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Submitting a manuscript that is not ready yet just to fulfil a contract
I am part (working part time) of a research project that is funded by the government in another European country (not the one I live in). As part of my contract with that project, I'm required to submit a manuscript reporting the research to a peer-reviewed journal by a deadline.
However, because of unforeseen circumstances (mainly related to methods that didn't work as expected), the manuscript was not ready for submission by the deadline. In fact, it received very critical responses when presented at a conference earlier this year, and it is clear that major changes have to be done before it is ready to submit. That conference is organised by the same association that publishes the two journals that I had in mind when writing the paper, so I think that I should heed their advice.
Yet, I'm being forced to submit it by the deadline or I will face a fine. My co-author, who is from that other country, has been very clear that I have to submit the article, period. That co-author has been very helpful in buying me time, but the changes needed are very time demanding (I need to basically re-do the whole study), and I'm not working full time on that project.
What is the most sensible thing to do? Can I just submit it anyway? I thought about sending it to a journal where I expect it to be desk-rejected just to fulfill my contract, and then do the necessary changes to submit to the journal I originally intended to send it to. Would it be ethical? What other options do I have?

Is the JofUR an option?

I wish it was, but I guess it has to be a real journal (one that publishes papers).

What about the sort of journal that will publish anything so long as you pay them?  Most will claim to be peer-reviewed if anybody asks.

@SimonB It is not the type of thing that I would like to see published, specially when I know that, if I didn't have the deadline, I would be able to make the changes and publish it where I originally intended to.

If all negotiations failed, I think it is time to consider also the possibility of paying the fine. Is the possibility to have a good paper instead of a crap one (don't forget your scientific record) worth the fine (maybe also think through a couple of scenarios depending on what source of money can be used for the fine, or will it just be subtracted from the project money)?

Contracts for scientific research can often be thought of as having two components:

A set of "minimum requirement" fixed deliverables that you must accomplish or else face penalties, and
A set of actual goals, which may or may not be able to be accomplished as anticipated, given the uncertainties of every sort of interesting research.

Typically, the fixed deliverables are things like "write annual reports" and "create a prototype implementation of X" that should be able to be accomplished as long as the research is progressing well.
"Submit a paper on this research," on the other hand, is a foolish requirement to have in a contract, because whether a paper should be submitted at a particular time or not is very dependent on context.  For example, you might have been doing wonderfully, but then be unable to submit as anticipated because of related work that other people have published in the mean time.  It is for this reason that in my contracts I typically propose something more vague like, "communicate with scientific community on results of the research" and put the fixed deliverable as reports to the funder on what we've done.
So something's already rather screwy in your contract, and you need to deal with it.  I think the most important thing to figure out is whether the pressure to fulfill the letter of the contract is coming from a program manager who cares about the research or an accountant who does not.  Talk to the leaders of the project and see if they can figure out, because my recommended path depends on which it is:

If the pressure to publish comes from an accountant or similar "box-ticking" authority who does not actually care about the research, only about fulfilling the ridiculous contract, then I would recommend fulfilling the technicality by asking something like Nature or Science to desk-reject your manuscript.  Confirm the plan with your co-authors and others on the team, and make it clear what you are doing in your cover letter, and I'm certain they will provide you the rejection you desire without doing any significant damage to your career.
If the pressure to publish comes from a program manager who actually cares about the research, then you are in a much more difficult situation, and the desk rejection ploy is unlikely to satisfy them.  At the same time, the program manager could likely grant an exception to the contract to allow you to not submit. In this case, I think that it is important to understand why there is so much pressure to submit (perhaps it signifies that the whole project or program is in trouble?), and for the project leaders to negotiate with the program manager.  If they've already done so and failed... well, you're stuck in a bad situation.

If you're in the second situation, negotiations have failed, and you really must submit, I would recommend not submitting results that you believe should not be published.  That is the sort of thing that can haunt you for your career.  Instead, I would recommend submitting the part that you are comfortable with---the study design---in a paper that clearly and honestly says this is all that is done right now and puts the completion of the new study into future work.  Make sure that anything you submit is something that you would actually be OK with seeing in print if it does get through the peer review process, and make it clear in your cover letter that you are aware that this is preliminary and will be happy to accept a decision by the editors to either proceed or not.
And then never accept a contract with such a horrible clause in the future.

It all boils down to me accepting such a contract, but it is my first research contract of such type and I was foolish to sign it. I can't negotiate with the administrators handling it due to they speaking another language, being in  another country, at a university I have not been to. I know that these things alone should have raised red flags, but my co-author who has double affiliation with my institution is someone whom I trust and who has been helpful through all the process.

@Kenji Then either your co-author should be willing to work with you regarding something like the solutions that I propose, or else they keep pressuring you and you should re-evaluate the degree to which you trust them.

I think I will first try to talk about these solutions with my co-author. Your advice seems sound.

@Kenji Don't beat yourself up over the contract, either: it's easy to make mistakes like that early in your career.  I've certainly made some myself.

Thanks for the comforting comment. I try to look at the bright side and learn a lesson from it.

+1 just for the first bullet. Way to stick it to the man! :)

I am rather shocked by what I perceive as the utter stupidity of the contractual requirement to submit your work by a predetermined deadline regardless of whether you have actually produced any work of publishable quality. I will analyze your question from a theoretical ethics perspective, since on the practical level there are already some good suggestions. The way I see it, you are in a uniquely peculiar situation in which almost all options available to you are unethical in one way or another. Specifically:

The option to submit research that you know to be flawed with the intention that it gets rejected is very clearly unethical. You would be putting the editor, and possibly a reviewer, through the trouble of handling your submission only so that you can satisfy your contractual requirement. I would see such an action as a clear abuse of the academic publication system and would look very negatively on a person doing such a thing. (As others have pointed out, there can also be a real risk that your paper may actually be accepted, which would perhaps have even worse consequences for your career and raise its own quite serious ethical concerns.)
The option to submit the flawed article (or a satire of an article, as in emory's answer) along with a request that it be desk-rejected (and an explanation of your motivation) is a bit better, since it is unlikely to cause a very large burden to the editor handling your "submission". However, it is still essentially a form of spam, and as such mildly unethical. Depending on how high your ethical standards are, you may feel (rightly, in my opinion) that a contractual obligation requiring you to degrade yourself and inconvenience another person in such a way is itself unethical.
The option to decide not to submit an article describing the flawed research and pay the fine is unfair to you, and as such, also unethical (hurting yourself raises ethical issues that are quite real and may in fact be no less severe than the ethical issues associated with hurting other people). It may be a minor thing and unimportant to you in the grand scheme of things, depending on the size of the fine, but remember, I'm analyzing the situation from a theoretical point of view.

Finally, I can think of two approaches that don't require you to do anything even a little bit unethical, but they both have their downsides:

You can contact the government agency to whom this contractual obligation was made (and other parties who are signatories to the contract), explain the situation clearly and honestly, and ask them to waive or modify the requirement to submit the paper by the prescribed deadline. As stupid as this requirement is, the people who proposed it are still human beings, hopefully with some common sense, so I think there is a chance that you can get them to agree that this is a requirement that might have been entered into in good faith but simply does not make any sense in the current situation (this happens frequently with contracts, where some assumption was made that turns out later not to apply and the contract needs to be changed or reinterpreted). They have authority to modify the terms of your contract, and if they agree to do so you will be in the clear and the problem will go away.
The downside of this approach is that it would be bothersome and time-consuming to explain the situation to all the parties involved (if you can even easily find out who is the right person you need to talk to), and in the end they may turn out to be stubborn and mindless bureaucrats and simply refuse to cooperate.
Alternatively to 4 (or in addition to 4 if you tried that and that didn't work), you have the option to not submit the paper and not pay the fine. This probably sounds like a dangerous thing to do, and it may in fact be a dangerous thing to do. However, from a purely theoretical perspective I claim that this is the most ethical action of the ones I proposed. In the law there is the concept of an unconscionable contract, which is a contract or contractual obligation that is morally or ethically unjust and therefore is held to be legally invalid. I am not a lawyer, but I believe the requirement you have described is precisely an example of such a contractual obligation, and ethically speaking I feel you would be completely within your rights to ignore it. This may even be a position that would be defensible in court, but since I'm not a lawyer I can't advise you about that. Of course, it's important to emphasize that practically speaking, such a move may very well be ill-advised and could lead to all sorts of negative consequences for you.
By the way, it is possible that some people will counter that since you entered into the contract knowingly, the argument that the requirement is unconscionable is not valid (or less valid). I believe this is false -- in fact, the nature of unconscionable obligations is that by definition they are invalid even if entered into knowingly. Moreover, in your comment you stated that "It all boils down to me accepting such a contract, but it is my first research contract of such type and I was foolish to sign it. I can't negotiate with the administrators handling it due to they speaking another language, being in another country, at a university I have not been to." I believe this is a very good explanation and would in my opinion absolve you of any hypothetical responsibility that might be ascribed to you otherwise, even discounting my claim above that unconscionable obligations cannot be entered into even knowingly.

