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How to deal with "too descriptive" comment in dissertation proposal feedback?
I am writing a University Dissertation proposal on Big Data. I have recently received my feedback and while there are good, constructive points one of the main issues in the marking is it is "too descriptive". I do not understand what this means really, when we are talking about a literature review how can it not be descriptive - you are talking about what has already been found.
The exact feedback is:

Your literature review is overwhelmingly descriptive in character and its needs more of a critical edge, evaluating the main contributions to the literature. Having a critical edge is essential, if you want to achieve a high mark in the final dissertation.

So the question is: What is descriptive writing and what is critical writing, preferably with examples?

By paraphrasing the feedback as "too descriptive", I think that you're slightly mis-reading the criticism.  The issue isn't that your proposal is too descriptive, it's that it's too exclusively descriptive.  Being descriptive is great; but you need to add a critical component as well.

The difference between descriptive writing and critical writing is much like the difference between a newspaper report and an opinion column.
Descriptive writing is the act of reporting on what's in the literature:

Smith found that when X occurred Y and Z also happened.

Critical writing analyzes what has been done, and takes note of trends, as well as possibly offering feedback on the overall quality of the research:

Smith found X occurred in the presence of Y and Z, as did Jones. However, Doe has demonstrated that Y and Z normally occur in conjunction with one another, so it is not clear if X actually influences Y and Z, or if it is an independent effect.

What you can see from the above is that critical writing does require some descriptive writing, but it goes well beyond it in terms of the depth of analysis.

To extend aeismail's comment slightly, a good critical analysis will not only summarize and critique findings, but also extrapolate conclusions from multiple studies to support/disprove current theories. Each individual paper provides evidence to some small piece of the overall puzzle; a good review will tie together many related (and some unrelated) papers to build an argument towards a general conclusion, using the individual research findings as support for their argument.
Note that the individual results are almost expected to contradict each other. You can frequently have a batch of papers supporting theory A, and a second set of papers supporting theory B. This should be noted and identified as well; these are the current trends in your field of research.

I would like to tackle this question from another angle for you.
You have done a literature review for the dissertation proposal. You report your findings from those literature after you study them, so you have descriptive writings in the proposal.
But, what do you propose to research? Have you discovered anything? Have you challenged the existing literature? What do you want to research? Why do you want to research that topic? What are your arguments? What would be your own approaches? Why would your approach work? Etc.
Those are the things they are looking for. They want you to have critical edge in the proposal.
I found a link from University of Leicester about What is critical writing very helpful, at least to me. It contains several sections, What is critical writing? What is descriptive writing? The difference between descriptive writing and critical writing, examples and other useful information.

I find this answer to be the most compelling thus far.  However, I have to wonder why the reviewer used the term 'critical edge' rather than something less-abstract and more-informative.

Echoing what others have said, while reviewing the literature, you need not only summarize findings. That's what "Descriptive" means in this context - not that your writing shouldn't describe current findings, but that your writing only describes current findings, without any analysis, criticism or synthesis.
For example, I once wrote a review on the reasons why a particular disease follows a particular seasonal pattern. A purely descriptive review would have described the various theories as to why this phenomena exists, and stopped there. Instead, I evaluated the extended evidence for each (i.e. for X to be true, Y must also be true. We have no evidence that Y is true, which puts X on shakey ground), identified which were mutually incompatible, and suggested which might actually be describing the same mechanism in two different forms.
What your evaluators are looking for, in all likelihood, is not merely a listing of the current thought in the field, but work that shows you are interacting with that work. That you think someone might be wrong - or are at least critically evaluating what is currently being written. That you can extend where the field is going in unique directions based on what's been done before, etc.


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Is there any requirement to cite recent literature in publications?
Recently I submitted my first paper to a philosophy journal and got a rejection. This is of course nothing unusual, but as someone with a STEM background, I was surprised by the reason for the rejection: While there were no complaints regarding contents or correctness, it was felt that the paper failed to cite and engage with the recent literature on the topic.
The latter is indeed true: I did ignore the latest papers in the field and only referenced a handful of "classic" papers from the last century. But I also thought this was okay, as it seemed to me that the recent literature didn't add much to what was already covered by the classic papers, and was in any case not essential to the discussion.
Now, I'm not here to complain about having my paper rejected, or to argue about who's wrong or right. I just would like to know whether the requirement to cite the recent literature is a humanities-specific thing, or whether this is a common requirement in most fields. For instance, I imagine that if I had submitted a maths or computer science paper that referenced only a handful of classic and old, but relevant papers, my own paper, if correct and substantial, would have been accepted.
Note: Since people seem to misunderstand me, a bit of extra clarification: I don't have a problem with citing recent literature, if that's what it takes to get a philosophy paper published. I just want to know if this is more or less the same in most fields, including maths and CS. In the latter, so I believe, it's less of a big deal to cite the latest papers as long as the submitted paper correctly solves some well-known open problem.

it seemed to me that the recent literature didn't add much — Then you should have argued in your paper that recent literature on the topic is irrelevant, with citations to the recent literature to back up your argument.

Who is going to be the reviewer, if you only reference century old papers? The list of references serves as a signpost to the Editors who to assign as a reviewer.

This question seems to be based on a common misconception about the role of citations (see this question for a related issue).  Citations aren't just there to list content your work builds on; they're also there to provide the reader with context and motivation.
The reason you should be citing recent work is to help the reader.  If you were familiar with various unsuccessful solutions, it's likely that some of them motivated the successful one, even if only by identifying things that couldn't work, and that merits a citation.  Even if not, many of your readers are likely to be people who've thought a lot about one or more of those unsuccessful approaches; you're in the best position to explain how your approach differs.
(I'm writing from the perspective of mathematics, by the way.)

If you were familiar with various unsuccessful solutions, it's likely that some of them motivated the successful one [...]; Reading this part of your answer, remembered me this question: Article that shows the complete publication history of acceptances and rejections of a successful academic

Your assumption is wrong: The requirement to cite the recent literature is a valid reason for rejection on many fields as well and is certainly not a humanities thing. Why? You give the answer yourself:

my own paper, if correct and substantial, would have been accepted

But how can the reviewer judge that (the substantial contribution at least) if you do not cite the recent papers? Perhaps what you propose, has already been done before and even in a better way that the one you propose in some recent papers. Science is not rebuilt from scratch every year and reading just a classic textbook is not enough to address the state-of-the-art in any field.
Also, not acknowledging the recent works is not only lazy (since you have not done the necessary "homework" regarding your scientific area) but it can also be intentionally misleading (perhaps you hide the recent papers because you know they are much better than yours). At the very best case, it is just ungrateful on those dealing with the same problem as you, since you seem not to consider their work significant enough for citing them on your paper. If you take into account that those reviewing your papers are also moving around the same problem area as you, by ignoring their work, is a sure way to get your paper rejected.

