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What incentives have professors to teach a large class (vs. a small class)?
I am wondering about what incentives professors have to teach a large class (vs. a small class). To put it differently, when a professor is assigned to a class, what motivates him/her to attract students to his class? I am looking for external motivations, not personal ones, such as willingness to share the class materials to as many people as possible.
I am mostly interested in the United States, but curious about other academic systems as well (at Mars University there seems to be none).

It might help if you try to give a better idea of what you mean by "small" and "large". In some situations, 30 students would be considered a large class; in others, it might be considered small. If I only had 9 students in my class, I might try to actively get it to grow. But if I had 30, I would consider that "large enough" and cease my recruitment efforts.

Continued employment in an anti-intellectual country. :|

Are you asking about why would an instructor choose/agree to teach a set large lecture classes like Calc I, or why a professor might actively recruit students to enlarge the class (e.g., for a topics course)?

At my institution in my department, I think there are two major external incentives:

The number of teaching assistants is a function of the number of students in the class. Critically, below some threshold size n, a professor will not receive any teaching assistants.
Offering the class in the future may depend on enrollment in the present.

In some other departments,

Professors who teach classes with more than N students get double credit for that class, so if they typically teach 4 courses a year, they could instead teach 2 small courses and one large course with >N students.

What's the typical size of N?

Over 100 at my school.  I'm sure it varies.

Indeed. Where I was a graduate student, N was about 30-35.

@Jeff are you saying n or N? To get double credit for 30 students seems crazy.

@StrongBad Believe it or not, I'm saying N. The normal class size was 30 students, and the cap could be increased to 35 at the instructor's discretion, but due to classroom sizes, that was it. The only way you could have more students would be to teach a "double section" of 60-65 students, and this would necessarily take place in a much larger classroom.

In our department at a large public R1, n=60 and there is no N. In other departments at large public R1s, I've typically heard of N being in the range 100-200.

One other incentive that I have not yet seen mentioned, and which might or might not count as "external," is that teaching a class is often the earliest stage of various recruitment pipelines.  If more students are interested in a class on X, then:

if the class is early enough in the sequence, it may attract more students to the department (most relevant in those colleges where majors are chosen after the first year or are easy to change).
students already in the department will be more likely to take the higher level follow-on classes regarding X, as opposed to their other options.
strong students are likely to become interested in research related to X, and may become undergraduate researchers or apply to become graduate students.
growing student demand for area X may affect what types of faculty candidates a department is interested in recruiting.

All of these are relatively long-term and indirect, but can be a significant motivator for instructors who are strong teachers and strategic thinkers.

+1 for recruiting undergraduate researchers. Getting top students to write their thesis at your department is definitely a motivation, especially if it is custom to keep your best undergraduates as graduate students.

Yes, but being the one very bright student in a 100 class is not much of a incentive for that desirable student...

Start before recruiting: is there a better teacher at your department for the material you want people to get before they can work for you?

Departments I am familiar with have a minimum size that a course has to be to run. If you want to continue teaching the course, it is helpful to grow the class in a way to consistently exceed the minimum. This usually means you want to be attracting at least 10-20 students. Once you hit 30-40 students you can often get a TA to help with office hours and grading. With 100+ students in an upper level class, departments I have been in either let you teach two sections or reduced other teaching requirements. I have never heard of upper level classes getting much bigger than 100 students.
For intro classes, the incentive for growing seems reduced as the numbers are already large, and generally there are multiple sections.

Somewhat related: classes also might have a maximum size. For example, if a methods course I teach attracts more than 28 students,  I get two classes of 14 students instead of one of 28 (and the double amount of teaching hours). As I obviously only have to prepare the course once, it is very attractive for me teaching the same course twice. Example from the Netherlands.

I would suggest that the type of institution plays a large part in the level of effort a faculty member does or doesn't put in to attracting students. In an R-1 or similar you may want to grow possible graduate students or undergraduate research assistants. A teaching-focused college won't have this requirement, for example.
There's also the question of supports. In my own college, we're almost entirely focused on teaching, which means we don't have TAs for the most part. Growing a lab focused class beyond about 24 would make it unmanageable since the lecturer is on their own, and damage the learning experience of all the students. However, a class that was mostly lecture-based could probably stretch a bit more. My last college was an R-1-type institution where supervising a lab of 70 was fairly straightforward.
More important is the matter of student motivation. A small motivated class that has a good group work ethic almost teaches itself, whereas a class where half of the students don't really want to be there is a totally different undertaking.

A fundamental assumption of your question is that the professor has been incentivized. In many cases, there is no incentive, beyond "The Chair told you you're teaching X" and X is inherently a large class. In my experience, this is how most of the folks I know who ended up teaching large classes got them.
Beyond that, another reason might be class dynamics. Perhaps you prefer to teach via a "Lecture and Test" style, which is harder to do with a smaller, more intimate class. Or you might need a certain number of students for group work, discussion groups, etc. to be viable approaches.
As others have mentioned, classes can be viewed as Step 1 in recruiting grad students, and thus you might want a larger pool to draw from.
Finally, teaching a large class potentially has a larger impact on the way the department works than a smaller class. Teaching your "vision" in one of the larger core methodology classes in a Department may impact the feel of that department, outlook of students, etc. over a small, specialized seminar.

No incentive is a valid answer as well, my question didn't exclude it.

I guess the incentive in this case is "keeping your job".

@NateEldredge Or "not wanting to restart my job search again..."

As budgets shrink, pressure from administration may also provide incentive for larger classes. Some higher-ed administrations are starting to measure various sorts of "productivity," and $-per-student is certainly on the table.
This raises the spectre of classes that instructors love to teach being cancelled for low enrollment (and thus high $-per-student) unless balanced by higher-enrollment courses.