To summarize, from the practical point of view your best options are probably 4 (if it works), 3, or 2. Option 5 is theoretically the most appealing to me, but I recognize it's not very practical. Option 1 is unacceptable and I would advise you to avoid using it under any circumstances.
I'm not sure this answer will be helpful to you in a practical sense, but I hope this theoretical analysis may be helpful to you or someone else (and I am happy to debate the points I made above if anyone thinks they see a flaw in my reasoning). I certainly found it very interesting to think about this peculiar situation.

If you don't submit a manuscript to a journal you will get fined?  What would Marshawn Lynch do in this situation?
Prepare a manuscript titled "I am just submitting this manuscript so I won't get fined".  I am not sure it is necessary to write anything more than the title.  Submit.  Do not be surprised if your manuscript gets rejected without review.

The contract says that I have to submit an article about the research that was proposed in the grant application. I would at least need to have the right title.


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'best poster' and 'best talk' prizes - can we do better determining winners?
I am a new board member of a few small, local research and health societies.
We run a couple of events each year, often with poster and oral presentation prizes. One thing that I noticed as a judge in my specific environment is that these prizes are highly random. Basically, the most dominant judge will push their choice through to first place. In another example, I have witnessed a few prizes that went to horrible presentations, some that were so bad that I talked about their poor quality to my other senior colleagues and they completely agreed.
Is there a good way to determine winners? I don't really mind who wins the prize but rather I am sympathetic with those many presenters that don't win. What sticks often with them is that they weren't good enough and the winner seemed to clearly out-competed them, which is objectively not true. I had several students asking me for how they could improve and although I am providing feedback, I know it was 'not their fault'.
I thought about how we could improve things. One of my ideas was to determine the top presenters (say 2 per judge or so) and then decide the winner by lot. That way nobody knows if they were in the inner circle and luck with support a good talk but it's not necessarily 'the best'.
Just to re-emphasise this, I am talking about small societies with less than 100 members where almost everyone knows each other and most often also know about their work.
What do people think? Thanks for any input!

Create a simple rubric and make sure more than one judge evaluates each presentation and poster. Then tally up the scores.

I don't find clear in your question whether you call prizes "highly random" in the first place because there were many about equally good contributions (in which case I'm not sure much can be done), or because you think contributions that were clearly better didn't win the prize. If a "most dominant judge" pushes undeserving contributions to win, the problem may need very different treatment from a situation in which you don't have clear criteria and the like.

Or is the problem rather that you are worried about the overall quality and want to stimulate participants to do better by becoming more competitive? This issue is again different from the two potential problems mentioned above.

I don't know if this is within your power, but I would start by considering whether the prizes are a good thing in the first place. What purpose are they serving? Do they actually motivate people to produce better work?

If it were up to me, I would replace the word "best" with something else, since it's clearly not the case that there exists any "best" paper or talk, nor that this process could reliably pick it if there were. I'm not sure what I'd use but something like highlight, spotlight, or even just award.

Are you rewarding the presentation quality only, or the science that is being presented?  It's possible to present good science in a horrible way or vice versa.  Is it clear to jury members what they should look at?

Your random selection idea reminds me of what some funding agencies have started looking into (random selection between proposals beyond a threshold). It's a theoretically sound solution to the problem, but really bugs people on an emotional level. We don't love randomness, and it seems we prefer it to be hidden away behind a few obstructing layers than out in the open.

To follow up on @usul's suggestion of terminology, we've used "featured" instead of "best". Some awards shows use "favorite." Another: "starred" like in book reviews. "Judges' choice" would be explicit without implying any value judgement.

The obvious solution to "the most dominant judge will push their choice through to first place" is to not discuss among judges and just average their scores instead.

the most dominant judge will push their choice through to first place Maybe don't let that happen?

I don't know how this is done in other fields, but in math when we've done this with undergrad posters, often we have a whole group of judges for each poster, and then the top posters are determined by averages of those results. I've also encountered a setup where the top few (say something like 10%) all got recognition and then additional judging for those top 10% happened.
Doing a random selection as you suggest seems suboptimal. At that point, why not just recognize the top ones that would go into the lottery and not have the lottery at all? It isn't like there absolutely needs to be a single best.

Thanks for the suggestion!
We have some sponsors that want a picture with the winner(s). It's a great suggestion to acknowledge a larger group instead of picking out a few of them, I really like this idea.

Hmm, @Hydrazin In that case, make sure certainly that whatever you do, your sponsor is ok with the procedure.

The selection is always going to be somewhat subjective and, thereby, random, no matter what you do (like in the Olympic figure skating or gymnastics) but you can mitigate it somewhat by formalizing the procedure like there. First, select and agree upon a few reasonably well-defined evaluation categories (like "how clear is the presentation", "how interesting is the topic", "how much did the speaker engage the audience", or whatever else is of interest to you).
Then use some simple numeric scale for each. Don't try to evaluate by the score from 0 to 100: you'll break your head over deciding whether you should give 46 or 47 and end up in a hospital with a severe mental trauma; do some scale with few values that you can easily explain in words instead. For instance, when I grade my student quizzes, one of the scales I'm using is 4 for a full impeccable solution, 3 for a solution with minor (in my opinion) inaccuracies, 1 for a clear attempt to move in the right direction without much success, and 0 for everything else (including 5 pages of accurate computations that led nowhere as far as the task in the problem was concerned). There is no grade of 2.
Then just let each judge fill out the score sheet for each presentation he/she attended. Agree on the function that determines the overall score based on these sheets (it doesn't need to be additive, but it should be well-defined, made publicly available, and be simple enough to determine and verify the final score without a supercomputer or a huge reference table in Excel; it should also take into account the possibility that some judges may miss some presentations, if that is a likely event). Then just collect the sheets, compute the scores, arrange the candidates in the score order and decide where you want to make the cutoffs for the first, the second, etc. prize totally ignoring anybody's opinions on how inaccurate the other judges might be in their scoring and ruthlessly suppressing any such conversations before the winners have been announced. Then announce the prizes and give each contestant, winning or not, a copy of his/her evaluations (without the judge names) just like we are given the student evaluations when teaching.
That sounds simple in theory, but still requires some amount of preparatory work, self-discipline, and mutual respect, so if you want to set up something like that for an upcoming competition start early. It is not a panacea, but it will add a lot of transparency and credibility to the selection process in addition to clearly indicating to each competitor the jury opinions about their strong and weak points, not just his/her overall ranking.
Just my two cents :-)

The first paragraph could have used an appearance of the word "rubric". That's what the paragraph proposes.

You could take a leaf from many subjective sports scoring methods and eliminate the top and bottom scores as a way of mitigating prejudice (i.e. a judge who loves or hates the presenter rather than the presentation)

Frame challenge: It's better not to have prizes for best talk/poster.
The OP and others have pointed out some negatives of these prizes: the process for choosing them is flawed and opaque, people who don't get the prize end up feeling bad, and knowledgeable colleages are frustrated by the outcomes. I want to add another serious negative of prizes in general, which is that they are heavily skewed towards people in majority groups (white cis males in STEM, for example) due to biases against people in equity-seeking groups.
The question seems to posed under the assumption that there must be so many positives to giving these prizes that it outweighs these acknowledged negatives. Personally, I don't think that's the case.
(The feedback mechanism fedja proposed in their answer, if carried out respectfully, could be very valuable to the younger academics giving talks/posters. Perhaps that could be done for its own sake instead of in service to prizes.)