"But how can the reviewer judge that (the substantial contribution at least) if you do not cite the recent papers?" -- By means of logical reasoning? Also, the problem and solution are well-defined, and those familiar with the field know that problem is substantial and that it has not been solved yet.

"At the very best case, it is just ungrateful on those dealing with the same problem as you, since you seem not to consider their work significant enough for citation on your paper." -- But what if the recent literature consists mostly of unsuccessful attempts at solving the problem?

@pythondude you just prove my point: ..."mostly of unsuccessful attempts at solving the problem". How would the reviewer know that, if you do not cite those attempts?

Because, as I said, the problem is well-known in the field, and it is also well-known that it hasn't been solved yet.

I have rejected papers in applied physics journals for not citing recent literature. In those cases, it generally was because the result was not actually new (and in several was actually incorrect). As pointed out by @Alexandros, the proper way would be to summarize at least some recent (failed) attempts, and then establish why your contribution is actually new and novel. If the reviewer can't get a warm fuzzy feeling that you are actually up on the current thinking in the field you will have trouble.

Getting recent literature costs a lot of money in some fields.  Just saying.

@JonCuster: Okay, if you put it that way, it makes more sense. Basically, citing recent literature just to show that I know what I'm talking about, even if my own approach doesn't build on it.

@pythondude if the recent literature consists of mostly of unsuccessful attempts at solving the problem, then your paper must state that and support it with evidence - citing the 'most successful' attempts and explaining why they're not appropriate. The only thing that 'well-known that it hasn't been solved yet' buys you is that you don't have to prove it, but you still must explicitly state it within the paper. If there's some 2013 paper that (on the first sight) claims to have a good solution as well, then it should be clear from reading your paper if you've taken it into account or not.

In applied computer science, not citing recent literature (and in this case, "recent" really means "the last couple of years") correlates very strongly with rejection. Essentially, when I review a paper where all references are old according to the standards of the field, the reason can be either that:

there is newer related work, and the author is not aware of it or wilfully ignores it
there is indeed no recent related work; this is at least an indicator that the problem is either solved or deemed irrelevant by the community
the paper has been written a long time ago and has been rejected at multiple previous attempts at publication
the paper author is just a crank, who believes he has redefined (for instance) the concept of object-oriented programming

Points 1 and 4 warrant rejection on their own. Point 2 and 3 are at least a strong indicator that a paper should be rejected. That being said, I cannot remember ever rejecting a paper only for failing to cite recent literature. In all cases that come to my mind, this was just a minor sidenote and the paper actually got rejected for much more fundamental issues.

I'd modify what you say just slightly: points 1 and 4 warrant rejection on their own, and points 2 and 3 are strong indicators that a paper should be rejected.  (Admittedly, I'm coming from the perspective of a different field with quite different publishing practices.)

@MarkMeckes Agreed.

Citing papers is primarily to provide reference to the source of information gained from sources other than yourself in the study you are writing about. There are some instances where reference is made to works that provide background to the topic, in my field often review papers that summarize knowledge up to a point in time or papers that discusses methods and similar cases that can shorten your own description of some aspect of your manuscript
The main question is not so much if the latest material is cited but rather if the right material has been cited. Most research builds on earlier studies and is located at the cutting edge of knowledge so it seems unlikely that references to new or the latest findings within a subject would not have its place in a paper. That said, I would add that there is often a lack of historical knowledge as well. People (again in my field at least) reference papers from within the last five years for findings that were done half a century or more ago. This lack of knowledge about the origins of ideas can sometimes be problematic since one trusts someone else's interpretation of the original work when referencing new material that builds on the original.
So reference the right material, old as well as new, and be aware what the papers you cite actually say and from where they in turn sourced their information.

You asked about maths and CS in particular. xLeitix wrote about CS; I am going to write about math from my perspective publishing in the field.
In math, there is much less of a need to cite "recent" work - although there is still some need, as I will explain below.  In many areas of math (perhaps not all), the referee really can verify the arguments by logical reasoning, so references are less important to verify that the argument is correct. (Of course, if you use previous results, they will need to be cited.)
For this reason, citation practices in math are well known to be different than other fields. We publish less and have fewer citations on average than some other fields (so our journals have lower impact factors) and our citations are, on average, to "older" papers compared to other fields.
As a perhaps extreme example, I published a paper in 2010 with 14 references, of which 11 were published before the year 2000. The paper is in a respected, selective journal (an "A" journal in the Australian Math Society ranking). This paper is an outlier, though, compared to my other papers. My most recently accepted paper has 8 references: 1 is still a preprint, 2 were published in the last 4 years, 2 are from the 1990s, and 3 are from the 1970s. I don't think that is very far from normal in my area of mathematics.
When I referee papers in math, I look for references that:

Provide appropriate links to background material (these are particularly helpful for non-experts who read the paper).
Give appropriate credit for previous work.
Motivate the new work by showing how it relates to previous work. The 3 "newer" references in the paper from 2010 that I mentioned were exactly for this purpose. They showed how the problem we were studying had been posed by others, and how our work was related to published open questions in another area of mathematics.

When someone submits a paper to a selective math journal, the referees and editors will look for all these things. A paper that is full of brilliant technical results, but for which the editors can't see any motivation or interest, may end up being rejected because there are other papers that also have brilliant technical results, but which have clear motivation and are likely to be of interest to many others.  Because journals have space limitations, correctness on its own is often not sufficient for a paper to be accepted.
At less selective math journals, correctness on its own may be the main criterion, but I would still expect a referee to comment on a under-referenced paper.

As for the situation in the question, it helps to remember that philosophy is generally focused on the types of problems that cannot be solved by mere logical reasoning. The same holds for many areas of the humanities, as well. In these fields, one cannot simply prove one's argument from commonly held axioms - the problems being studied are not amenable to simple logical analysis like mathematics problems. Each paper is viewed as a contribution to a discussion about the topic.
This leads to another key difference between citations in math and in some other fields. In mathematics, we usually try to cite the original source of an idea, to give credit to the first person to define or prove something. In other fields, the practice is instead to cite the most recent references on the idea, because they give a better representation on the current state of the discussion about the topic.

It's dangerous not to cite works from the present. Most reviewers live in the present and have a "frame of reference" there. Your best shot would have been to hope for a bunch of reviewers who are now at least 45-50 years old, who remember "the good old days" of the past century. Apparently that didn't happen to you.
It's possible that there are some fields where, for whatever reason, the work done before the turn of the century was better than the work that was done after it. In that case, you might have to rely heavily on the pre-turn of the century work to critique the more recent work. But at least cite the recent work.
A paper or idea, even if meritorious that is not "modern" already has one strike against it. The damage is "double" or more, if you haven't considered (or at least appeared to have considered) the recent ideas in the field.
I found this out the hard way with my book "A Modern Approach to Graham and Dodd Investing" (Wiley, 2004), that preached that a "modern" version of the (1930s) ideas of Graham and Dodd would be more useful than the ideas that were then in vogue. But at least I couldn't be accused of "ignoring" them.