To supplement other answers and comments... :
In some cases, an instructor can get negative incentives to attract students, the supposed rationale being that this takes students away from other courses in the same department, pushing them to sub-acceptable enrollments. I myself experienced this some years ago having developed a then-new-ish crypto course and a then-new-ish error-correcting codes course within a (pardon me, but, somewhat stodgy) math dept. The traditional-stodginess leads to courses whose names and catalog descriptions were/are incomprehensible (and certainly not attractive) until possibly after one has taken the course... So, in that context, it is easy [sic] to develop a course that will attract students... but/and this might be (was) construed as extremely hostile to other courses/faculty in the environment.
On another occasion, when it was proposed to increase the size of lower-division math classes (mostly calculus...), when I asked whether that wasn't moving in the opposite direction of more effective teaching, the answer was that things were already so bad in that regard that the marginal worsening would be less than the gain in freed-up person-hours of instructors. Sure, the kids are pretty negligent students, but, still, ... ?!?!
So, in lower-division courses in math, the motivation for larger class sizes is "efficiency". And instructors with 200 students have virtually no responsibility for the individual success/failure, ... even the TAs usually have 60-80 kids... For upper-division, it takes a certain number to "run" the course. Beyond that, it is actually unwise and undesirable to rope-in more people if they're not really qualified or interested, since it drags things down... and in some cases one can be accused of sabotage of colleagues' courses!
For graduate courses (in math), again there's a minimum usually required, so one wants to offer something that appeals to more than 1 or 2 people. Beyond that, again, there is some push-back that one might be taking away from colleagues...
And, I note, in all cases I myself have been accused by colleagues of "pandering" to students (at all levels) by trying to engage/entertain/edify them... as though being boring were a fundamental virtue in the teaching of mathematics. And, also, the idea that exams contain "surprises", so that no one knows what to study, apart from "everything", etc. That really doesn't seem a productive pedagogical strategy, since the kids cannot effectively study/learn/assimilate "everything".
(The devices that one might use to maintain close contact ... often unwanted!... with large student populations are not subtle, but require some technological savvy. My experience is that the system-gamers were amazed-and-incensed that anyone would manage to prevent... in a large-population situation where they'd hoped for quasi-anonymity. Poor kids...)


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Reputed journal publications, yet I have small number of citations
People say that the impact factor and number citations somehow correlated. However; since 2012, I published 7 articles in well reputed top-10% journal, 5 papers in flagship conferences. Yet my total citations are just 51. On the other hand, one of my friends published his work during same time period (2011–2018) in predatory journals and he has 150 citations. We both work in almost same research area.
Is it a myth that number citations are correlated with impact factor. What if a journal has high impact factor due to some few cited articles published in that journal?

This is several questions.  You should narrow it down to a particular question, and post or search for other Q&A's for the other matters.

these are correlated questions would be better to discuss in single thread

Well, predatory journals inflate their articles via self-citations.  As for IF versus citations, one can manipulated IF value; e.g., by accepting fewer articles and/or accepting survey or generalist type articles, which tend to attract more cites.  If your work is highly technical, then probably only a handful of people understand your work. In my area, top specialist journals have an IF of 3-4, and I suspect citations follow a power law relationship, meaning most articles have few cites and a small number of articles attract most of the cites.

High quality publications are always the way to go. They show that you can do high quality work.   As for tips on increasing citations, publicize your works more, give tutorials, do seminars, visit other universities and talk about your work, email people in the area to make them aware of your work.  If your work is fundamental, then look for other applications in different disciplines/areas.

@MBK: This is not a discussion forum. As a rule of thumb, if you do not expect that the answers to your individual questions considerably overlap, ask them separately. This is the case here: An answer can address the bibliometrics and statistics underlying impact factors without even touching the topic of how you boost your CV. I therefore removed all but your first question. Feel free to ask the other questions separately.

@Prof.SantaClaus: Please stop answering questions in the comments.

@MBK: Just to be on the safe side: Your friend really published in pay-to-publish journals that have no real peer review and are not listed by the major indexing services?

One data point cannot refute correlation... However, your assumption in your last sentence is correct for a lot of journals.

@Wrzlprmft yes those journals have peer review just for formality. They accept your article with 10-15 days. In computer science its impossible. In my case it always took 7~11 months to get acceptance.

@knzhou he did nothing special. Just sharing update on social media, which I also did.

First, let's forget the number of citations in the predatory journals, since they are fraudulent trash and no conclusions can be drawn from them.
Let us instead focus on why some work gets well cited and others does not. In order to be cited, a paper needs to be:

noticed by other researchers, and
considered credible by other researchers, and
significant in its contributions, and
relevant enough to the citer’s own work that they have cause to cite it.

Publishing in a top venue helps with #1 and #2, but only sort of helps with #3 and doesn't do a thing for #4. Complementarily, if your work is useful to other researchers and they become aware of it somehow, then they'll happily cite it many times even if it's in an obscure workshop or even a non-peer-reviewed venue (e.g., arXiv), as long as they have reason to find it credible.
So let's get to the heart of the matter: are your low citations actually indicating a problem in your work?  I would advise reflecting on whether your contributions matter to your field and the feedback that you get at conferences.  If your contributions matter and you are gaining respect, but you happen to be working on something extremely specialized, it may be fine to not be getting many citations---as long as you're getting cited by the few people who matter in your niche.  If you aren't getting citations because your work is correct but not very interesting or relevant to others, however, then you may wish to consider why that is and whether a shift of focus would be useful.

I think "If you aren't getting citations because your work is correct but not very interesting or relevant to others" this is the main reason. Also, almost all of my publications are my independent PhD work and I have 1 or 2 authors in publication.

I disagree regarding the factors which usually lead to citation.  Important factors:  1.  Provides a motivation for new papers.  2.  Provides evidence supporting an obvious statement.  3.  Reviews previous work.  4.  Easy to find on search engines.  5.  Makes the citing paper look good.  6.  Citation is expected by peer reviewers.  7.  Describes a method.  I doubt many people decide what to cite based on what journal the paper is in now that search engines are available.  But some people do imitate work based on what journal it is published in.

@AnonymousPhysicist I think that your reasons are largely a finer subdivision of my #4 (excepting ease of discovery on search engines). Even in our current digital world, however, work in highly-ranked journals is still typically easier to discover and often considered more credible.

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Does obtaining citizenship somewhere help in applying for a faculty position there?
Would obtain the citizenship of a country help to be a more successful applicant for an academic job?
More specifically, for example consider that an international scholar, who currently holds a postdoctoral position, obtains a permanent resident or the citizenship of a country. Would this help to be a more successful applicant for a tenure-track faculty job at universities, such as in US, Europe, China, Japan, Australia, etc? Comparing to those who don’t have the resident permit/citizenship, with a similar background and academic contributions.

It depends on the situation. Sometimes it is explicitly stated that citizens or permanent residents are given priority.  Sometimes it isn't, but there are many more administrative hurdles to overcome before a foreigner can be hired.

@wonderich: I replaced the tag for you. And you meant "citizenship" rather than "nationality. Also, note that countries are geographical entities and don't have citizenship; states have citizenship. I suggest you edit accordingly (although this is a bit nitpicky I'll admit).

I am mostly interested in knowing the case of US, and perhaps Europe countries like UK, Germany, Swiss, Russia.