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Try to minimize the random choice to the minimum. It is demotivating in the best to compare yourself as a looser to a winner whose presentation/poster with feeling that it was worse than mine. You start wondering what was the winning feature I missed to spot?
It will look burreaucratical and overcomplicated, especially for non-technical fields, but good system and respectful commitee solves most of the issues.

As a comittee agree on equal vote and pick one to decide possible conflicts (draw, special cases, etc.)
As a commitee agree on what attributes you are to assess the
contributions on. Define how the performance will be evaluated and summed. Define weights to each "topic". Bonus points for
disclosing for the contenders.
Print evaluation sheets for every contender and every referee. Submit the evaluations anonymously.
Sum up the scores and make the list. Resolve the conflicts and draws.
Write down comments and ideas from the referees about the process and iterate to improve the process.

There is a huge drawback of this system - you need to keep the same measures throughout all the sessions. I'd strongly recommend the very first presentation/poster being awarded 50/100 by default in every category as a benchmark.
In case you are concerned about conflict of interest (referee is tied with at least one contender) you can sum up average scores among referees and referee can submit marks with "In Conflict" that will be discarded.

You can also divide the prize in several smaller prizes. Award top 5 or top 10.

What if the best presentation is by far the best/worst?

I suppose you meant "the first" is far best/worst. I think this level of outclassing/failure is quite improbable. If the first will be the extreme, you are still left with 0-50 or 50-100 scale, which is still quite fine scale.

Oops, yes, I did.

Frame challenge: Rate the presentation of the work, not the incomparable content/impact.
While determining the best talk/poster may be an very complicated task, especially in life/health sciences where expertise from half a dozen disciplines is required to assess correctness. Yet, instead of presenting prices for the best poster/talk, make the prices only about how stuff was presented - detached from the quality of the content. This may also decrease variability, if done correctly, as accessibility of information may be assessed with specifically prepared questionnaire. Furthermore, science communication is a very important topic which deserves praise, if done properly, hence prices may be fitting.
Disclaimer: This suggestion is biased from my own experiences in life/health sciences. I have seen talks winning best talk which presented correlations of 4 datapoints and an obvious outlier, or t-tests between 2 states with 3 datapoints each - fundamental flaws most undergrads can identify. Awarding such talks/posters with a best work sends a clear message to, especially younger folks, in the audience.
In sum, thereby the winning talks do not have to be the best, most impactful, or most relevant ones, but can simply be the best presented ones.

So, an "artful" but nonsense talk is best? Seems odd. Professor Irwin Corey would win every time.

Well, in life/health sciences, jurors are often asked to judge poster's in fields they know very little about, for example jurors with a background in genetics judging posters on pharmacology.
With that level of divergence in terms of expertise, why not level the playing field and judge which poster/talk managed to get its points across, especially when considering there are dedicated prices towards science communication?

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In Mathematics, what is the standing of the journal Proc. AMS?
This is a question specific to mathematics.

what is the status of the journal Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society (Proc. AMS)?

It seems to be a generalist journal that only publishes short papers, and has a massive output (in 2018: 12 issues on 5485 pages). The blurb says :

"To be published in the Proceedings, a paper must be correct, new, and
  significant. Further, it must be well written and of interest to a
  substantial number of mathematicians. Piecemeal results, such as an
  inconclusive step toward an unproved major theorem or a minor
  variation on a known result, are in general not acceptable for
  publication".

Yet on Scimago it is ranked below most of the journals I have heard about (in their math/stats ranking it is #256, edit: in the subranking that lists mostly pure math journals, it is still lower than most I know edit ends). Nevertheless, I see that very well established researchers sometimes publish there (I won't give names obviously).
So to be more specific :

do you always submit somewhere else first, and it the paper is rejected then consider Proc. AMS ?
or maybe is publishing there an act of "giving back to the community by promoting the AMS" ?
or is it mostly a journal for anybody who needs a quick publication (as the workflow seems quite fast) ?

Hmmm. Rank 256 in a listing that compares apples, oranges, strawberries, dogs, bears, celestial phenomena, .... That link is not a listing of math journals.

If this is a question specific to mathematics, try the Mathematics Stack.

To expand on @Buffy 's comment, that listing includes journals in Bioinformatics, Econometrics, Vital Statistics, Psychometrics and other things which wouldn't normally be considered in math. So the number is not important. That said, that it is lower than journals you have heard of is more noteworthy, but that's because the ones you've heard of are often the very tip-top journals.

Considering the two journals ranked by that list above Journal of AMS and Annals, I would simply ignore that list.... Their ranking is inherthly flawed for mathematics, they base their raniking on the number of citations in the current year of papers published in the previous 3 years.

And to expand on @NickS 's comment, citation practices, such as H-index are not great for math. Many other fields have much higher citation numbers, and many papers get put through informal circulation well before they are published. So anything that looks at number of citations in last x years for any x that isn't extremely long is going to make pure math journals somehow look worse than journals in topics that are even somewhat close to math such as many bio-math areas.

Scimago is a semi-fake ranking. Its ranking is obviously flawed in many aspects. Simply false.

@Dilworth IMO, their journal ranking is similar to ranking teams in European Football based on the number of points they get in their national league.

do you always submit somewhere else first, and it the paper is rejected then consider Proc. AMS ?
I've never submitted to the journal. In general, it is true that in many respects the best math journals are the generalist journals, but if a paper was rejected for not being interesting enough, I'd likely be substantially more inclined to resubmit it to a more specialist journal, and not to a generalist journal like the Proc. AMS. That said, if one is building up a standard career, it is important to build up a CV that has at least some papers which are in journals which are generalist journals, so people don't feel like your work is so specialized that anyone outside one's own area won't be able to interact with you. This is important for hiring decisions for post-docs, VAPs and tenure-track positions.
or maybe is publishing there an act of "giving back to the community by promoting the AMS" ?
I don't know of anyone who publishes with the AMS to deliberately give back to them. Unless one is already tenured, having that sort of desire to give back influence where one publishes would be odd. There are a bunch of other ways mathematicians give back to the AMS, such as by writing reviews for MathSciNet, which is run by the AMS.
or is it mostly a journal for anybody who needs a quick publication (as the workflow seems quite fast) ?
In general in math, one rarely needs quick publication since one can put things up on the arXiv and math is very fond of preprints. There is a difference between a preprint that's been submitted to a journal and an accepted paper, and if one is at a particularly bureaucratic school, such a thing might even be a relevant distinction for tenure if one is borderline, but that would itself be weird. While issues with long publication time can be a problem (I have one personal horror story involving it), it is very rare to target a journal based on their review/publication time. I'm also not sure what makes you conclude that the workflow is quick. What gives you that impression?

Thank you for the thoughtful answer. They mention a backlog of 3 issues, which, given they have 12 per year, is not much.

Scimago is a clearly false, possibly semi-fake ranking. It is very easy to check this: for instance when I clicked on your link I got the following amusing result:
Vital and health statistics. Series 2, Data evaluation and methods research   is considered of higher ranking for mathematicians (!) than the Annals of Mathematics.
There is no need to elaborate more.

Maybe I should have mentionned their "Mathematics (misc.)" subranking https://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php?category=2601 which is a lot like the list I'd giv (apart from Ann. Math missing, since oddly ranked in the stats/probability subranking).

The user interface is a part of the ranking. If users get false or confusing data using simple queries like I exemplified then it's the website's fault. Hence, I stick with my impression: SciMago is a fake or semi fake ranking. P.s. anyone can invent their own ranking based on their preferred metrics. Hey, that's precisely what Scimago does!

Subjectively my impression is that Proceedings of the AMS is a very good journal for short papers.  Having a paper there says two things: 1) The paper is short, and 2) For a short paper, it's a good paper.  No one is going to mistake a Proceedings publication for one in the Annals, but no one is going to question whether it's good work.
As for the rankings, very short papers are rarely as substantial or influential as longer papers, so it's not really fair to compare a journal that only publishes short papers to a typical journal.  It would be more fair to compare it only to the short papers in another journal, but this data is difficult to find.  Nonetheless I expect that Proceedings would rank reasonably highly once you compare papers of similar length.