I will try to add another perspective (I hope I don't repeat anybody else, if I do, please alarm me).
One of the measures that can be used in pre-review to see if the article is suitable are the references. For example, if your article cites only low-quality journals, it is presumed that it will be cited only in low-quality journals. Similarly, if it doesn't cite anything newer than X years (where X may vary from field to field), it is presumed that it is not interesting for the community and it will maybe not cited ever.
If the editor sees the article, doesn't find it very interesting, and moreover it has this problem, it may get rejected without review.

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How to prepare for the French language exam as part of PhD program?
I am about to take the French language exam as part of the requirements for the PhD program at my university. The exam will consist of having to translate (with the help of a dictionary) a subset of a mathematics paper written in French. As an Indian international student in the US, I speak a number of languages, but I've grown up knowing them (i.e. never went through the process of having to learn it) and none of them (except perhaps English) give me any insight into the French language, which makes me nervous!
I would appreciate any tips as to how one might prepare for this exam, and materials that might be handy. For example:

Did you have to take a language exam? How did you prepare for it?
Has knowing said language helped you out in your mathematical career?
Do there exist collections of mathematics papers in French that one can practice on?

Thanks you in advance for your answers!

@Zhen Lin: Maybe EGA is not the best choice for a topologist... Anyway the website of IHÉS contains a lot of other interesting papers/monographs.

Basically, if you just learn to translate with a dictionary, it will not be very helpful later, because it will be too painful to actually use it throughout your career.

Recently I have discovered Babbel.com website for learning new languages. It is very interactive and powerful, I think it might help you. Unfortunately, it ain't free.

Knowing French has been very useful for my career, but being able to translate really slowly with a dictionary is not "knowing French". If you like puzzles, it might be useful to look at the linguistics puzzles here: http://webscript.princeton.edu/~lingclub/challenge/puzzles.php to get in the proper mindset for translation of unknown languages.

Yes. I took both German and French. I was already fairly comfortable with French from having studied it in high school and in university, so I'll write about German instead. I prepared for my German language exam by going on to the GDZ server (a program to retroactively digitise documents, including a lot of classical mathematics papers) and downloading some papers in mathematical analysis (my field, sort of) from around the 1950s to 60s (when still a lot of the papers were published in German). I then went to the library and borrowed the copy of Hyman's German-English Mathematics Dictionary (for the nouns) and a copy of a normal German-English dictionary (for the verbs) and sat myself down and started translating word by word. After about a month I translated about 30 pages or so of math papers (and at the same time learned about uniform spaces), and proceeded to take my exam.
Not much. I have absolutely no conversational German, and only very rarely do I have to look something up in German that I cannot find a write-up in another language. (So far twice only, one a slightly obscure result in algebraic lattices that the only reference I could find is to a paper in the 30s.) (French on the other hand has been useful; mostly because the abovementioned "write-up in another language" often turned out to be in French.) Given how much I've found French to be useful for me, I'm sure that if I had actually properly learned the language, German would be just about as useful. Conversely, if you don't really learn the foreign language, you will probably be able to get by through other means in this day and age.
The canonical place to find French papers to read is NUMDAM. Of course, for practice, you can also check out Bourbaki from the library; it may be slightly less intimidating to start working first on the language by reading something whose mathematics at least you are familiar with.

BTW, for suggestions of things to read, there happened to have just been a MathOverflow discussion on exactly this topic.

I think the main purpose of learning another language in the PhD program is to be able to explain your research in that language if necessary.  At my former institution, the language exam covered reading and writing about mathematics in french or russian.  It would be best to investigate your institution's policy about the exam and their requirements for the PhD degree.  That will determine what and how you need to study for that exam.
While I've never had to write a technical paper in another language, knowing these other languages has certainly increased my ability to network with experts from around the world.  That's the true value of learning languages: being able to connect with others on another level.

I agree with you in principle about learning languages, but what you describe sounds more ambitious than most grad school language exams.  My impression is that (in mathematics) they focus almost exclusively on reading, which is a much lower bar than writing.

I think this is generally true of language exams in scientific fields. I've never heard of a science or engineering program require speaking knowledge of a foreign language.

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Curious case of self-citations and how to monitor self-citers?
If one looks superficially at the publications of author X, he seems to be one of the top scientists in his field. But looking more closely his citations are 60% from himself 35% from his co-author, and 5% from others. (Some people might say: “It doesn’t matter, probably he is the only one working in such a field and he has to cite himself.” However, let’s say that it is not the case.)
This author is only one example of many people who do self-citations. Many of us have grown up to see citation as a measure and started to mishandle it. As it is easy to do so. My questions are:

Isn’t there a system which monitors unethical self-citations apart from the peer-review process, where such authors pass such tests and still extensively cite themselves?
Isn’t there a system that blacklists authors who involve in similar unethical activities as “fake scientists” and never allows them to publish anywhere else?
Do institutions not realize that such professors are a potential threat to science and ask them to resign?
Don’t such people demean real science people who spend years of hard work to publish their work?

I strongly disagree with the notion of self-citations being in general bad/inappropriate/unethical.

Most comments and answers discuss self-citation per se, while the case here is about excessive self-citation. The original version included a link to a Google Scholar profile where the citation count went from 500 to 5000 in a single year, mostly based on self-citations.

The specific case covered is quite notorious, and seems to be a case of an institution trying to outright cheat the system in order to increase their University’s rank: see e.g. the following article, or this quora Q&A.

Self-citations are not unethical, but if you do any bibliometry, they should be ignored.

The most likely treatment of such individuals by universities is a promotion. This wonderful well-cited academic is getting lots of grant money, and more overhead for the university! (Joking I hope ...)

@Walter True, but is anybody arguing the opposite? Neither the question nor the answers do, and anybody working in research knows that self-citation (in moderation, where it makes sense) is simply completely normal and unavoidable.

Goodhart's law states that ""When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." At some point people decided that citation count was a good measure of an academic productivity (and it probably was).  As soon as important decisions (promotion, tenure, etc) started being made based on citation count, some academics started gaming it.  If we "fix it", then some academics will game the new fixes.

The four bullet points indicate that self-citers are a significant threat to modern science. On the contrary, I believe people who attain a larger number of citations from other authors but have very questionable scientific methods are a much bigger threat.

@yo' That was my reaction as well, but might overcompensate against work that is mostly others' but you end up being on the author list for small contributions. Those should count, shouldn't it? Hm.

Well, it's your decision where you draw boundary between "been thanked in acknowledgements for one smalltalk at the coffee corner" and "spend time that I consider significant and I want to be a coauthor".

