some really strange (possibly illlegal) stuff. At my university's CS degree it works like this: each semester is broken down into 2 blocks of 10 weeks. Each block contains 3 courses of 5 ECTS and a 40h per week work load (per week, not per block). Meaning you will spend roughly 13-14h per week per course, for 10 weeks, for a total of 140h for a 5ECTS course. 1 ECTS = 28h, so there is no way what you are saying is correct, or is it illegal.

@ElectronicToothpick I did not misunderstand anything. Each block has 7 teaching weeks, in total about 32-36 contact hours (I am not counting the other hours). The material covered is much less detailed than I used to in my previous academic position (which is normal). I just seem to miss a good justification for this system.

I doubt that there is a demonstrated benefit, but I also doubt that it is a problem or an issue. The length of a term is basically arbitrary. The number of credits assigned to a "term length course" is just a number. What matters is that (a) there is a fair amount of consistence within a system and (b) that a translation to other systems is possible and rational.
Some national systems are historical and based on the country's past. In the US, terms were heavily influenced by the agricultural past. In some countries, say UK, terms are somewhat determined by religious holidays and conventions. But, if a student has some sense that the system behaves in a stable and predictable manner, then it isn't an issue.
Universities are good about knowing how to do the translations when students move from one system to another. Again, no real issue.
But, I'll guess that over, say a year, a student from The Netherlands and one from UK or US who applies him/herself equally to the study, will learn about the same.
Breaking up a total curriculum into more or fewer longer or shorter "chunks" with more or fewer credit numbers is not especially relevant as long as the student knows what to expect.
Trying to do it 36 contact course what other do in 45, would possibly be an issue, but even that can be "about the same" depending on what students are expected to do overall and what is expected of them when not face to face with a professor.
Local consistency and predictability is enough.

This answer would be improved by providing a study or report, as asked for, or explaining how widely one searched for such but did not find it.

Thanks. Of course each country/uni is free to choose whatever they see fit for their purposes. I would just like to know if there is any study about the potential merits of having short blocks over long semesters.

Your question is unclear. Your real problem seems to be with the amount of contact hours, as you put in the comments:
"A typical course consists of about twelve 2-hour lectures plus a set of six 2-hour tutorials. In this duration it is supposed to cover the entire content of a semester-long course (which typically is 48+ contact hours)."
But the amount of contact hours has nothing to do with the use of a 4 block year rather than a 2 block year (i.e. semesters). The amount of contact hours differs per course and each university does it differently; there is no law that decides this*. Some universities prefer very few contact hours, others more. That is not really a property of the Dutch education system as a whole.
Having said that, Dutch universities do rely heavily on self-study, although I'm sure universities in other countries do too. A course that takes up 5 ECTS (=140h) in 10 weeks will take a student 14h per week. Any number of this might be contact hours, but usually it will range from 2 to 6 hours. The rest will be filled up with self-study, which includes reading material, doing assignments, and everything else.
I couldn't find any research about what the best ratio of contact hours to self-study is. But at my university, and at others as well from what I've seen, courses are evaluated through individual student feedback and student committees every year, which is treated seriously by the university. Courses change every year to better fit the needs of students and the appropriate learning goals and difficulty level.
Looking internationally, Dutch universities rank pretty well: several, especially the technical universities, frequently rank within the top 100 globally. So it seems to be working fine.
*Since 2013 Bachelor degrees are mandated to have at least 12 contact hours in the first year. Other than that universities can do as they like.

Thank you. But I made a clear distinction between "contact hours" not about total hours spent per student which can be highly subjective. I came in NL from another system and having to teach the exact same course, I can tell you that we cover far less material (and in far less detail) in NL that I was covering otherwise simply because there are too few contact hours. Ranking of uni's depend on many factors, and I am not so sure if breaking a semester into 2 teaching block enhances the learning capabilities of the students. In any case, I would like to see some report/study justifying this.

Once again I posit that the duration of a course and the total amount of contact hours are not related. You can have a 10 week course with a total of 80 contact hours, and a 20 week course with 20 contact hours total. Your issue seems to be that there are too few contact hours. You can easily raise the amount of contact hours and decrease the self-study hours while keeping a 4 block system. Moreover, as I've already mentioned, the ratio of contact hours to self-study differs per course, per degree, and per institution.


text:
Do certificates for "Outstanding Reviewer Contribution" matter?
So, I have recently received a certificate of outstanding reviewer contribution from a good and well-known journal in my field. I admit that I did not even know these things exist until now.

Do these certificates carry any prestige? Does it makes any sense to include it on my CV? Or, equivalently, at what point does it make sense to include this achievement?

I expect that the less senior I am (i.e., PhD student) the more it matters, but what is the point that it becomes white noise on one's resume?
My initial thought is "NO" (in the sense that nobody in any hiring committee would care). On the other hand, given the constant struggle to find decent reviewers, maybe this carries some signal about my responsibilities towards the community. But I would like to see opinions in this matter, if any.

What do you mean by a junior non-tenured faculty member, currently submitting applications? Are you submitting your tenure packet? or are you planning to leave your current institution? Also, which country and field is this?

@Thomas I mean for both cases. Field is CS. Country should be irrelevant (i.e., application in multiple countries, mainly USA, France, UK)

Well, I mentioned it on my full CV, but more because I was fed up by mentioning each year I have reviewed papers for the journal and notion like "2012-now" does not really quantify. I would reconsider if someone here convinces me.

There is little significance, if any, attached to “good reviewer” commendations. You’re generally being hired for your research or teaching contributions, not service. The only thing that such an award shows is that you do make significant contributions in service, which demonstrates you might be a “good neighbor.” But that’s all that it shows, and not mentioning it will certainly not hurt you.

Agreed that the certificate per se is meaningless, but for a junior researcher it's still worth noting very briefly on one's CV that one does peer reviews for journals X, Y, and Z; perhaps under "Service" or something. It does indicate that you're respected enough in the field that your opinion has some value.