I tried an alternative measure that seems reasonable, but in the end the numbers are weird so I don't think it's a great measurement.  But since I have the data here it is.
One could rate journals per page instead of per article.  Eigenfactor gives a nice way to do this, since the un-normalized Eigenfactor is calculated at the level of all papers published in the journal.  Their "article influence" is measured by dividing Eigenfactor by number of articles (and normalizing), so we can equally well calculate "page influence" by dividing 2010 Eigenfactor by 2010 number of pages published.  Normalizing by multiplying by 10^6, this gives: JAMS 13.4, Acta Math. 8.6, Proc. AMS 7.1, Annals 5.9,  Trans. AMS 4.9, J. Alg. 4.9, Adv. Math. 4.5.  By that measurement Proc. AMS would be a very highly ranked journal!  I think that naively just measuring per page unfairly advantages short papers relative to long ones so one shouldn't treat these numbers as too meaningful, but the numbers you were looking at unfairly penalize short papers, and the truth is somewhere in between.

One of my academic siblings pointed out that one of the reasons these numbers are strange is that of course different journals have different size pages!  So maybe you should only use it to compare JAMS, TAMS, PAMS, which I think all do have the same format.

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In writing a job posting/ad, better to be specific or broad?
In writing a job posting/ad for a tenure-track faculty position, is it better to (A) specify subfields the department is most interested in hiring in or (B) make the posting as broad as possible (even if there are some specific subfields the department prefers).
Obviously, better is subjective here. Here are some more specific subquestions. I am open to making this community wiki if it's still not specific enough.
Does (A) or (B) result in stronger candidates for the specific subfields?
Does (B) actually discourage some strong candidates from applying?
Does (A) end up producing a weaker sequence of hires in the long term?
I'm interested in this in terms of benefit to the department doing the hiring, not benefit for the candidates.
Anecdotal evidence based on substantial experience is fine. Even better is research on the subject.

The best type of positing is specific to your location.

@RichardErickson Oh really? What do you mean?

Often one might have 'required' and 'desired' sections of the posting. And, those should correspond to how you actually will go about screening candidates to interview. So, if you truly want to hire in one specific subfield, that is a 'required'. If you would prefer that subfield, but would look at outstanding candidates in other subfields, that would be a 'desired'.

@JonCuster Indeed, I have seen postings written in this way. My question is whether that structure is effective.

You ask In writing a job posting/ad, better to be specific or broad?. The answer to this question is specific to your situation (You even clarify you question to describe your school type). This type of specific question is off topic for the site.

@RichardErickson Location information deleted. I don't agree that it is situation or location specific. Perhaps slightly, but not largely.

@MichaelGaudreau - well, it has worked well for me, hiring technical staff and post-docs (not professors). But, I can't really do an experiment, since my HR folks insist on the format. My problem is more to make the 'required' list short and simple enough that HR doesn't robotically rule good candidates out.

@JonCuster Thank you. The last point is useful advice.

One needs to know the needs of your institution, and something about the pool of available candidates, to answer this question.  Too broad will waste applicants' time.  Too narrow may miss good candidates.

There is no straightforward answer to this. I would say it should depend on how important it is that the candidate fit the desired specialism(s). If you are willing to consider an outstanding candidate who does not fit the desired specialism(s), you should tend towards making the advert relatively open. If not, you should be more specific. In all cases, you advert should be open enough not to discourage serious contenders but specific enough not to waste the time of candidates who stand absolutely no chance. When advertising, it is also useful to clarify:

the history and modus operandi of any particular initiative/project/grant to which the position is connected (each institution and department has its own character and traditions, which may be obvious to an insider but may seem bizarre/confusing to an outsider); and
whether the purpose of the position being advertised is to

deepen an existing departmental strength or research cluster, or
broaden your department to extend coverage beyond its existing specialism(s).

Issues to consider with option (A)

it has the advantage of encouraging candidates with the corresponding specialism(s), who may otherwise not apply because they do not realise you are after those specialism(s) (because applying for jobs is very time-consuming);
it may discourage candidates whose profile is not a perfect fit (because they will assume that there must be someone who is a better fit in terms of specialism(s));
too specific, and people may assume that the vacancy is "fake" because you have already decided whom you intend to hire and are advertising to hide the nepotism (and thus not bother applying).

[but not all very specific adverts are stitch-ups: my current position had a very specific advert, but that was because it was to fill a post for which project-specific funding was already obtained; despite not knowing any of the people in any of the departments involved, I got the job, but I suspect I may have been the only applicant (the timing of the advert was unusual)]
Issues to consider with option (B)

you will probably get a lot more applications (no comment on whether this is a good or a bad thing); but
many/most of these applications will not fit your desired specialism(s); and
some candidates who would be a perfect fit, not being aware of the fact, may not bother applying;
people may assume that the vacancy is "fake" because you do not really intend to hire anyone, but are just "testing the waters".


text:
Teaching mathematics at the college level,
Can I teach a college level math course at a community college with secondary mathematics certification.

I think this would probably be possible; look at some job postings; I suppose a lot depends on what sort of competition you would be facing for the position.

It is my understanding that secondary mathematics certification and community college teaching are "disjoint sets," such that having the certification is neither required nor directly helpful to teach at a community college.  I am confident that having such a certification will not disadvantage you in any way, but that's probably not what you're asking.  If you mean "Can I teach a college level math course at a community college with a secondary mathematics certification instead of [something else]?" then the answer is: maybe not, but if you are interested you should probably ask.
I have only indirect knowledge of the community college teaching community, and my understanding is that the parameters of the job vary heavily by region and institution.  For instance, in some parts of the country most community college faculty have terminal degrees (generally a PhD), whereas in others this is rare.  The requirements to teach one course may well be different from those of full-time faculty.  I would expect that having a master's degree in a related field would be sufficient for you to teach college-level math courses at many community colleges.  If you only have a bachelor's degree, then that might not be enough...or then again it might.
At my large state research university (UGA), we often find ourselves wanting to run a few more sections of precalculus and calculus and having to hire temporary (or "adjunct") faculty very close to the last minute.  It is my understanding that the necessity of covering classes can result in a flexibility in terms of hiring.  So I think that there is a good shot that someone who looks competent to teach course X will eventually get to teach course X at some community college if they are sufficiently persistent.

Pete Clark's answer seems solid. Here is a specific example to back it up: CUNY is one of the systems that most generally requires a PhD and published research even for community-college professors. But adjuncts can still be hired with only a bachelor's degree in the subject. (The teaching certification is, indeed, a non-issue.) From a current CUNY job posting for adjunct math instructors:

QUALIFICATIONS
For Adjunct Assistant Professor: Ph.D. degree in area(s) of experience
  or equivalent. Also required is the ability to teach successfully.
For Adjunct Lecturer: Bachelor's degree in area(s) of expertise, and
  the ability to teach successfully. Master's Degree strongly preferred.

That's currently here, but the link will probably age out quickly.

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


text:
Finishing my BSc while working - asking help to professors and future academic chances
I started my BSc (major Engineering of automatic systems, in a world top-30 college) in 2010 and, one 1.5 years in and around 25% done, I left to cope with growing family problems (multiple severe health issues amongst close relatives). It was not a light decisions, I was part of a great student research team and really loved the people around me, but being left unable to concentrate by all the struggles at home I had no other option.
During the time not in college I founded, along with a friend, a startup company out of personal research in the field of HMIs of systems for beta testing and got acquired  by a much larger company and my product is now in worldwide usage within the parent group.
The deal was/is satisfactory from an economical point of view and getting a technical vision that i truly believed in to grow was a fantastic experience but I started to find myself really disliking the corporate job very when, due to company reorganization, I was moved from product development to a more white collar job.
This experience made me realize that what I love is critical thinking around technical problems, so, around 3 years ago, I re-enrolled in college while holding on to my position in the company; at age 26 a strong economical independence is fundamental to me, especially because it allows me a great independence from the problematic family environment and to make one of my childhood dream -flying gliders- come true.
It has been 3 years of exhausting studying 9pm - 1 am 5 days a week and, slowly, I managed to reach around 80% completion of my degree, even if with a low GPA (22/30) and hopefully I`ll graduate within 1.5 years.
Questions time:
My current objective is to pursue a higher level of education, I`d like to know how does such a twisty academical career affects my chances of getting accepted in a good Master program around 2 years from now.
Moreover, I`d also like to know what is a legitimate level of "help" that I could ask for to a professor of a mandatory course that I am finding extremely difficult (e.g. recommending area of focus and exercises to pay special attention to) , since being unable to attend lessons makes it way harder to know what to focus on while preparing for tests.
Thankyou for your help

First, you say around 25% done, then you say around 80% completion of my degree by of exhausting studying 9pm - 1 am 5 days a week. Where did you do the 55%(from 25 to 80)? The same college? If the same college, then there is not much difference between you finished BSc in 2013 and in 2018. People understand. I don't quite understand what your problem is.