In general, employers in the US are allowed to discriminate between applicants who are already eligible to work in the US (by virtue of citizenship, permanent residency or some special immigration status) and applicants who are not currently eligible to work in the US (who would have to be sponsored for an employment based visa.)  It is not permissible to discriminate between applicants who are US citizens and those that are simply permanent residents or otherwise have work authorization.
Sponsoring an applicant for an H-1B or other visa can be very time consuming and costly.  Furthermore, approval of such a visa application (and even more so for a green-card application) requires the employer to argue that no qualified citizen or permanent resident applicants were available.  There are potentially substantial penalties for not following these rules.
If you're already eligible to work in the US, and you are otherwise well qualified for the position, then you probably will be more likely to get an interview than someone equally well qualified who does not have this status.
From my experience of running search committees for a math department, I can tell you that (1) The widely used AMS application form includes a check box for applicants to indicate their status and (2) interviewing qualified applicants who are eligible to work in the US is an important consideration and (3) the vast majority (95+%) of our applicants would require visa sponsorship.

In the US, my guess is no.
1) I'm not sure if this info is part of the application given to the faculty search committee. I am sure that it is not part of the first 3-4 things people  look at (research plan, CV, letters, teaching plan)
2) There can be concern and/or bias about international scholars. When I've heard anyone talk about this (and it is rare!) is usually about either language fluency or culture, not immigration or citizenship. So citizenship would not matter at all.
3) I know there is some cost and hassle in getting a new prof a visa. But compared to the cost of someone's salary for the six years pre-tenure, the startup costs (can be >500k at an R1 in the sciences!), etc... this is negligible.
As you look at jobs further away from the traditional tenure track, and as you move to smaller and smaller universities/colleges, I could imagine this being more important. (Though at the subregional university I know best, they've hired international people for the last 5-6 hires, so even there, I suspect it doesn't matter much)

I would love the American hiring committees to think that way. Unfortunately, this may be too idealistic. From my personal experience and conversations with colleagues, being a legal resident vs. not being one makes a big difference in U.S. when hiring for tenure-track positions in Economics. Not sure about other fields.

Many post-doctoral positions in the US are funded by grants from the Federal government that are limited to citizens and permanent residents. I know one colleague from mainland China who reported some barriers to getting post-doctoral positions due to this. I'm not certain how it works for faculty, but many are ultimately funded by similar grants. Things may work differently in other fields, however.

As someone looking for tenured work in Japan, my sense is that having Japanese citizenship will have little to no impact on the effectiveness of a job search (or at least no such requirement is listed anywhere for work). This is largely due to very simple visa application procedures for academics (4000 Yen and the right credentials: PhD, publications and job offer can get you a 5-year special status visa).
Being a native speaker of Japanese (it is often explicitly listed that you need to be fluent) and ethnically Japanese however will be greatly helpful (I have no direct data for this but a strong sense that jobs posted in Japanese are posted with the expectation that only Japanese (here lacking all distinction between nationality, citizenship, language, ethnicity, and culture) would apply).

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Non competitive grading system
I go to school at a University in the US.  We use a competitive grading system where teachers give grades based on how you do relative to other students.  This type of grading system doesn't encourage students to work together or help each other because we are all competing against one another.  I'm wondering if there is another non-competative grading system that major universities are using to eliminate this competition?

At most US universities, grading systems are generally set by individual instructors (under the heading of "academic freedom"), not by university policy.

As a graduate student I had to grade exams for the courses my supervisor taught. We had a very intricate system of establishing what would be a passing grade:

Prepare a set of questions.
Let all the Teaching Assistants (TAs) solve the problems, keeping track of how long they took for each question.
Distribute an arbitrary number of points over the questions relative to how much time, on average, was spent on each question by the TAs.
Let the students take the exam.

Let me be very explicit that until this point, no grading scale has been established!

Mark the exams. This just consisted of going through the questions and assigning points for correct solutions, partially correct solutions, etc... Every question was marked by a different TA and this TA was free to distribute points as he/she saw best. Usually we would go through a pile of 10-20 exams, see how the problems were solved, e.g. what pitfalls were encountered or how far most people got, and then establish a scheme we would use for the rest of the exams.
Every TA hands in an exact description of how they marked their question, i.e. how points were assigned.
With this list, go through the questions one by one and decide what constituted the minimum requirement in each question. This decision was signed-off by my supervisor.
Using the marking schemes written by the TAs, calculate how many points the minimum requirements would have given if they had been handed in as an exam.
The number of points for the minimum requirements constitute a passing grade. Anything below that fails, anything above that passes.

In my university, grades were on a scale from 1 (fail), over 4 (pass), to 6 (perfect) in steps of 0.25 grade points. This gives us three grades to map zero, the minimum requirement, and the maximum number of points to respectively. This can be fitted to a function $G(p) = ap^2 + bp + c$ which maps points $p$ to a grade $G(p)$.
The advantage of this approach is that it is, in principle, independent of the TAs specific style of marking, as the marking is taken into account when computing the minimum requirement points. It is also completely non-competitive in that it's independent of the students' actual performance during the exam. To make sure our decisions were sound, my supervisor and I would go through the 10 exams just below and just above the passing grade and see if they were all clear pass/fails. They usually all were. When not, it was usually just a matter of tweaking the rounding.
There is an open question regarding the amount of time given to the students, e.g. is it possible for them to solve all the questions, and thus is the mapping of maximum points to maximum grade justified? Here we played it safe by choosing only a few questions to make sure nobody would run out of time. The point is that if you do or don't know how to solve a problem, time won't be an issue. We also had two-hour exams, which gave the students ample time to show what they could, and what they couldn't do.
This system also works if you're the only person marking all the exams.
I would be very interested if anybody could suggest improvements or detect amendable flaws in this scheme, as it is what I plan to use myself, now that I'm a lecturer.

this is a really good solution.  I'm going to show this to the dean of my school.  I will leave this question open for more suggestions but thanks a lot!

when you say "let the students write the exam" do you mean let them take the exam?

@user522, yes, take the exam, sorry, have corrected the text!

also, why decide the minimum after the exams have been graded.  why not decide, in each question, what constitutes an A answer, a B answer, a C answer... before even handing them out. is this another way of doing it? or does this disrupt the system in some way?

@user522, good question, it's actually a matter of taste. I guess I can get a better feel for a question after I've seen how a few people have solved it (or not), and I also get the added expertise of whichever TA set up the grading scheme. As for A, B or C, I only look at the minimum requirement as anything below is a fail and an A+ is, by definition, a perfect score. Values in between can be interpolated.

thanks.  also, what about tests that are multiple choice or fill in the blank.  It seems like your grading system can only be used on long answer tests.  true?