I don't think there is a good way around self-citations, since most of the time, your current research builds upon your previous research, and therefore, your previous research (or that of your collaborators) is relevant to your current research. However, from my experience, self-citations form a small part of the overall number of citations.
Assuming the author's group is not the only one working on a topic, there seem to be two other problems here:

other people don't seem to cite his work, which could mean that he is ignored, his work isn't visible or his work is just not good and/or relevant enough.
basing quality on number of citations is flawed. The number of citations is closely related to an authors H-index, which is criticized regularly. The same criticism should be valid for number of citations.

To tackle the "problem" of self-citations (I would not say this is a problem in the majority of cases), some citation-based measures are based on citations excluding self-citations. This does of course get tricky when collaborators are citing someone's work, but the large bulk of self-citations will be removed this way.

I agree with everything, but I think the key part is that self-citation is normally not a problem.

To answer the questions directly:

There is no such "system" that I know of. There are a variety of independent "watchdog" groups, bloggers, etc, who sometimes draw attention to what they see as abuses in academic publishing, and occasionally notorious cases will be discussed in academic or popular media.  But I'm not aware that these people or organizations monitor these issues in a systematic way, beyond individual cases.  There is certainly no single global body overseeing the issue.
Again, there is no system.  Academic publishing is decentralized and every publisher makes their own decisions about how to run their journals.  Individual publishers might have their own internal blacklists of authors who have committed abuses in that publisher's journals, and whose work will no longer be considered by that publisher.  But there is no global blacklist, nor any central organization that would have the power to enforce it.  Many people would consider such a blacklist to be unethical - such systems have in the past been abused to exclude people for inappropriate reasons - and in some jurisdictions the idea of an industry-wide blacklist might be illegal.
Institutions make their own decisions.  They might not know about such abuses until they are brought to their attention by someone else.  They might or might not consider them significant enough to fire a researcher.  They might be swayed by the researcher's success in other areas.  There might be disagreement within the institution about what to do.  In many places there are tenure policies that can make it difficult to fire a researcher; it might require a broad consensus among faculty and administration that the researcher's actions are unacceptable, as well as requiring a long and costly legal or quasi-legal process.  Institutions might not feel that self-citation abuse is worth the effort.
Arguably.  However, that is a matter of opinion and off-topic for this site.

1) I suspect social values concerning self-citations may vary field by field, but in my (partly-former) sub-discipline within AI, self-citations are not frowned upon as far as I can see.
2) It's not necessarily that people think it's a good way to increase the h-index because some metrics exclude self-citations. Instead, self-citing helps boost the profile of the paper, which in turn benefits real citations.
3) Even if self-citing is terrible, then the few that do self-cite a lot force others to do so too, that is, some people may simply be doing what they have to do.
People are gaming academia in such cases, but not Science itself. I don't think citations and the h-index are partly-constitutive of Science. So, if it is wrong, then it is violating an academic rather than a scientific norm, in my opinion. The 'real science' remains science regardless of if it is cited a lot or not at all.

The problem is that citation counts are nothing better than a gross approximation to a measure of quality.  You can see this from the fact that "Smith is a moron who published an extensive series of papers [1-7] claiming that influenza is spread by eating cabbage; Jones [8] has conclusively demonstrated this not to be the case" gives Smith's junk many more citations than Jones's proper science.

Do institutions not realize that such professors are a potential threat to science and ask them to resign?

They're not a threat to science at all. They're a threat to people who believe that science is about counting citations.

Don’t such people demean real science people who spend years of hard work to publish their work?

No. We demean real science people who spend years of hard work to publish their work by reducing that hard work to "I have ten citations and you have six so I'm better than you."

Single-author self-citations (in peer reviewed publications) are hardly capable of generating a significant citation count (for peer reviewed publications) or H-index, unless author X publishes at a very high rate in peer reviewed journals.
The story is different with large collaborations: if each of ~100 authors cites their paper in their next few publications, this generates several 100 citations.
Edit. Oft course only peer reviewed publications should be considered to assess scholarly impact.

"Single-author self-citations are hardly capable of generating a significant citation count or H-index" It depends on the tool used for counting the citations. For example, Google Scholar indexes every PDF that looks like a paper, including legitimate, but non peer-reviewed work (e.g. undergrad homework), and plain bogus papers.

The majority of "citations" in the profile originally linked were form self-published stuff on Researchgate and the like.

@lighthouse keeper yes it is feasible and many people are doing it. I can repost the link of several profiles I know from Google scholar.

@lighthousekeeper Homeworks aren't going to contribute to self-citation counts.

@DavidRicherby Indeed, thanks for clarifying. An author could still use homework to boost his citation count at GS, in particular if he is the instructor of a well-attended class. The homework could be to write a short review of his recent paper and to upload this review online.

There is nothing, at all, unethical about self-citation. Authors should cite their previous work where it is relevant to their current work, as should co-authors and anyone else who refers to the work.
On the other hand, treating citation counts as a measure of ability in unethical. As with every other metric of this kind, it perverts and distorts science.
Your question therefore is aimed at the wrong problem, and because the question is based on an incorrect premise there is no good answer to it.

There is a system that ignores such citations. Ideas RePec (Research Papers in Economics) compiles citation counts for economics research. Author rankings are computed that exclude self-citations and which, when ranking journals or working paper series, exclude citations from that same outlet.
For example:
https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.person.nbcites.html

This is bound to happen; researchers follow their line of inquiry. And yes, it will help their H-index unless manually corrected. But, most top-tier institutions are wise to this, and a hiring committee will look at this in-depth. At my former institution, the H-index was recomputed less self citations. Hiring committees and grant panels won't fall for this, so don't be too concerned.

Self citation is a reasonable thing to do if you want it to be easy for people to follow the history of your work.
Most progression of science is gradual and most progression of each scientists individual work is also gradual.
Therefore it is not very strange if a scientist explains the gradual evolution of their work by citing themselves.

You don't monitor. You let them do.
It looks unfair, and yes it has negative consequences on researchers morale, though no matter the amount of self-citations and citations obtained on the shoulders of other researchers work, only due to having placed their name on others papers they haven't read, they will not get anywhere near the number of citations of really breakthrough papers.
I met one of these self citing professors. In his whole career he placed his name on thousand of papers he has not even read and encouraged self citations at any level, praising number over quality. He had his fingers in multiple research departments, and to do that he was mainly doing the boring work of the politician.
In twenty years of this boring work, his number of citations was an order of magnitude below the citations of a single successful paper (such as Nakamoto, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" or the Rivest, Shamir, Adlemann "A method for obtaining digital signatures and public-key cryptosystems").
But in the meantime he and his similar kept alive research lab and departments, getting on researchers and students, while taking all the administrative and managerial work.


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Is citing only high-impact articles in my publication ethical?
This question is related to the articles that are often cited in introduction or motivation section of any article. Often while writing an introduction, I mostly cite the famous works that are relevant to my work. Some other time I also cite the recent works from high-impact journals that are relevant to my work. This is primarily because these works are more show-cased and are widely available.
However, even though these works are relevant, is it ethical to just cite popular relevant works? What if an author published a more relevant work and it never got popular because he published in a low-impact journal? (This is refutable by saying: “Interesting work always gets cited and gets popular, irrelevant of the journal’s impact factor.”)