Yes, same college. I re-enrolled at the same college getting the previous 25 recognized. For this matter, the question can be simplified to "is completion time taken into account when evaluating candidates" and "is my GPA looked at keeping in ming the fact that studying at night after an 8 to 7 job is way harder than studying as a full time occupation"?

You can say something in your Statement of purpose or some place in the application package to describe your difficulty while finishing college.

Isn`s this seen as looking-for-pity?

If you're stating the fact, why is it "looking-for-pity"?

General attitude towards people asking to take into account personal problems when evaluating their results

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


text:
Is it unethical to take a photograph of my question sheets from a sit-down exam I've just finished if I am not allowed to take them home?
Last semester I've retaken a course and went through the exam. It was a sit-down exam and all students were present. All students are required put their possessions (phones, cameras, etc.) in their bags and put their bags in front of the room.
The students were not allowed to take the question sheets home.
As I was retaking the course, I feel the need to take a documentation to review my answers and to understand the problems better. So AFTER the exam was finished, I take my bag, grab my camera, and then I asked the supervisor (as the lecturer was not present at the site) whether I was allowed to take a photograph or not while gesturing to show my camera (which I had just taken out of my bag). It was denied and I complied without complaining.
Then I told my friend about that incident. He was quite surprised that I complied with that. He told me that he would take the photograph anyway for his advancement in learning, which he said it would be for the greater good but I can't actually spread / redistribute them as it would break the concept of exam itself.
The usual practice in my campus is that if the question sheets are allowed to be taken home, some students would scan and put them into a compilation and share them to the younger students to study and ponder upon as they will get different sets of questions.
Other than that, students that absent at the exam can take it at a different appointed time with a different set of questions.
So I'm stumped whether I should have taken the photograph or not. I thought it was unethical to take it if taking the sheet home is prohibited, but then my friends thought made me reconsider. If I took the photograph I would not create an unfair advantage for those who took the exam at a different date (if there are any) anyway.
PS: I'm sorry if I attracted heated discussions. And I think there is a misconception here. I don't intend to question the rule itself or trying to deceive myself. I only want to know how ethics and etiquette work as I was quite an anti-social from my childhood and I want to start learning about social life. I also didn't intend to redistribute the photograph at that moment.
PS2: My campus was located in Indonesia. I hope this will help to consider the problem at hand
PS3:
The rule was actually enforced by the Department. It would also be enforced to graduate students (and to postgraduate students IF they have any sit-down exams) . My friend which I mentioned above was in fact a graduate student.
The guidelines mentioned not to ask "Undergraduate-specific issues that could not apply to graduate or post-graduate academicians". As this question is also applicable to (at least) graduate students, I think this question is quite appropriate for Academia SE. But if it's still deemed as an inappropriate question by many and was closed because of it, then I'll just accept the closure.

Welcome to Academia SE. I am somewhat skeptical that you actually want to ask what you are asking, as the ethicality of the situation is straightforward to me (you gain an advantage by breaking the rules). I presume that you want to ask about something like the general purpose and ethicality of imposing such a rule, copying exams in the absence of such a rule, or disseminating old exams. If this is the case, please [edit] your question to clarify.

In most examinations I'm aware of, having a camera or a phone on your person during an examination is prohibited and can lead to  the exam being tainted.

@Wrzlprmft I don't intend to question the ethicality of imposing such rule. I only mean to ask whether it was ethical to actually take that photograph.

@BrianTompsett-汤莱恩 In my campus all students' bags should be put at the front of the room so nobody can't get access to whatever tools the brought during the exam. That's why I have the mean to take that photograph after the exam was finished.

Vote to close - this is an unclear question, but most interpretations lead to the conclusion that this is inappropriate for this site.

@PatrickSanan May I know why would my question regarded as inappropriate while I meant to ask about Ethical Academic Conduct? Well, as this is Academia SE, I think this is the right place to ask.

It's not relevant to academics, only to students. Please don't take the number of upvotes you got as an indication of quality, and see the guidelines http://academia.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic

@PatrickSanan Umm.. I wasn't referring to the points though. As for the student part, the same issue actually happened to graduate and post-graduate students in my lab as the same rule is applied to them too because it was in fact enforced by the department (which I knew of later on). So I think the question is applicable to them too. And my friend I mentioned above is a graduate student. Perhaps I should have mentioned those, but the guidelines only prohibited questions that are not applicable to graduate or post-graduate students.

One sheet is easy to memorize. What's the problem?

Taking a photo is effectively equivalent to taking the question sheet home.
For either of these: it’s not inherently a bad thing, and (as your friend said) it can be good for personal study, and so on.  However, it can be used for unethical purposes (passing the questions on to students who haven’t taken the exam yet), so the school have prohibited it.  Given this, it is unethical, since it’s breaking a rule (and, moreover, a reasonably justified rule).
If the rules happen to be written in such a way that they just prohibit “taking the sheets home” and didn’t mention photos, then taking a photo may be allowed by the rule as written, but it is clearly still violating the intention of the rule.
So yes, the supervisor’s ruling was reasonable, and you were right to comply with it.
Edit.  There is, however, no problem with politely emailing the instructor afterwards and asking if you can get a copy of the exam (or parts of it).  No need to mention ethics or taking photos in the email; just say that you’d be grateful to have a copy for your own studying, if the instructor is willing to share it.  Maybe the instructor will say yes; maybe no; maybe “yes, but not until next week”.  But provided you are polite, and ready to accept a possible refusal, then I don’t think there can be any harm in asking.

Is it also unethical even if the students who take the exam at a different date are guaranteed to get a different set of question? Please don't be offended. I'm just curious.

The professor didn't return the question sheets SPECIFICALLY to prevent distribution.  This is well within the rights of the professor, and not within your rights to evade.  Attempts to circumvent this are ethically questionable.

@ScottSeidman So that's how it is. I really forgot that it was within the professor's right to do so. Whether the other students get different sets of questions or not is irrelevant then. Thank you... :)

it is clearly still violating the intention of the rule Is the intent stated in the rule? For all I know, the rule could stem from need to actually get those papers back, because of some weird environmental legislation (we recycle 100% of our paper, yay!) or someone toying with six sigma or whatever. Taking a photo does not remove the sheet from the school, so it's NOT equivalent to taking the sheet home. What about coming home and writing down that task you've struggled with but could not solve? What about discussing that task with a friend?

@Daerdemandt Occam's Razor. The rule is probably meant to prevent distribution. If you want to question whether it is, ask the teacher in question (as the OP did) don't assume there's a contrived reason for the rule

@Jasper I don't assume a specific reason for the rule, question's author does. Assuming that prof. really intends to prevent distribution via getting papers back strikes me as disingenuous towards the prof. You expose papers to students - you consider those papers leaked. If you know rule's intent then please share the source so we can stop guessing. Besides, if the rule's intent was to prevent distribution then emailing the prof and asking for a copy is pretty pointless, and distributing would be prohibited explicitly.

@Daerdemandt: actually, it was your first comment that prompted me to add the edit suggesting an email.  I agree with you, the reason could be something completely different, like recycling, or (more likely in my opinion) could be just to temporarily prevent distribution (if some students are sitting the exam a few days late), and so in that case the instructor may well be happy to send a copy afterwards.  My answer aims to be reasonable advice for either possibility.

I would add that the OP's mention of the difficulty of the course is irrelevant to the actual question.  I bring this up because students (at least in some studies I've read) rationalize academic misconduct when they perceive the task as difficult, or tedious, or not worth the time it would take to do it honestly.

While I agree with the email in principal, I would advise against the OP sending an email in this case. OP already attempted to get the questions out of the exam session, and was denied. Asking again, regardless of how polite you are would at best raise an eyebrow from the professor, if not immediately make them angry.

@krillgar I would disagree, for one reason.  The OP keeps talking about "the supervisor", which to me implies the person he asked isn't the instructor.  I think it's very possible the TA/proctor isn't permitted to let the students take home the test, but the instructor might be willing to, once everyone's finished taking make-up tests, if they were late.