@user522: Not necessarily, even for multiple choice questions you may have a variable number of points, e.g. for multiple correct answers, for getting the right box, for getting the wrong box, etc... Even if the marking is binary, you can still have questions that represent minimum requirements. Generally, though, I'm not a big fan of multiple-choice questions. They're easy to grade but do not, in my opinion, do a good ob of showing what a student knows. or doesn't.

ok thank you.  just curious, are there any other variations to this policy or are there other polices that you know of that are not competitive.  my school is considering implementing one such policy.

@user522: There are probably hundreds of variations of this marking scheme, but I only have experience with this particular one. Note that this scheme is also probably the result of several years of trail and error, evolving the particular details and leading to the current version.

I'd be very curious to know whether the actual grades differ substantially from simpler grading schemes (e.g. deciding on grades criteria in advance, or grading students relative to each other). My hunch is that, on the whole (once you have taken many exams and look at your GPA), the grading scheme complexity should not matter very much.

@Ana: Granted, over several grades, the errors and biases of each grading system will eventually be averaged out. This, however, is not a solution if you have a single piece of graded work which determines whether you pass/fail an entire course. Also, note that what I describe above is not a complex scheme: What's important is where what is done, i.e. when the scale is actually set. In terms of actual effort, this grading scheme is about as difficult to implement as any other.

The alternative is to assign grades based on non-curved performance, with cutoffs for each letter grade. That's pretty standard in many universities. The problem is you may have to wait a few semesters to optimize what the cutoffs should be, as you'll be failing or passing too many students in the beginning.

+1. Though its also possible to look at the distribution in a somewhat non-competitive fashion. Things like looking for clear breakpoints, or masses of students in certain areas. If there's a clear separation (say, a group of students who are clearly falling behind) its hard to argue that their grades are because of "competition".

What you're calling a competitive grading system is known pedagogically as norm-referenced assessment.  There are a number of ways to do this, but is based in the principle that a sudent's performance is judged in reference to other students.
The opposite is known as criterion-referenced assessment.  Its name is quite appropriate — you set up criteria.  If the student meets the criteria, they get the grade.
Rubrics are one way to do this that gives off a strong air of fairness (although sometimes might not jive with what holistically makes sense…see clustro's answer for one way around that).
But most people I know think when designing the methods of assessment think about three things (maybe not consciously, though):

What performance would indicate that a student is competent in the material I have taught, such that they can adequately take follow-up courses and succeed there? (grade: C)
What performance would indicate that a student has mastered the expectations for the course? (grade: B)
What performance would indicate that a student has gone beyond mastery of the basic expectations for the course? (grade: A)

For example, let's say we have an exam on the preterite in Spanish (where there are both regular and irregular verbs).  A C-level student ought to get most, but not quite all regular verbs, and have mixed performance on irregulars.  A B-level student ought to have all the regular verbs, while having mixed performance on the irregulars.  An A-level student would excel in all, consistently.
On the other hand, a D-level student might demonstrate cursory knowledge of verb formation, but not be able to apply it any remotely consistent manner.  And an F-level student would be clueless.
What criteria you use will depend greatly on the topic, and there are many ways to design exams.  For the aforementioned verb test, you might give 60-70% regular verbs and 30-40% irregular.  Based on the criteria given, you could expect grades to fall in the appopriate letter category (based on a 10pt scale).
For a longer mathematics problem, you might distribute points in a rubric over things like, does the student how to set up the problem? do they know how to solve it? were the calculations accurate?  Obviously a student who can understand how to set it up and solve it, but makes a few calculation errors has met the criteria for passing — but they haven't demonstrated the perfection needed to get the highest level of achievement.
A good instructor will constantly reevaluate the criteria (to see that they meet the needs of the course) and the assessment (to see that student performance numerically lines up with observed performance) and make adjustments as necessary.

In Mexico, the grading system is a scale that goes from 1-10 with a passing mark on 6-7 (depends on the professor)
Also, some professors would do global test averaging at least once in the semester, that is, make everyone take the test, and the average of the whole class is the mark for each student for that test.
One particular professor wouldn't say which test was this going to be (the first, second or third) so you had people making sure everyone knew the bare minimum to get a good mark for every test.

How does this answer the question?

Both examples I mentioned are examples of Non-Competitive Grading Systems

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Usefulness of graduate school extracurriculars
All graduate programs have committees such as the "social committee" and "speaker series committees", as well as Graduate Student Organizations and other organizations to work on behalf of these programs. Is there any concrete career benefit to being an officer on one of these committees/organizations?

Those volunteer positions may help boost your chances of getting a major award.  For example, one of the most prestigious graduate scholarships you can get in Canada is the Vanier Scholarship and the selection board uses your leadership experience as criteria for the award.
In addition to scholarships, it's always nice to have additional things to add to your CV to make you stand out.  These skills can show a number of traits that employers may look for.

It's a bit of a mixed bag. While there is certainly a lot of benefit to performing service activities—you are giving back to your community, and that is both admirable and expected to advance at all levels of academia—you need to strike a balance. No activities at all makes you look too single-minded (can be a concern for employers). Too many activities and it will look like you're not committed enough to research (again a concern). You need to strike a balance between the two.

More than being useful on my resume, being part of a student organization in a leadership role gave me new perspective. It allowed me to exercise my mind in a different way and allowed me to hone my administrative skills, people skills and time management skills.
It actually had a positive impact on my research because I was more focused as a result of having a "lot more on my plate".

I am a firm believer that if it doesn't lead to a publication, than it is generally not worth the time of a grad student. In my mind the social committee is a no win time suck. The speaker series committee, on the other hand, is potentially worth it for networking opportunities. It might all you to interact a little bit more with speakers. Even mundane interactions (e.g., dealing with their receipts and reimbursement) is good networking.


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What kind of Visa is required to work in Academia in Japan?
As from title. What kind of visa class do I have to apply for, in order to work as an academic in Japan ?

Generally the institution who hires you will prepare the required documents and process the application. If you come to Japan to hunt a job then you must apply for a temporary (tourist) visa that only allows you to stay in 90 days. But you might be waived for a tourist visa as you are a citizen who does not need a visa to enter Japan.

In 2018 I worked there as an unpaid intern at the Tokyo University. I had the "cultural activity visa".


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Is it possible to publish a paper on a topic about which you already wrote an online article?
I am a student and so I have no experience in publishing papers and I do not know much about it. My question: Is it necessary for publishing a paper in a journal, that you never have published something similar on your homepage / blog or on another online project?
I have the feeling that this is not a problem, because the own written online article on the personal blog was never peer-reviewed and publishing papers based on a dissertation does not seem to be a problem. Am I right?