You should cite all the relevant work you know, regardless of the journal IF.

@MassimoOrtolano Yes, But all we know is all we read. All we read is all that is popular, unfortunately. This is not always the case. But we should accept that journal impact factor largely influences the way we think about article quality and work.

Why should we "accept that journal impact factor largely influence ..."? Don't you have independent judgement of paper relevance and quality?

You should read papers relevant to your research even from low impact journals. You are of course more likely to miss them, but nevertheless should not ignore them. This (noticing relevant papers from low impact journals) is probably the best thing that various academic "facebooks" are doing for me.

@Patricia Shanahan To have an independent judgement of a papers relevance and quality you have to read it. Do you read all papers of your field ? I would rather be selective of what I read especially because there is oceans of published articles.

I agree with being selective. The question is what criteria to use in selecting. Why not treat probable relevance in terms of search results and reading abstracts as being more important than journal? If you ignore papers based on journal during your literature searches you risk wasting months or years, not hours, because a paper you ignored duplicates or invalidates your research. You may only find out about it when a reviewer recommends rejection of your paper for duplicating a paper you didn't read.

As someone who does not work in a university (and hence does not have access to a university library) I find it most useful if papers cited as far as possible are easy for me to access on the internet without having to pay to access them.    Therefore when there is choose of papers to cite, please chose the paper that all of your readers will find easiest to access and understand.     Citing an easy to access survey paper can be a great help to a reader like me, even if you also cite the papers that first come up with each concept.

No, omitting work you know to be relevant simply because its publication venue does not have as high an impact factor is not ethical.
The purpose of citations is to point your reader to the relevant additional literature, give credit to the work that came before you, and position your work in the broader space.  Indexing the most prominent venues (and thereby reinforcing their prominence) is not one of their purposes.
If you read the paper, and it materially impacted your work, you should cite it. And you should cite other papers that are relevant.  You don't have to cite every thing that has ever been written on the topic (and as Googlebot mentioned, review articles are a great thing to cite), but quality of individual papers, not prestige of their publication venue, should be the deciding criteria.

This is refutable by saying "Interesting work always gets cited and gets popular, irrelevant of the journals impact factor."

I do not believe that refutation, but even if it were true, it would not be true if authors approached citation as you are proposing.

If your purpose is to cite general references for a topic, it is
better to cite a recent review article (if available; as suggested by
the OP), as summarizes all recent works on that topic. Not only this
makes your manuscript and its references better weighted but also
properly guides the readers (random references are not useful).
If a relevant review article is not available, cite the references
which better fit your statement to be referenced. If there is no
other preference, it is better to cite references from the leading
journals of the field (regardless of the impact factor), which are
read by most of the readers.
If you cite a specific finding, then the reference should be cited
regardless of the host journal.

As a side note, for the general references, it is better to cite references you may use in the rest of your manuscript too.

Also, most people who read the review article will see a list of all papers that cite it, assume the review article is open access.

Impact factors are calculated from citation counts. If everyone just cites based on impact factor, in the end impact factors will become meaningless as they'll just be measuring last year's impact factor.


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Is it okay to have 2 definitions of the same term?
(A bit difficult to describe what I mean without sharing my definitions, but I am cautious of posting them since this is regarding my thesis.) I had to provide a definition for a term I came up with. Since it is a complex matter, I provided one definition and then wrote "alternatively put:" and gave a second definition that describes it a bit differently and more elaborate. My advisor just put a question mark. I thought of merging both definitions together, but they are more or less different "views" of the term, so it didn't make sense. Is there an academically adequate way for me to keep both definitions of the same term?

Is this math? Lots of answers seem to assume it is.

Shouldn't the general answer to "what to do if my adviser puts a question mark" be "then talk to your adviser!"?

Consider the seven definitions of a matroid.

If they are "views" then they are hardly "definitions". A definition should be precise. If you want to give two statements, which might occur in math, you need to be able to prove equivalence.
If they merely overlap in meaning then there may be cases in which one applies and the other doesn't. In informal language that is probably fine, but in a dissertation that is unlikely to be the case. It is hard to "define" goodness for example.
Note that something like a metaphor or analogy isn't a definition. A definition needs to distinguish what is and what is not conformable.
I'll go along with your advisor and put a question mark.
You can choose one, perhaps, or unify them formally, but two is too many.
If the same term is used in your field in two distinct ways then it may be defined differently for different aspects. But in such a case you will need to be extremely clear when you use one definition or the other. What is it that distinguishes them?

If they are "views" then they are hardly "definitions". Counterpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP_(complexity)#Formal_definition Though I do agree that the thesis should probably pick a single thing and call it the definition.

@user541686 the difference in that example is that all those different definitions are provably equivalent.

@JordiVermeulen That doesn't sound like a difference to me. If multiple definitions aren't provably equivalent, there's been a mistake.

@user541686 Well, the first one is the definition, and is why it's called NP. The second one is not so much a definition as a result saying that something is in NP if and only if it satisfies these conditions. And it's often more convenient to check NP-ness using the result than the definition.

@wizzwizz4 I just meant that in some mathematical settings, there are different "views" of a certain concept that are provably equivalent (e.g. NP-ness by Turing machine, or by certificates). Sometimes one view is more convenient for whatever it is you're doing, and that's fine, because they're all the same. It's different in some other sciences, where the same term may have multiple definitions that are not provably equivalent, but subtly different.

Echoing @Buffy's good answer, and emphasizing a certain point: even if there is no truly "correct" order of logical development of the ideas (meaning what is a definition, versus consequence of definition), you probably need to pick one... Then perhaps prove that another "definition/characterization" is equivalent, or, possibly, is equivalent when both characterizations apply(?).
After proving such an equivalence, then we can forget the (possibly artificial) logical ordering that we used at the beginning (to avoid circular reasoning...)

I often write definitions like "The following are all equivalent: def1, def2, def3.  We call anything satisfying any one of these equivalent conditions a ____".  Then prove the equivalence.

Here is a familiar example of how to write equivalent definitions,
Lemma 1.3.4: For any set $A \subset X$ the following two conditions are equivalent:
(a) The complement $X-A$ is open in $X$.
(b) Any sequence $(x_n)$ in $X$ with limit $x$ that has all $x_i \in A$ also satisfies $x \in A$.
Proof: Yadda yadda yadda QED.
Definition 1.3.5: The set $A \subset X$ is said to be closed in $X$ to mean it satisfies one and therefore both of conditions (a) and (b) above.

I guess you can give multiple definitions, as long as you then explain why there are multiple definitions. For example, I can imagine if you are talking about "fatigue" you could say "for engineers, fatigue means... But when sports scientists use the term, they mean... The difference is interesting because...."
Basically, you don't want your readers to be puzzled by what's going on. If your supervisor (who is an expert) is puzzled, then everyone else will be too. Have a bash at rewording it, and run it past your supervisor again.