@PatrickM I asked the exam supervisor as the lecturer was not present at the site

@MatthewLeingang Ah, yes... When I read my my post again, I think the difficulty part doesn't actually contribute to explaining my problem and my intent. Sorry for the confusion. I'll edit that.

@PLL Thank you for your suggestion in the edit. Perhaps it is the best course of action I could take. :)

If we say "Taking a photo is effectively equivalent to taking the question sheet home." then that leads to it is clearly wrong.  However, if we say "Taking a photo is effectively equivalent to memorizing the question sheet." then it is clearly OK.

@emory I think we have to consider it closer to taking the sheet home.  Memorization is a mental device for getting the information off the sheet.  Taking a photo and taking the sheet home are both physical methods of getting the information off the sheet.  Considering the memory one is the only one with inherent uncertainty in keeping the information, I don't think it's appropriate to link that with physical methods.

The contents of the blank exam, including the questions/formatting/instructions/etc., belong to the person who wrote it.  This person retains copyright and all associated rights, unless otherwise given away (or unless otherwise claimed by the employer).
It is irrelevant why the exam's author does not want to permit photography of the exam.  Perhaps the author intends to create a book (or paper or patent), in part with this material.   Or, perhaps, as the OP speculates, the author intends to create a future exam, in part with this material.  Relinquishing a copy of the exam questions may make any of these more difficult in the future.
In the OP's question, the student is granted permission to read the exam, and write answers in the designated areas.  However, this does not mean that the student is granted additional rights, such as keeping the exam questions, or photographing them.  Doing so infringes on the exam author's intellectual property; doing so after being told not to is a flagrant infringement.  It would be very difficult to build a persuasive case that doing so is not unethical.

This does not fall within the domain of copyright as the exam is not redistributed or copied any further. Now, the question is not about the lawfulness but about ethics, but the ethical backbone of copyright is avoiding economic damage to the copyright holder. Nothing that the asker intended to do would cause such a damage. A similar thing applies to intellectual property: Unless the asker claims that the exam is their intellectual property, this is not touched. (BTW: With your arguments it would also be illegal or unethical to take photographs of almost anything created by a human.)

@Wrzlprmft It seems plausible to me that copyright law would cover this circumstance, because taking a photo of something on a piece of paper does make a copy of that content - this is basically what a photocopier does, after all. Taking a photo of a building or sculpture or some arbitrary object would not be similarly equivalent to making a copy. Of course, then you could get into a fair use defense, which might plausibly excuse taking a picture of e.g. a painting, and might or might not be applicable here.

@Wrzlprmft Actually yes, taking photo of a building is copyright infringement e.g. in France, Belgium or Italy. Some countries have "fair use" clause that allows you to make a copy for personal use and/or under specific conditions, but it's highly dependent on local laws. If that legislation is unethical in your opinion then fight to change it, but telling people on the internet that copyright doesn't apply is pretty much encouraging to break law.

@Wrzlprmft No. Copyright subsists in any creative work, whether or not it is intended for distribution and whether or not the author intended to charge for distribution. This most definitely includes exams. The distinction between written works and, say, a building is that a photograph of a written work is a copy of that work, whereas a photograph of a building is just a picture of the building, not a copy of the building.

@DavidRicherby: I am not debating that the exam is not subject to copyright. I am debating whether copyright applies to the action in question. At least in German copyright (which is structured to explicitly allow and disallow things), I am pretty certain that it doesn’t. In US copyright, e.g., has a fuzzy fair-use clause, it’s also more fuzzy what the domain of copyright is – well, I grant you that. Either way, compare to the following cases: Writing down the text of the exam from memory; taking a photograph of a published exam; taking a photograph of a public poster.

@wrzlprmft, suppose the course instructor wants to publish a book "50 exams for use in course X".  This book would not sell as well if copies of the exams were already known.  Hence there is (potentially) direct economic damage caused by taking that photograph.

@vadim123: … if you disseminate the photograph (or the contents of the exam). That (not taking the photograph) would be a clear violation of copyright. But that is not what the asker intended to do.

This answer is just plain wrong. There's almost no question that taking a copy for temporary, personal additional study of an exam one has taken would be fair use. This is simply not a legal issue and answering it as if it was one makes no sense.

@DavidSchwartz, in the US at least, fair use has been eroded by the courts to be almost negligible.  However, even with a very broad reading of "fair use", a photocopy of the entirety of the exam would not pass the "Amount or Substantiality of the Portion Used" factor of fair use.  A photocopy of a single question might be okay.

@vadim123 I completely disagree. Fair use is quite broad in a non-commercial context like this one. And, in any event, that's just one factor -- pretty much all the other factors weigh in favor of a finding of fair use.

Note that the OPS original statement involved photographing for the purpose of redistribution

@ScottSeidman That's a closer case, but still all of the fair use factors but that one (that the whole work is taken) weigh in favor of it being fair use, so it almost certainly would still be considered fair use. This still isn't a legal issue.

@ScottSeidman Well, objectively speaking I could always do that, but at that time I didn't intend to redistribute to other people (students). Perhaps I should reword my explanations better.

The ethics and even the morality of copyrights - a legal practice based on collusion between monarchies and oligopolic publishers from the middle-ages - are debatble in themselves; so an argument based on the ethical/moral validity of copyrights is, IMO, not the right one to make. Others have argued convincingly against the ethics of this action directly, regardless of copyrights.

@Wrzlprmft All 3 of your examples are copyright infringements. Fair use may or may not exclude them. You're German, ask Piratenpartei, they have nice examples of how ridiculous copyright can be. Doesn't make it any less valid.

@einpoklum Law can be viewed as codified ethic, therefore if something breaks law there is high chance it's unethical. We're not debating morality of copyrights (you are), we're debating if this situation violates copyright because it affects it's ethics.

@Agent_L: I am rather familiar with German copyright law, and copying a text for private purposes is explicitly and clearly allowed under § 53 (1) UrhG. By the way: According to the sources I could find, it’s not illegal to take photographs of copyrighted buildings in France, Italy, and Belgium, it’s only forbidden to distribute photographs or similar.

@Wrzlprmft Yes, and the point is that every country has different scope of allowed use. BTW, in the age of Facebook a private use without rights to distribute is pretty much useless.

@Agent_L: Law can be viewed as codified ethic, but I don't think that it should; and even if I did, then 2. It's the ethics of other people in other social classes at other times and with other interests codified by other people with other interests again.

If you would have taken that photograph, you would have broken a rule to gain an advantage: Even if the exam is not repeated exactly, you gain information as on what kind of questions to expect and you state yourself that you want to use the photographs to your advance (even if this involves honest learning). Taken the photograph would thus have been unfair against those students who comply with the rules and do not have this advantage. This would clearly be unethical.
As the exam is not repeated exactly and the same can be achieved with memorising, you may debate over how bad taking a photograph would be. Also you can debate whether the examinor’s approach to exams – relying on the contents being kept secret to some extent – is a good and effective one. All of this does not however impeach the ethicality of taking a photograph. If you do not agree with the rules, complain about the rules first; do not just break them.

Thank you for the answer. The second paragraph is a real eye opener. I've never considered that approach at all. :)

Part of my math exam was a test. All the questions, that might be in the test, were public for whole semester. For those, who wanted to memorise the answers, there was little surprise. It was 12 000 questions.

While I whole-heartendly disagree with the last sentence, I agree with the rest of the second paragraph.

@einpoklum: The last sentence has two parts, so a whole-hearted disagreement means that you think there are situations in which you do not agree with the rules but should not complain and yet should break them. I don't understand why, as long as we're talking about rules that are not inherently unethical themselves.

I disagreed with the combination of the two parts, i.e. "if (don't-agree) then {do complain; don't break}". In my opinion, you should complain about them when appropriate, and break them when appropriate or necessary. And - it is indeed appropriate or necessary. Example: In my alma mater, they were about to enact this rule precluding people from using the bathroom during exams except during one break in the middle. We (the grad student union) protested, but were ignored. Consequently, we announced that...

(cont) ... we were rejecting that rule outright, and that we would back anyone who would be penalized in any way for using the bathroom when he/she needed to.