This is perfectly acceptable.  It is, in fact, fairly common to "upgrade" a white-paper, technical note, or other such non-peer-reviewed publication into a peer-reviewed publication.  Two important caveats, however:

The appropriate form for a peer-reviewed publication is generally very different than for a blog post or similar informal format.  You will likely need to almost entirely rewrite the publication in any case.
If the other material is durably available or has been circulated in academic circles previously, however, you should acknowledge this fact and reference the prior publications.  This may be in the form of a citation, or in the cover letter of the article, or both.


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Effects of Game-based Learning on Motivation for Learning
I found many studies discovering the impact of game-based learning on motivation for learning.
For example, these papers
You can also find a summary of them in this book chapter.
However, it is still unclear to me if this motivation is for entertainment or for learning. I was wondering if there is any study showing that students who are adapted to this method of learning have a higher motivation to pursue learning in other forms. My concern is about long-term effects of this method of learning. What is the intrinsic reaction of K-12 students who have adapted to game-based learning when they start higher education in which game-based learning is not provided? Will they have a higher incentive to study? or a lower incentive, because they prefer to play games rather than studying?

This is a very interesting question, though I have only few knowledge about it... But I believe, when things are learned playfully- it is more effective. The game genre also matters, especially when different subjects require different skills to learn...

Since game-based learning is a rather new thing (as I understand), I can't imagine too much has been done regarding long-term studies.

Game based learning isn't that terribly new. I grew up on Reader Rabbit, Math Blaster, and Carmen Sandiego, etc. Anecdotally, they were helpful, but I'm less convinced of the Second Life-style game made for one of the intro textbooks that my department uses :-)

I'm a higher ed instructional designer. Our industry is beginning to integrate serious games(a term that seems to be replacing educational games) and the principles of gamification into our courses, particularly those that are online. We know that K-12 students are using Learning Management Systems, mobile devices, and games to learn (whether formally or informally), so we are getting ready for them.
On gaming versus studying: A well-designed serious game and/or gameified learning environment IS studying. Instructional designers like myself who are present on a team developing a gamified online unit of instruction or course are there to ensure that pedagogical best practices are embedded in the content. I can't really answer a generalized statement about higher or lower incentives/motivation because no specific audience has been defined. Individuals, and their reaction to different types of curriculum, vary.

thank you for your response. Where can I find resources and tools to apply game-based learning in the courses I teach?

I would search online using such keywords as, "gamification" and "serious gaming" in addition to keywords related to what you teach (if you taught English Comp I in higher ed, for example, you'd add keywords like "English", "higher ed", etc.). When starting out, it helps to see how to apply such principles to your specific subject and grade level.


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Professors who use their own idiosyncratic names for things
I sometimes have professors who use their own names for things. For example in lecture one kept referring to the "perfect marriage algorithm" but after talking with him I'm fairly certain he was referring to the Stable marriage problem. This is a challenge for me as I prefer to learn a little about a topic before going to a lecture, or read up on points discussed in the lecture after it. Are there any suggestions on how to approach this? The prof from the example above told us not to use Google to learn material for the class. With that said, he's a very reasonable and intelligent man, but I've been in other classes where profs have used nonstandard terminology (such as in math saying solve a problem by symmetry) and it would be difficult to talk to them.
I don't want to offend them by suggesting the name their using is wrong, but it makes studying from other resources hard and I don't think it's practical to try to learn everything just from lecture.

I know some cases where faculty make up their own names for things precisely so you can't just google the topic easily.  Often the point is to make you try to think for yourself, which is not a bad thing.

To paraphrase Feynman: when you learn the name of a thing, all you've learnt about is how people name things; you haven't learnt about the thing itself.

It is also possible that the same concept has different names. For example, the famous Squeeze Theorem in maths is also known as Pinching Theorem or Sandwich Theorem or Policemen Theorem. Especially if the teacher comes from a different culture, it may genuinely think its notations/terminology are standard. Using point 3 of grauwulf's answer helps to know if you are in this situation.

I would use Google anyway.  As long as you only use Google to learn concepts and don't use it to give you hints on the homework problems, I don't see how a professor can reasonably stop you from going online.  That would be like saying "I'm teaching you real analysis, but you're only allowed to listen to ME, you're not allowed to talk about real analysis with anyone else."  Which is super controlling in my opinion.  (For instance how would you know he's not feeding you wrong information, if you can't verify it with other sources?)  It's not fair to prevent students from getting second opinions

@Ben Bitdiddle: There are certain pedagogical approaches (such as the Moore method) that rely on the students developing standard material for themselves. In that sense, the  entire course is homework, and the approach is spoiled if the students Google anything.

"Google" is a red herring. The problem is that this prevents you from using textbooks! Suppose I want to see what different textbooks say about compact operators. If my professor calls them "well-behaved operators", I will not be able to use any textbook, because they won't discuss "well-behaved operators". This is not "teaching students to learn for themselves". This is obfuscation, and sabotaging the entire academic enterprise. Learning is hard enough, there is no excuse for making it even harder by inventing your own terminology.

@Taladris - My undergraduate analysis teacher used to refer to the Squeeze Theorem as the Fly-Swatter Theorem, a bit more gory and violent, but it certainly gets the point across. Nowadays, I try to use standard terminology and mention some of the non-standard terms that are used.

There is a "stable marriage theorem" (aka Gale-Ryser theorem) and a "perfect marriage theorem" (aka Hall perfect-matching theorem), and the two are not the same. If your professor uses the name of one of them for the other, it is more of a mistake than an idiosyncrasy. That said, please make sure it isn't you who is doing the mixing-up.

This is a tough one because it is a topic that meanders into psychology. I have encountered similar problems when professors insist on calling, that thing that everyone else calls agrees on as blue, pink. I will also add that I agree that this is an "academia" problem, as it relates to distribution and comprehension of information.
Three techniques for clarification that I have tried. YMMV.

Ask the professor why they feel the need to be an opaque and pedantic prat. Tell them to stop making up new names for things to feel better about their pathetic little existence and use the language of the field. This method has been met with some ... "resistance". :-P
Ask the professor is X has any adjacent concepts or theories that might be good to look up. This is dangerous as sometimes the prof. will decide to wax poetic on the art of Edvard Munch when you started out talking about impedance mismatch. Use with caution.
Ask the professor about the similarities and differences between X and Y. On a few occasions I have been VERY surprised to learn that I had completely misunderstood the point they were trying to make. All I needed to do was ask the simple question of "is this like such and such?" This has worked several times. BONUS: This approach has also led to some interesting discussions that worked back around to my area of research.

Jokes aside, the common theme here is 'to ask'. :-) As for "don't use google"... I don't know what to say about that. I guess you could ask for other reference material to gain a better understanding of the topic but google scholar is a pretty awesome/terrible research tool to use as a handicap. (IMHO)
Good luck with your class.