What field is this? If you're doing qualitative work, it wouldn't be out of line to provide an elaborated definition and a more concise (TL;DR) version of the same concept. The shorter definition may be shorthand for the former. The shorter version could also be a more abstract concept that would meet with wide agreement (and be easy to grasp, maybe even by non-academics), while the longer version is a detailed description of exactly what does and doesn't fit into the concept. Indeed, when doing quantitative analysis in the social sciences, it's very common to give a conceptual definition, followed by a definition that operationalizes the concept for the analysis in question.

You aren't describing a "definition" but an explanation or, perhaps, an analogy. If the shorter "definition" really defines the concept, what use is the longer one?

The definition of "definition", and the uses of definitions, vary by field. For example, I used to do research on democracy, and there are literally dozens of different definitions of it. Most everyone agrees that a "democracy" is a country ruled through elections, but there are all sorts of nuances, like who can vote, how free the press is, and how fair elections are. When there are no true bright lines between categories, you can't construct perfect definitions. OTOH, for quantitative analysis, I'd need a very specific definition, which might depend on what's feasible given imperfect data.

A definition must be comprehensive and unambiguous.

If you need a second definition, it can mean that your first "definition" is still ambiguous, that you still need to be more precise. In that case, it means that the first "definition" was actually not a definition. So it would not be okay to have two definitions. Work harder on the first definition.

Another case is if you have readers from very distinct fields who have distinct jargons which makes that some of them who aren’t familiar with the jargon of the first definition (assuming it is a true unambiguous definition) don’t really understand it. In that case, a second definition can be interesting as long as it’s just a sound paraphrase. But the best solution remains to find a definition whose words are understandable by everyone.

TL;DR. It’s always a bad idea to have two definitions. However, it can be interesting to present equivalences. That is the fact that one term in a specific field corresponds to another word in another field. This can allow to jump from one field to another field and connect knowledges together.
If you want to help people better understand what your object is by explaining things about it, by stating some consequences of its existence, or by telling its origin, etc. it doesn’t stand in the "definition" part but in the rest of your text parts (etymology, origin, consequences, corollaries, theorems, etc. as it depends on your working field).

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


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Tricky situation with affiliation
I would like to hear an advice for a slightly complicated situation.
I'm currently a postdoc working on a revolutionary project during the last year. During this year, my boss gave me a real hard time and managed to sabotage a future job that I found even after it has been confirmed. His point that I should perform 'his request' and not the project that I had in mind (although, it is clear to me that the project he asked cannot be done).
According to my judgement, my boss's project cannot be done and therefore I was working both on the original project as well on my interest (although this created a huge delay in the preparation time of the original project).
Currently, the project is mostly done and should be published soon after my affiliation is over. However, I left jobless due to the action of my boss, and had horrible time throughout the writing process.
My question is in what way would you express you inconvenience. I actually prefer to publish this paper with no affiliation rather than publishing it under an abusive institute. What would be your advice?

did you take the postdoc position to develop a specific project or to follow your ideas? why did you not resign from the project when you realized it was not doable?

how did your boss left you jobless? did they fire you or did the contract expired?

The question in its current form is not useful, but it may become useful if the situation is better described.

@DanielHatton at some point is too much shit even for a PhD. As a postdoc, even more: the pay is the same as working as a waiter, with the double of the timeload. So you work 60 hours per week for a pay X. At that point is better to find a job 40h per week with the same pay, and then do a PostDoc as a hobby only.

I actually was working both on the original project as well on my interest (but this created a huge delay in the preparation time of the original project your boss is seeing this way: you worked for the other project on his budget, so someone got your work for free. Additionally, the project got delayed because you were not so productive. It is reasonable to expect your boss is angry with you, after discovering that you were delaying the project not because of intrinsic difficulties, but because you were spending your braintime somewhere else. Apologize, face the consequences, move on.

Do you mean that the project you did first was a prerequisite to perform your boss project? please include this information. You are not explaining properly the situation. Please focus on what happened, not on why someone did something

Please don't sabotage your posts.

@Buffy: please delete my post, there is no need to keep this underated post.

Actually, the history of the site is worth keeping. I have no power to delete your post in any case. You can flag your post for attention by moderators, however. I have some posts that are far (far) more underrated than this one. See the help center for site usage: https://academia.stackexchange.com/help

You are anonymous here. There are no issues.

Note that one reason we don't like to see such sabotage or question removal is to respect those who have taken time and effort to answer the question. Other commenters have also give thought and consideration to your original question.

@Buffy: if this post is not removed then you essentially force me to remove my user. As a new user (first post), I can tell that it was not clear to me that my post cannot be removed.

@Yair: Deleting your account won’t remove the post; it will only anonymise it even further. You might as well dissociate the post from your account. Please see this FAQ.

@Wrzlprmft: why to be so strict about such a terribly written question? I honestly think that it has to be mentioned to any new user on this platform that questions cannot be removed. I don't remember approving anything like that.

From their point of view, the abusive institute provided you at minimum a table and an email and therefore they (unwillingly) supported you while working on that other revolutionary project.
If you want to be sure, ask them if you can consider yourself as being affiliated with them to publish on that revolutionary project. If they do not answer, it means that they do not want and you can go forward with your revenge plan.
Please keep in mind three things:

revenge is a dish to be served cold;
no one accepts a cold dish from a revengeful person;
if I see someone serving a cold dish to someone they do not like, I think this someone is not completely intelligent.

EDIT:

My question is in what way would you express you inconvenience.

That is a tricky question. Of course talking openly about this behavior will help future students and society, but this way you will get "retribution".
You may be ok with that, since it seems your former advisor is putting a lot of efforts in obstructing your way, so you can consider you have to find a way out of academia. You are in an inferior position of power, so a part from trying your best to get on top and when you are a professor remember not to behave this way, there is not much you can do.
If you need to express your inconvenience, just find another to invest your time and energy positively. Your advisor is not in the co-authors list, so it is already enough "retribution".
If you publish the paper without the affiliation it is a small loss for every honest person working in that institution. If there are no honest person working there ... why did you went there?

Framing every reaction as revenge is unhelpful. If one feels they have been wronged in a relationship, it's OK to say so.  If OP feels they were treated unfairly, and the abusive lab sabotaged the project rather than supported it, it's OK to reflect it on the paper.

@DmitrySavostyanov I agree, however in OP's words However, I left jobless due to the action of my boss, and had horrible time throughout the writing process. there is a clear hint to seeking revenge. And honestly. it is not clear how the boss left OP jobless: when a contract expires, it expires.