@einpoklum: Just to confirm, for your "complain and break" case you are referring to rules that you consider unethical, right? Your bathroom example seems to fit into this category. If so then I think we actually don't disagree; just misunderstood one another.

@einpoklum: Added one word to make this less general.

@user21820: That would be the typical case. But sometimes, you can't be expected to complain. When the regime (of a state, a university, a department, or even a PI in a lab) has a vindictive streak, and would hold a grudge against whoever complains.

@einpoklum: Agreed, sadly. But I'd say your kind of rule-breaking is not anywhere near the norm! If there were more of your kind and less of the usual kind then the world will probably be a better place because those same rule-breakers will not discard rules altogether but put new better rules into place.

Just a comment too long to be posted as comment.
Even the instructor allowed, I would still suggest you not to do it. If for any reason the questions are leaked (your phone got stolen or hacked, or other people get to see your questions), you'll automatically become a prime suspect. And worse, even the questions were not leaked through you but through other channels, you'll still likely be included in the suspect list.
This can create a lot of troubles, the instructor will have to remake the exam. And in rare case all the students might have to retake due to possible mass cheating... the list can go on and on.
Your friend's argument that "he would take the photograph anyway for his advancement in learning, which he said it would be for the greater good" is flawed. First, knowing how to answer a set of exam questions is really not that much more beneficial than knowing how to answer a set of textbook questions or other published/released quiz questions, etc. Second, the benefit of getting this one extra piece of study material is far outweighed by the aforementioned risks and harms.
If you're concerned about how you performed, you can always try to communicate with the instructor or TA to discuss your approaches after the grade is released.

These rules often exist to prevent students from making public the exam questions. Unfortunately, there are some Web sites that will publish such exam sheets, and sometimes even pay students to do so.
When I was teaching, that particular school re-used the same exams on all campuses, and for several years. I'm not commenting on whether this is a good idea, but that's the way it was. We did find a few of our exams on such a Web site.

Hi, Kevin. Thanks for responding to my old question. At that time, I already got a solution. You see, my goal was to get some materials to review on my own, right? Then I won't be needing the photograph, since I can just ask the lecturers for some reviewing materials. I admit, this would have been a simple problem, but I thought about it too much and forgot my goal.

@WidiWidiyanto Totally understood, and a legitimate request. I didn't mean to say that you were doing it, just that one out of a thousand students might, and just to prevent that, we had to control distribution of the exams for everybody.

If a rule was clearly unfair, then you'd have grounds to protest. Like if the rule said that white students are allowed to make copies of the test but black students are not, there'd be pretty obvious grounds for complaint.
But barring that, it is surely fair to expect everyone to comply with the rules, whether they like the rule or not. Whether I was the prof or another student, I'd consider it totally unacceptable for someone to say, "I didn't see a good reason for this rule, so I broke it." It is certainly fair and reasonable to ask the purpose of a rule. But it is not justified to break a rule just because you don't see the purpose. Maybe you're not smart enough to understand, or not creative enough, or haven't thought through all the possible scenarios. Heck, maybe you're not dishonest enough to see how others could take advantage.
And realistically, if breaking the rule does not give you some advantage, then why did you want to break it? If you break the rule and others follow it, then you have an unfair advantage.
One could argue that if the intent is to prevent distribution, the rule is ineffective, because a student could surely remember at least some of the questions and pass this information on. But you could say the same of any rule or security measure. If the tests are kept in a locked file drawer before testing day, someone might break into the office and steal a copy. If students are prohibited from getting help during an exam, someone might have a miniature radio in his ear with his friend giving tips. Etc. The fact that it is possible for others to break the rules does not justify you breaking the rules.

"Students with photographic memory are allowed to retain a copy of the exam but those who rely on paper as a memory aid are not"

@BenVoigt That sounds like the starting of the Xmen's Mutant Registration Act. ;)

@krillgar: I'm just pointing out that the rule IS clearly unfair and discriminatory, unless all examinees are subjected to neuralyzer when leaving the exam room.

@BenVoigt Well, okay. But by that reasoning, history tests are discriminatory because students with good memories for dates and places get good grades while students with poor memories get bad grades.

@Jay: There's a reasonable argument that such history tests are discriminating, rather than discriminatory - their explicit purpose is to discriminate between students with good memories for dates and places and those with bad memories for the same. There's a reasonable argument that history should be about more than just dates and places, but that's a separate issue.

@StuartGolodetz Umm, yes, of course. That was supposed to be a witty reply to BenVoight.

"It is surely fair to expect everyone to comply with the rules" - no, not surely. I would not expect people to comply with unfair rules. Now, you argue "barring clearly unfair etc." - I would say otherwise. You can expect complaince only with clearly-fair rules. This rule was at least puzzling and somewhat problematic (including for people who find it fair, see @Wrzlprmft's answer), and some people might find it wholly unfair. It is not reasonable to expect compliance in such situations without prior discussion.

@einpoklum: Sorry but I think you've not thought through carefully enough about fairness. A murderer who intentionally kills people for fun might consider unfair a law that judges them to be wrong. But are you saying that it is unreasonable to expect them to comply with the law? If not, then clearly you cannot just determine 'fairness' of a rule in terms of the person subject to the rule. A much more developed moral framework is necessary.

@user21820: If the prevalence of people who kill for fun is not negligible, then, yes, it is unreasonable to expect a large group of people to not kill people. That is not to say that this kind of action would be justifiable. But - you're using a straw man, or straw murderer, argument here. Students often do expect to be able to get a copy of the exam questions (whether the expectation is valid or not).

@einpoklum: I now see that you interpret the word "[un]reasonable" differently. I and likely many others interpret it to mean "[un]justifiable" when the context suggests it. My straw murderer was not actually straw, because it was based on a misunderstanding of your interpretation of "reasonable".

@user21820: relevant "dictionary definition of "reasonable". I think the definition only agrees with my interpretation... regardless, perhaps you could edit your answer and make your interpretation more explicit.

@einpoklum: Various dictionaries at http://www.thefreedictionary.com/reasonable agree with me that "reasonable" can be used to mean "fair / acceptable" in suitable contexts. I'm a native speaker too, but I agree we could be more precise by using less ambiguous words. However, I'm just a commenter and neither answer belongs to me. =)

@einpoklum If people only obey rules that, in their opinion, are unquestionably fair, that's pretty much synonymous with "there are no rules". If I think something is fair and reasonable I'll presumably do it whether there's a rule requiring it or not. So you're saying the standard should be, Everybody does whatever he feels like. Or even if you wouldn't take it that far, there's a huge difference between protesting rules that you believe to be unfair and calling for discussion, and simply ignoring them. ...

... How would you react if you were a student, and you thought some rule was fair and reasonable and so you followed it, and you later found out that some other student broke the rule and gained an advantage, and he said, "well, I didn't think the rule was fair so I ignored it"?

@Jay: You're mis-interpreting my statements, creating a false dichotomy, and making a leap from "people cannot fairly be expected to follow rules which they don't think are fair" to "everybody does whatever he feels like". In the case of your example: 1. I reject the artificially competitive mentality, as though academic studies are supposed to be about gaining advantages over others and 2. If s/he is able to make a cogent argument of that kind then most likely it's also somewhat valid anyway. Why are you looking for the worst in people?

@einpoklum While school is not all about competition, there is an element of competition to it that cannot be ignored in this context. If Al follows the rules and flunks out of school while Bob breaks the rules and gets a degree, Bob could have better job opportunities than Al. Etc.

@einpoklum "If s/he is able to make a cogent argument" If a student can make a persuasive argument to the professor or the administration, sure, by definition. But the context is a student breaking rules that he in his opinion considers unfair, after the prof rejected the argument. People often have great ability to justify unethical actions TO THEMSELVES.

@Jay: If you noticed him doing it, then ask him for justification. If you haven't noticed then it's all a theoretical discussion anyway since you can't do anything about it.

@einpoklum But the context here is, he asked the prof for permission, the prof said no, his friend now says he should have done it anyway. So presumably if someone saw him do it and asks for justification, he's going to give the same argument that he already gave to the prof and that the prof rejected. And BTW, if something is unethical, it isn't made ethical by the fact that no one saw you do it.