I'm really glad that (2) is a well-established pattern.

I agree with 2 and 3, but I doubt that 1 will be much help in this situation.

Politely asking for a little clarification has worked well for me.  Is "term x" similar to "term y"?  Sometimes this is met with "Yes, term x is what I call term y."
For example, my Data Structures professor was using a term that I would deem "non-standard".  He was discussing "k-trees", but it was clear from the context that he didn't mean k-trees from graph theory.  I asked him if "k-trees" were similar to "k-ary trees".  That led to him explaining the similarities between what he calls "k-trees" and "k-ary trees".
Then again, not every professor is so helpful.


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What is the purpose of having grades?
What is the idea behind giving a student a grade? It might sound like a funny question but I'm serious.
I ask because in my previous question about disputing a mark, it's hard for me to decide how many marks and how much effort I should put into having a mark changed. If the purpose of going to school is to learn (something presumably you don't already know) then how do marks fit into the equation?
Given some of the answers and comments on the question I'm curious, how did this mentality that marks are non-negotiable arise? There seems to be the belief the prof has a totalitarian rule over the students. This doesn't make sense, especially considering how commercialized some schools have become. In any other area of business if a client pays (e.g. a student pays tuition) and is dissatisfied or has a concern about a service, then the company would work with them and either explain or change some part of the contract. How is it with teachers they get away with simply saying "that's the right mark"? (I know that's rather a facetious example but hopefully the point is clear). I'm certainly not suggesting one can or should be able to buy grades: rather I meant in business there seems to be a certain level of diplomacy which doesn't exist between students and teachers. For example in the question linked to it was mentioned that even if the wording to a question is vague, if there had been examples in class of a similar question then it should be known what is being asked for. This wouldn't happen in business. If a client said they wanted x, they're not going to pay for y; conversely if they had asked for x and wanted y, they're not going to sue the company.
It may be relevant to note that where I go to school, costs quite a bit of money (and it's a public university).
After reading this several months latter, I hope my tone didn't come across as too harsh.

I've always thought it was to be able to quantify the unquantifiable. If no grades were given, how do the student's next [whatever is next] quantify what the student learned previously? I get that is a hard sentence. What I mean is this. If the next whatever is grad school, and it has 5 openings and 5000 applicants, how does it even begin to weed? If the next is a job, then how does the job know which of three young students are going to provide higher levels of work?

I don't give grades.  Students earn them.  All I do is set and enforce the standard by which they are judged as objectively and fairly as possible (i.e. the test).

In any other area of business if a client pays and is dissatisfied or has a concern about a service... — Yes, but the service is not the grade.  The service is the opportunity to learn in a structured environment with like-minded peers, proper equipment, and expert feedback and advice.  Among other things, you are paying for an honest professional opinion about your mastery of the material.

It may be relevant to note that where I go to school, costs quite a bit of money. — Nope.  Not relevant at all.

There is one university in the US famous for not using grades: Evergreen State College

In general, teachers get away with "that's the right mark" because they know the material better than the students and they understand the process of marking better. The marking guidelines should be clear (a rubric should be provided) up front. That said, there is nothing wrong with you asking for some tutoring on how to mark your own papers against a rubric.

@JeffE when I go to the doctor I am paying for an honest professional opinion, but I reserve the right to ask for a second opinion.

What I find most fascinating in this discussion is that people apparently believe that being a customer gives you absolute say in how a business should be operated. I am a customer of World of Warcraft, and somehow I still can't make Blizzard send me great loot for free all the time.

I reserve the right to ask for a second opinion — Of course.  And students have the right (and usually the opportunity) to retake any class from a different instructor.

Be happy if what you pay has no bearing on what grades you received; the rise of a generation of parents who feel their children are entitled to good grades because of what they paid is doing a great disservice to everyone!

This might be related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVqMAlgAnlo

A professor who I used to work with once gave me an explanation that I found quite useful for understanding the purpose and philosophy of grading.  Universities, he said, must always struggle with a tension between two educational goals, illumination and certification.

Illumination means the intellectual development of the student, bringing them a deeper understanding of a subject, its relation to the world, and the deeper issues it may touch on.  From the perspective of illumination, marks are intended to be feedback to students that helps them realize weaknesses in their understanding so that they can fix them.
Certification means evaluating a set of skills acquired by the students against an objective standard, to attempt to measure their fitness for certain tasks or professions.  From the perspective of certification, marks are intended to be objective judgement of the fitness of the student for carrying out tasks requiring the skills taught in a class.

These two are often in tension with one another because certification pushes teaching toward rote practice and standardized testing and grading, while illumination pushes toward more open-ended exploration and interactive formats which can deliver much more benefit for apt students but are often very subjective.  Most classes try to deliver both, to varying degrees of success, though some classes may almost entirely hew to a single side of the balance.
You need to decide what you're after from the classes that you take.  From your "pay for service" tone, it sounds like you want the career value that comes from certification.  But certification isn't valuable if the standard can be easily negotiated, and so professors have to set a standard and stick by it.  Sometimes they are even forced to by regulations.  From the perspective of certification, trying to negotiate for a better grade is trying to cheat the system and reduce the value of everybody's grades.
Moreover, one of the "meta-skills" that is always being certified is the ability to figure out what somebody wants from you.  If you're out in industry and you deliver the wrong thing because you misinterpreted your client's needs and didn't ask for clarification, it will be difficult to argue that you should be given more partial credit.
If, on the other hand, you're after illumination, then grades are less important to begin with.  In that case, it's more important to understand why you got the grade that you got, so that you can improve your understanding of the material.  If you want illumination and you aren't getting it, you need to switch courses, majors, or institutions.

I'd mention that negotiating for a better grade is cheating if you expect to get the better grade purely because of the negotiation, but it's not cheating if you actually deserve the better grade (which is rare but possible).

@DavidZ Well, things do get overseen in tests. As well, it depends on the type of the test. We have oral exams, I wouldn't change anything because checking that someone understand math proofs in an ABCD test is ridiculous, but we all know that oral exams are "not precise" and "subjective".

A university is like some software-companies, which provide seminars with certification (for example Fulffy-Certified Database Admin) you also pay for 2 Services, the education and the certification. They could also be provided by two separate companies - like with many independent language tests - which only provide certification (and you also pay a lot for a TOEFL-Test and can't diskuss the grade they give you, because that is the reason their certification is worth anything!)

@DavidZ I feel like negotiation is somewhat inaccurate for certain situations. For example, my professor once subtracted double points for a single question that lowered me a letter grade. Would that be negotiation or pointing out the professor's error, which he corrected?