@EarlGrey There are many ways in which a PI can help postdoc secure their next job - recommendations, extensions, networking. There are ways in which PI can give postdoc some space and flexibility to allow them attend interviews etc. And there are ways in which PI can make it really difficult.  Ultimately, a postdoc leaving jobless is a waste of human talent and indicates an issue (a failure?) in the current lab.

my take is "Ask them if they want the affiliation on the paper you prepared while being at that institution. If they hate you and your job so much, they will say no. If they say yes, then they were not nice, not friendly, but they hosted you so the affiliation is deserved".
@DmitrySavostyanov sure, a postdoc advisor can support finding a job, but it is different than being left jobless.


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Retaking an exam to improve a low, but passing grade. Why do universities not allow this?
Life is tough, deadlines are strict, and failures are costly. But reality usually is not black and white. One can try again and one can improve oneself in real life.
It is different with university courses. If I pass an exam with a low, but passing grade, then this grade sticks for the rest of my life and I can do nothing about it. It can ruin my prospects of an academic career.
Why is such a strict rule common?

I reduced your question to one question. If you want to know about the trends in this, ask a separate question, but you need to restrict yourself to one country and beware that it is quite likely that no study on this exists. If you want to know how to make up for such a low grade, again best ask this as a separate question.

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In Hungary, we were allowed to take up to six exams for a course in a single exam season, theoretically. In practice I could take at least 3 for any course I wanted. It helps massively in pointing out what I don’t understand, and gave me a chance to obtain a better grade if I reinforce my understanding of the course.

It depends on the university. I know of universities where you have one opportunity to retake an exam even if you passed. I had part of my degree at such an institution. The other part I did where it was not allowed, but there are backdoors even there. On one exam where I was good at the subject, and the professor knew it, I was in a very bad state and did many avoidable mistakes, and I got a low but passing grade. The professor offered me if I want to voluntarily take a non-passing grade because he knew I could do much better. (the downside is that I have to decide it then and there)

At my university, if you are dissatisfied with your grade in a course, you can retake the course (in its entirety) and the new grade will replace the old one.

Where I did my BSc and MSc (Croatia), you were allowed to refuse a grade and try for it again within the same semester. However, the included refusing the previously achieved grade (i.e. if you did worse during the second attempt, you ended up with a lower grade). You couldn't improve the grades past the current semester, as many courses were required for progression as you were expected to build upon them going forward.

@DanRomik On balance, I voted to leave this open. As you yourself pointed out, the proposed duplicate question is about retaking a course rather than resitting a final.

"One can try again and one can improve oneself in real life." - How would you like it if your professor came up with a partly incomprehensible and error-laden exam paper, and tells you upon complaint that they will try to improve for the next exam in four months, which you have a right to retake?

In Italy you can reject a passing grade and try for a better one.

If universities allow infinite resits for all students for free, it creates infinite workload for staff, which is unsustainable. Even if funding were not an issue, preparing and marking the re-examinations is a tedious task which would lead to staff burnout if not managed properly.
Asking students to pay for their re-examinations allows financial inequality to penetrate further into the system of academic success, and ultimately leads to furthering systemic inequality. This goes against the mission of many universities, which aim to provide fair opportunities to all students.

While I consider the first paragraph a valid answer in the sense that this is the argument made against allowing grade improvements, my experience in a system that allows for grade improvements is that the argument is wrong. Also see my answer.

I concur with @Wrzlpmft, this answer is pure theorizing that has nothing to do with reality. My university leaves it up to the teacher, I allow unlimited retakes to improve the grades for my courses, and it barely ever happens.

"preparing and marking the re-examinations is a tedious task" - Preparing the retakes has to happen anyway for those who didn't pass. Also, in my experience, universities do allow retakes of passing grades, so I'm not convinced the rest of your reasoning is correct.

@marcelm In the UK, Universities allow one retake and only for students who failed the assessment. This limits the amount of assessments to prepare (to one) and reduces the number of assessments to mark.

@Wrzlprmft I am really puzzled with your logic. Even if attempts to improve grades are rare (as you seem to imply), as soon they are possible, extra work is required to prepare those assessments, and extra staff should be in place to mark them. As soon as there is 1 student to retake the exam, someone needs to write and check an exam paper, someone needs to invigilate the exam, someone needs to prepare the room for it, someone needs to mark the exam and process paperwork.

@DmitrySavostyanov: If you are assuming that you offer an extra exam just for this purpose, yes. But that’s not how I understand what the asker wants, how I would implement it in any context, and not how it is happening in any system I am familiar with. Here, you have make-up exams with plenty of participants anyway (because they failed the main exam for whatever reason).

I feel as if the comments are missing the time frame aspect. Students in any subject where topics build on each other could easily get 99% on exam 1 if they retake it during the last week. Plus, we have to grade them in the last week. And now we have to grade 2 final exams for each student before grades are due next Monday (or do we have to grade them very quickly so the student know whether to take it again?)

This assumes that the students would infinitely use the opportunity to retake exams. But that's not going to happen, as even if the university puts no cost on the retakes, there's always a cost to the student, as revisiting the same subject takes work and time that could be used for e.g. other courses to advance graduation. And, assuming the students want to graduate, that's going limit how much retakes are used.

Why do you think that this is provided "for free"? For example in Italy there are usually 3-6 exam sessions for each course. So BY PAYING THE TUITION you can have 3-6 tries per year. You can also continue trying the next year BY PAYING AN OTHER YEAR OF TUITION. Moreover TUITION INCREASES IF YOU DO NOT GET THE DEGREE IN TIME. In which world is this "for free"? There is no need to request additional payment for re-examinations because TUITION ALREADY PAYS FOR THAT!

@Bakuriu: You make a good point, but you do not need to SHOUT. We can hear you just fine. (Or, to phrase the same in more literal terms: while your comment is interesting and valid, so are the other comments in this thread as well. There is nothing in your comment that's so IMPORTANT that it needs to be EMPHASIZED and made to STAND OUT by writing it in BOLDFACE AND CAPITALS, and doing so just makes the whole comment thread less readable.)

@OwenReynolds In the systems I'm familiar with that allow retaking passed exams, there typically is only one exam per course in a given exam period/week. Students who want to take the exam again (whether because they missed it, failed on it, or want a shot at a better grade) would have to wait until the next time an exam in the course is offered, typically months later. So you'd grade at your usual speed. (I suspect the delays between exams reduces the number of students choosing to do retakes, so 2 final exams for each student is unlikely.)

@Anyon That's still very vague. It sounds as if you're saying that if you fail the final exam, you can "retake" it in 4 months at the regularly scheduled final exam of the next time the class is offered. But you can't retake any other mid-term exams. I'm also seeing that in Germany you must do that, since you're not allowed to retake a class. Essentially, retaking the exam is the German version of retaking the class?