I wasn't arguing the specifics, I was objecting to your general claim about what's "surely fair to expect. But in this specific case - the student made a fair attempt to appeal the rule, was rebuffed and gave it up; I don't see the problem. As for the BTW - if something is ethical, you are not obliged to convince people who believe otherwise of that fact in order for it to remain ethical.


text:
What term is used to refer to how teachers are allocated for each course?
A question about terminology here...
When creating schedules or timetables for our school, the first thing we do is to allocate a teacher for each course that is to be given. Example:

John will be teaching...

...Math 1 for student group A
...Math 1 for student group B

Mary will be teaching...

...Physics 3 for student group B
...Social Studies 2 for student group C

...and so on

In my native language we have an established and well known term for this, which translates directly to "service distribution" where our word for "service" is closely related to "employment".
My question: Is there any established terminology for this type of teacher ↔ course assignment in English? If not, what would you say is a good term?
My candidates (but I'd love to hear other suggestions):

Teacher allocation
Teacher deployment
Teacher-course allocation
Teacher-course assignment

At University of Michigan and University of Washington, where I've taught, these were called simply "teaching assignments".  If a given class is taught to multiple groups of students, e.g., at different times or by different instructors, those are called "sections".  Non-teaching assignments, e.g., serving on a committee, are called "service assignments".

The general term "scheduling" is used pretty frequently. There isn't a dedicated term in English, actually. Instead, descriptive terms are used and they vary pretty widely (US). "teacher scheduling", "instructor scheduling", "course scheduling", with various substitutions for "scheduling" possible.
An individual university will have a term of art, but it will differ if you look more broadly. And, being descriptive, those using different terms will probably understand what is intended.
And, of course, there is no one-one correspondence between the terminology/words in different languages.

Scheduling. Or maybe Timetabling. Both are succinct and clear.

You might be looking for the word "preps". In your example, John has two sections, but only one prep; Mary has two sections and two preps. See here.

"Preps" means "preparations". But I doubt that is what the OP is after.


text:
Should I put the papers that I contributed only a little to on my CV
When I was a undergraduate student, I worked in a professor's lab doing research about "A". I helped the senior members to do some work they didn't want to do, like designing a website for their demos, or doing some basic calculations. You don't have to have the background knowledge of A to do that work. Then they added me on two papers, though I was always the last one. Afterwards, during my master study, I conducted real research individually in another field "B". Now I am trying to apply for study in an interdisciplinary field that merges fields A and B.
The problem is I know little about A. I am a afraid that the professors in the admission committee would ask me something about A and I definitely can't answer. And they would think I lied, which I didn't. Should I put the papers on my CV?

This depends to some extend on your field. Given the publication procedure in my field I have hundreds of publications, many of which I haven't even read. In those fields one often doesn't list "publications" but instead "publications with significant personal contribution". If one applies to a committee that covers several fields, applicants sometimes provide two publication lists: 1) the full list to be formally correct, 2) a separate list of "relevant" publications to provide a list that makes some sense.

Your list of publications has to be complete. You should not omit any papers for which you are an author.
If you are uncomfortable with some items on your list, you may add a note on why you happen to be a co-author, but dropping some work is not a good practice.
In your case, I'd say that there is nothing wrong with these publications: The other authors agreed that your contribution was worth co-authorship and that's usually ok (assuming that the other authors know their field and acted appropriately). If somebody asks about that paper, you can frankly say that you did the calculations but that you can not answer questions about background/other parts or such.

I'm curious about why the list has to be complete, but maybe that's a different question.

@Qsigma Well, I was assuming that the other authors knew what they are doing and were doing things right… Anyway, I edited to clarify a bit.

@pipe If you omit some publications, this would be under the title "Selected Publication". But "Publication List" indicates that the list is complete with no omissions.

@Dirk - thanks for your edit - in response I deleted my comment; your assumption makes perfect sense.

I haven't got any publications, but in other areas I've used the approach of putting the main things in a bulletted list or table (which takes up a lot of space, so really highlights them), and then put the more incidental stuff in a sentence. Something like "Also contributed to A, B and C between 2010 and 2015".

As long as you can describe what your role in the paper was, you are fine. If you didn't play any scientifically relevant role, you shouldn't have been on the paper. Helping with calculations may count as scientific contribution, designing a website not (except for very special cases, e.g. where the website was used to analyse data).
It is not uncommon to have early papers that do not fit with one's later work, and where one doesn't know much about, since  one's role was very minor.

I would definitely put them on your CV. The admissions committee for a graduate school would be well aware that the author list order is significant. If they ask you about the paper just guide your answer towards what you contributed. The admission committee probably doesn't really want to know about the paper but rather more about your contributions anyways.

I worked for a research hospital for 30 years as an editor. I can promise you that anyone conversant with publishing and research knows that the second, third, fourth, fifth writer, etc. contributed in a minor way. Contribution at all describes a lot about a person's level of interest in the subject matter.

Remember some fields typically order authors alphabetically, so there is little notion of a second or third author.


text:
Where can I find the IEEE list of research topics?
I'm trying to submit to IEEE Transactions on Computers, and their web form offers an 8-line box with a list of hundreds of topics to choose from.  The web form does not identify the list, but I am sure it is published elsewhere.
Can someone link the topics list that IEEE is using?

I used a regex to mine the list from the page source, but the link might still be helpful to others.  It has 2261 items, to be exact, and you can view 8 of them at a time.
Here is an up-to-date list as of August 2016 (and I will not be keeping it up to date).
From IEEE: S1M Taxonomy
Below are two items from the list, for identification purposes:

C.2.1.h Network topology < C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design < C.2 Communication/Networking and Information Technology < C C
G.1.7.d Differential-algebraic equations < G.1.7 Ordinary Differential Equations < G.1 Numerical Analysis < G Mathematics of Computing

The IEEE makes their 'Taxonomy' available on line (linked to in their Author FAQ under the Publications page), but this is only a hierarchical list without the designations you have given to identify something as the C.2.1.h topic. Surprisingly (to me), neither the author kit nor the editorial manual discuss this hierarchy.
In contrast, for the American Institute of Physics, the PACS codes are available on-line at PACS 2010.

wow, they didn't put in the section numbers (as you point out)!  Thanks

The PACS 2010 codes are now available here, but I'm not sure it's worth updating the answer with the new link given that AIP and APS discontinued use of PACS years ago.


text:
Can I submit my paper without author list (double-blind) to a conference with a single-blind review process?
I am submitting a paper to a computer science conference, can I submit it without author list? The submission guideline says: "submissions are reviewed following a single blind review process, meaning, you do not need to hide authors’ names and affiliations"
The names, affiliations and conflicts of interests will be mentioned when I am submitting the paper. But can I remove name and affiliations from the paper (pdf)? Does it mean that the reviewer will not see it?
Secondly, is there any point in hiding these information, or they will find it out anyway?

My suggestion would be contacting one of the organizers directly and asking about it. It is possible that they accept to treat your submission as a double-blind one.

In a single blind review process, the author names are not hidden for the reviewers, but the reviewer names are hidden for the authors.
In a double blind review process, the author names are hidden for the reviewers, and the reviewer names are hidden for the authors.
In both cases you will have to submit the author names during the submission process (e.g., in a web form), and the organizing committee will be able to see your names. Typically, for a conference or journal with a double blind review process, you are asked to provide a manuscript without any author names and affiliations.
You cannot submit an anonymous manuscript to a conference/journal with a single blind review process, as it probably will be rejected straight away.

When I've been on the program committees of computer science conferences, the names of authors were always available even apart from the pdf files of the submissions.  But other conferences might work differently, so you should probably check with the chair of the program committee.

Is it the case for double-blind conferences as well?

@emab No, that would clearly defeat the entire purpose of making the review double blind.

@TobiasKildetoft Though "Blind to the Reviewers" = / = "Blind to the Committee"

@Fomite In the conferences I referred to, the program committee members served as reviewers (though they could farm the task out to sub-reviewers).

In general, single-blind is single-blind.  Full stop.  Of course, you may try to negotiate with the PC chair, but the outcome is not guaranteed.  A busy PC chair might disregard such a request simply because he/she would have no time for special regulations.
What you can also try to negotiate (or simply do without asking anyone) is to submit under a pseudonym.  It is unusual, so I would not recommend it unless you do it right from the start and stick to that pseudonym for a long period of time.  If you go for a pseudonym, you should ponder about how you would handle spending part of your life under another name, about citation counts, etc. In short, you should be knowing what you are doing.