@DavidZ saying negotiating for a better grade is cheating, is the same as how school call what industry calls "collaboration", cheating.

@Celeritas I'm not sure what you mean by "collaboration", but I don't believe that's at all analogous. In grading there's an implicit assumption that the work submitted by a student has some "true" grade, and the grader does their best to derive an approximation to that true grade by examining the work. Negotiating to improve your grade is OK only if you are trying to fix a discrepancy between your assigned grade and the true grade; otherwise, it's cheating the system. In collaboration, there is nothing analogous to the "true" grade, as far as I know.

Given some of the answers and comments on the question I'm curious, how did this mentality that marks are non-negotiable arise? There seems to be the belief the prof has a totalitarian rule over the students. This doesn't make sense, especially considering how commercialized some schools have become. In any other area of business if a client pays (e.g. a student pays tuition) and is dissatisfied or has a concern about a service, then the company would work with them and either explain or change some part of the contract.

I don't think "non-negotiable" is the right word.  Marks can be questioned and even challenged.  However such challenges are (outside of the movie Clueless) not negotiations, because that implies a business transaction in which the student is offering something in return.
[Also, professors do not have "totalitarian rule" over the students.  We don't have any "rule" over the students.  We can only ask them to do certain limited things and they get to decide whether to do them or not.  It is of course very common for students to drop or exchange a class because they are not happy with some aspect of how it is being run.  This is really the antithesis of totalitarian rule.]
Grading is not a business transaction.  You seem to think (or at least be willing to argue) that modern academia is a business transaction in which the student is the client and the instructor is the service provider.  Well, there is some truth to that, but it also has severe limitations.  (By the way, I have found that most businesses whose services I enlist as a paying client have severe limitations on how they are willing to work with me or (especially) change part of the contract in response to my complaints.  The threat of losing my business does something in some cases and very little in others.)
It is worth thinking about what services a university is actually providing, and to whom.  If all you wanted from your university was to teach you courses and give you a grade at the end, you could enroll in internet classes at little (or no) cost.  Most universities -- especially expensive ones -- are also certifying competence and providing prestige to their graduates.  That is why you are paying them the big bucks.  This only works if the grades themselves are not negotiable in the sense you mean.  At a very elite university there will be considerable resources available for the student and steps taken to try to ensure their success, and the average GPA may be higher than at some other universities.  But I taught calculus at Harvard for several years, and every time there were some students who got D's and F's.  A B- in calculus at Harvard is a discouraging grade -- literally; it is meant to signal to the student to seriously shape up or not continue studying math -- but it does certify some amount of calculus knowledge.  To get an A in calculus at Harvard you must indeed be very good at the subject: Harvard wouldn't be a top American university if it gave top grades to students who had not mastered the material.
Sometimes it helps to make the situation more extreme.  If you think that "the student should always be right", perform this thought experiment: I will offer you the opportunity to take the COSATs, a consumer-oriented variant of the SATs.  Every student who takes my exam will pass.  In fact, every student who gets less than the 50th percentile will have their score reported as "satisfactory".  And that's just for basic members.  Silver members will be allowed to answer again the questions that they got wrong and will have their exams rescored.  Gold members will be offered the same service together with additional instructional materials that will include complete and comprehensive answers to all exam questions.  Platinum members get online access to the materials while taking the exam, in a patented "one-click: correct!" format.  Of course the COSATs will cost money -- so do the SATs!  But actually basic membership is cheaper than the SATs and silver, gold and platinum membership is surprisingly competitively priced.  Are you interested?

I would think that coSATS are taken by lleges who apply to costudents. I will show myself out now.

Grades do many things, and there is no general agreement which of those things is the most important. A few things that grades do are:

Grades motivate students to learn. Without grades, many students would not learn nearly as much, because the mere presence of grades encourages students to study.
Grades tell others whether students have mastered the material of the class (e.g. which students can count a class towards graduation, and which need to re-take the class).
Grades tell others how students compare with each other (e.g. to help determine which students are accepted to competitive graduate programs).

Even when they disagree about why grades are assigned, most professors do want to grade fairly, and will listen to student comments and consider them seriously. But, as I described in another post, the situation may be more complex than is apparent from a student perspective. Moreover, many universities have a system for "grade appeals" through which students can formally dispute grades. So, far from being "non-negotiable", grades are usually subject to review by the professor's superiors at the university.

In any other area of business if a client pays (e.g. a student pays tuition) and is dissatisfied or has a concern about a service, then the company would work with them and either explain or change some part of the contract.

This is not really the case. Imagine two hypothetical scenarios.

I buy an annual membership in a local warehouse club (e.g. Costco or Sam's Club), and then tell them I don't like their bananas, and I want them to buy some other kind. They are likely to ignore me, unless many other people make a similar request. They may well just tell me to go buy bananas somewhere else if I don't like the ones they offer. There are various opinions about whether universities can afford to take a similar position with their students.
I hire a professional opera singer, but then I tell her that I want her to sing pop songs, and by the way can she also lose a little weight and learn how to dance better?  She's just as likely to just tell me "no" as she is to work with me to figure out which pop songs I prefer. She has an uncommon skill that is sufficiently in demand to keep her employed. There are various opinions about whether professors are in a similar situation.

The applicability of #1 and #2 to universities can certainly be questioned. These examples are just meant to show that it is not universally true that a paying customer can negotiate freely with the company or person being paid. This goes against the idea that this sort of negotiation should "also" apply at universities.

First off, I would say that the primary importance of a grade is to be able to certify that you actually mastered the material. Simply knowing "X attended Y university and studied Z" tells me next to nothing about how much X knows about Z without the additional information provided by grades. This is not to say that GPA is the end-all-be-all of the hiring process, but it does make a significant difference in my ability to determine how successful the candidate was in work similar to what I'm wanting him or her to do if hired. This is especially true for candidates who are recent graduates and don't have an extensive work experience to point to. It can also be helpful in cases where a candidate can't give much in the way of specifics about prior work projects, such as if those projects were classified or otherwise secretive in nature.
Second, Regarding this portion of the question:

In any other area of business if a client pays (e.g. a student pays tuition) and is dissatisfied or has a concern about a service, then the company would work with them and either explain or change some part of the contract.

In order to serve their above-stated purpose, it is essential that grades be objective. If you can buy a grade, it is worth absolutely nothing because it does not serve the purpose of a grade. In order for the degrees granted by an institution to be valuable, the grading process must be held to high standards of ethics and objectivity. Having those standards violated is an enormous black mark on the reputation of the institution. Furthermore, when discovered, it will likely result in the termination of those involved. For a recent example, see UNC Chapel Hill academics-athletics scandal.
As far as the 'customer' analogy is concerned, consider that you are not the only customer of the institution. If the institution allows you to get a degree and a good GPA without actually mastering the material, that makes not only your degree worthless, but also the degrees of everyone else in that program. Since it can be reasonably assumed that most of the other students and alumni don't want their degrees to be useless, the institution is, in fact, acting in accordance with what their 'customers' want by maintaining the integrity of the grading process.

+1. Part of what you are paying for is an independent assessment of your accomplishments, which others will understand was not influenced by you.

Hate to say it but you would never, ever hire me if you saw my undergraduate GPA.  And yet I've gone on to teach Masters' level computer programming at some pretty prestigious schools WITHOUT an advanced degree or formal education in computer science and now work for a leading technology company in a very senior position.  I just found school boring and why should I care about grades that come from teachers who made no effort to challenge me?  Doubt this will change your mind about anything, but had to point that out.

@DaveKaye That's why I said it's not the end-all-be-all of the hiring process and is mostly important for recent graduates without much work experience. There are lots of great self-taught professionals, though they're more the exception than the rule these days. Teaching Master's level classes does surprise me, though. That's generally forbidden for someone without a Ph.D. in the field at the universities I've been familiar with (in the U.S.) A Master's degree is required even to teach undergraduate courses at the university I attended.

@DaveKaye Grades certainly aren't the only way to know how well someone knows something, but they are an important way to know, again, especially for those without much other relevant experience.

Eh, maybe.  Having done plenty of admissions and hiring if I see a student has done some other kind of outstanding work I'm not sure I'm even going to be wondering about GPA or test scores at that point.  I mean, I don't think that Bill Gates guy has a Ph.D.  Think he could get a job teaching at Stanford?  Also know many students who coast through college taking "easy A" classes and even dropping classes if they feel they can't get an A.  So yes, nice to have a perfect 4.0, but it's but one factor among many, and stops mattering pretty quickly in your career.

@DaveKaye Yes, I'm pretty sure Bill Gates could get an exception to policy. Most people aren't Bill Gates, though. And, yes, it's possible to take all "easy A" classes in some majors at some schools, but it's kind of hard to do that while getting an engineering degree at a respected engineering school. It's easy enough to tell the difference by looking at a transcript.

Oh yes, I absolutely agree.  Not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  Just saying grades are not the SOLE measure of accomplishment for every student in every situation.  Think we mostly agree here.

If the purpose of going to school is to learn [...] then how do marks fit into the equation?

Grades are a "cheap" way of assessing what a student has learned on a specific topic. Imperfect and cheap as they are, grades are nonetheless one of the best tools that we (as humans) were able to conceive for assessing learning without introducing more serious problems (experiments have been made, but with doubtful success).
But let me stress a few facts about grades and grading which sometimes students overlook:

Sometimes students are discouraged by bad grades because they feel deflated as persons. Grades, however, do not assess personal or moral qualities: better grades do not make better people. As I said, a grade is just a measure of what a student has learned or understood on a specific topic and, also, of his ability to convey this learning to other people (don't underestimate this part!). But no more than that.
Grades are not proportional to the amount of study done. This might seem unfair: I've studied so much, I deserve a better grade! Rather, grades are roughly proportional to the quality of your study. If you study a lot and you don't get good grades, probably you have to change your approach.
Grades are the result of a measurement and, as such, are subject to uncertainty. There is no such thing as a right grade as there is no such thing as an exact measurement. The amount of uncertainty depends on many factors, e.g. the type of exam, the grader, the neatness of students' papers etc. A professor should try to keep this uncertainty to a minimum, but it will be never negligible.
Grades can't be negotiated in the sense of "hey prof, here I should've got 3 more marks", but you can say "I think that this piece of solution, which was marked as wrong, might be right because of this and that etc.". Then, if the professor recognizes that you're right, he or she will upgrade your marks on the basis of their rubric; if they think you're wrong anyway, they will explain where your argument fails.

This is not so much an answer as an extended comment on 'the right mark' from someone who has to allocate marks.
On the whole I would not say with certainty that a mark I have given is 'the right mark' (well, unless it's 0), only that it's close enough. For most questions that are useful for actually teaching students something, it's very difficult to be completely objective. Even if you start with a detailed mark scheme, the way you decide whether something slides across the yes/no divide will change over the course of a large pile of scripts. I also often suspect that some students get the marks more by luck than judgement. For this reason I think it's best to have worked in to the grade system a way of checking borderline cases.
Not discussing marks also acts a defense mechanism, particularly in cultures where students are focused more on marks than learning. I believe it is not unusual for a large section of a class to try and argue for more marks. This is frustrating just in terms of being time-consuming for anyone, and disappointing for people who really care about the students learning. It can also be particularly difficult when students understand so little of the topic that they cannot be shown why they are wrong.
Another thing I've come across, particularly in the context of north American large classes, is 'I'm really close to the grade boundary so it's not fair to give me the lower grade'. When there are hundreds of students, and grade boundaries are 5% apart, being 0.8% below a boundary can mean there are 5 or more students closer to the grade boundary!
In the other direction, if you really feel your grade is substantially wrong, do ask about it. It can be a mistake, particularly if the marker has not noticed part of your work, or added up the marks wrong.

My favorite "not even wrong" argument was a student who complained that we had marked his (completely broken) code as incorrect even though it had most of the same words as the sample answer.

@jakebeal I took a drafting class where a student complained of not getting 100% because he got the teacher to demonstrate the entire solution to him and he copied all of it.

While I generally agree with the answer by @jakebeal, I also wanted to note what is probably the single most important part of the reason we grade (which I don't see mentioned).
The ultimate point of education is to create individuals capable of producing work of sufficient, consistent quality. The ability to self-evaluate and recalibrate towards the desired quality is the essential component of consistency (at least for mere mortals).
While the instructive and gate-keeping functions of grades are important, the feedback grades convey helps us create an internal model of what qualifies as "good" and "bad" and "mediocre" work in our fields. If we don't build models (and learn to apply them to our own work), we'll forever be at the mercy of hand-holders and gate-keepers to tell us what we've done wrong.

Historically, grades are relatively recent in the university system. The first universities in the modern sense sprouted up in the High Middle Ages (circa 1200 and afterwards). They used disputations (formal, logical, oral debates) as a means of assessment. Grading began in the 1800s when professors wanted a quicker way of assessing progress; those professors using grades were considered lazy.
cf. "History of Grading Systems" by Nicole Lassahn.

Based on my experiences I realized that most students make more effort if the course is graded rather than its result is just marked by Pass or Fail. Consequently they learn more. Of course there are also exceptions: the situations where they make effort regardless of the grade.