The effects of allowing improving grades may somewhat depend on the academic system, in particular how much these grades are valued and what failure rates are considered acceptable (see, e.g., this question). However let me give you some perspective from a system that does allow it (Germany, STEM fields):
For most written exams, our university gives students one attempt to re-take a passed exam when they have taken the course for the first time. In that event, the better of the two grades counts. I consider it good that this opportunity exists since it can cover some edge cases, where the exam was broken or the student had a bad day, but still passed. The main positive effect however is that students do not intentionally fail the exam in hope to get a better grade at the next attempt, causing more work and possibly regretting it later.
The most relevant aspect to your question however is this, in particular in light of Dmitry Savostyanov’s answer: Most students do not use this opportunity. Some rough statistics from personal experience:

Only ten percent of students who meet the requirements for improving their grades, register for the make-up exam (which is a non-committing easy act that ensures we have enough exams printed and we can check that they meet the requirements in advance).
Of those, only half show up to the make-up exam.
Of those, only half actually manage to improve their grade.
Finally, only half of the grade improvements are substantial, i.e., more than a one or two notches.

So, in our system, the additional correction effort is small, and I would guess that it is fully compensated by the additional effort caused by students intentionally failing.
Now, back to your question: While I do think that allowing grade improvements is good, the reasons for this are not immediately apparent. Look at it from the perspective of another university evaluating our experience to make a decision: The statistics you would naïvely look at (students who substantially improve their grades) suggests that this rule does not make a relevant difference, while the main benefit (students not intentionally failing) may not be obvious and is not easily quantifiable. Add to that the fear that students overuse this (even though our data suggests otherwise). You might thus decide that you may as well spare yourself the administrative effort of establishing it.

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Add to that the hard-to-measure fact that if a student gets a low passing grade in an exam for course A and cannot retake it, they'll stop studying the topic of course A because its exam is over, and if next year's course B and C require a deep understanding of the topic covered in course A, then the student might fail next year; whereas if they are given the opportunity to retake the exam of course A to improve their grade, they'll keep studying even after they got their low passing grade, will get a deeper understanding of the topic, and might succeed in courses B and C next year.

I would like to push back on several misconceptions in this question.

Life is tough, deadlines are strict, and failures are costly. But reality usually is not black and white. One can try again and one can improve oneself in real life.

Your premise contradicts the last part. Life is tough, deadlines are strict. This immediately implies that in many cases you will not have a chance for a re-do. Clients impose project deadlines, products need to be rolled out to market, and collaborations often depend on you completing your tasks on time.
An academic career will fill your life with many strict deadlines. Papers have to be submitted by a certain time, grant proposals have deadlines, your grad students will need to propose/graduate by a certain deadline, your tenure case will be evaluated at a certain time and so on.

If I pass an exam with a low, but passing grade, then this grade sticks for the rest of my life and I can do nothing about it. It can ruin my prospects of an academic career.

Again, not necessarily true twice: first of all, there is almost always something you can do about it. You can often talk to the instructor to see if there's an option for extra credit, a lot of universities offer retakes (as others mention), and you can also simply retake the class (or even request for it to be potentially dropped from your transcript).
These things take time and effort on your part - but that's the point! You are an adult and need to take ownership of your failures.
Secondly, a single bad grade usually won't preclude you from graduate school, especially if you show excellence in other aspects: doing a research project, excelling in extracurriculars, or community outreach activities are all looked at.
Finally, this may be unpleasant to hear, but if you have consistently bad grades in some field, this is usually a sign that you may not be a good fit for an academic career in that field.

Why is such a strict rule common?

Several technical reasons: allowing students to retake exams takes time, effort and money. It also interferes with a lot of downstream university processes.
Someone needs to invigilate these exams, those people need to be paid.
Exams happen in study halls that could be used for other things (e.g.
renting them out for events which often happen during semester breaks, or for winter/summer classes).
Instructors need to write additional exams, and their difficulty needs to be calibrated with those of the first exam. This is not easy to do fairly.
One could question whether final exams are an effective method of assessment altogether. This is an excellent question in itself with lots of different answers. I personally try to avoid them, but that is only because I usually teach small classes. In large classes, final exams are one of the few methods of impartial large-scale assessment with less potential for cheating. We do see some movement towards more continuous assessment methods, but these are also problematic, e.g. they can be biased based on how much an instructor likes/dislikes a student, they're time consuming and (at least from my limited observations) tend to disadvantage first-gen college students.

+1 for retaking the entire course.  The professors are paid for their time, and you won't gain much retaking a test if the material hadn't gelled in your brain the first time anyways.  Slug through it and do your best.  Take it again next semester.   You will have a good sense of where the instructor is trying to bring you and a feel for how the examinations are set up

In addition to the other answers, I'd like to highlight another reason for not allowing retaking exams to improve low grades: when you know you have only one chance, you approach the exam more seriously and responsibly. In many life situations, there's only one opportunity, and the university is, in a way, preparing you for that. If you anticipate the option to retake the exam for a better grade, there's a likelihood that you might treat your first attempt as a trial and invest more deeply in learning the material only if the initial attempt falls short.

The department I studied in took this approach. Retakes were allowed in exceptional circumstances, but not just to improve a grade.

There are different rules in different places. In some places, even at different universities in the same country, the rules will leave you with a grade on your official transcript that can't be changed. In other places it is possible to take the course again and in some of those (not all) the new grade will replace the old grade. But that might not be in a student's best interest. It takes time that might be better spent on other things.
If you get a bad grade in one or two courses (US focus) it might not affect your future career at all. It would depend on the courses. Advanced courses in the major have more impact than early courses or general education courses.
Moreover, if you get accepted to a graduate  program, then how you do there will cover for any negatives in the undergraduate program. It is expected that people aren't perfect and that they can grow.
But, if you had options along the way that you didn't take, then it isn't the fault of the system that holds you back. And your career is most likely determined by things other than just the grades you get. In many places letters recommending you have at least as much weight as grades, though poor grades in advanced courses can be an issue.

As to the question of why isn't a more permissive policy common is that universities consider the judgements of professors to be valid at the end of a course. In rare instances those judgements, usually and hopefully based on data, can be questioned. But for most situations the grade is the grade. Full Stop.

One of the problems with retaking an exam is that there is a bias.  People who take two exams on a subject tend to do better on the second exam, even when they didn't do much work improving their knowledge of the material.
Some of this bias comes from just being exposed to the exam.  If the second exam isn't heavily rewritten, then a student with a decent memory who did poorly can remember the questions they struggled on and select a different answer.  This is especially true for multiple choice questions, where you are effectively cancelling one of the possible answers.
Should you be an enterprising professor that completely rewrites the second exam, then you get into arguments on whether the second exam is the equivalent of the first exam.  It is possible to design the second exam to be the equivalent of the first, but generally such efforts must be undertaken at the beginning of the exam design (for example, selecting at random 100 questions out of a pool of 500 equally difficult questions).  Trying to post-design an equivalent exam is very difficult.
And while these items are technical in nature, the real issues come up with the countless hours lost in argument by student over the merits of the first exam vs the retake.
Finally, it is important to remember that Professors are not really paid or retained due to their teaching.  It is a task assigned to them in addition to their primary duties, which typically is to obtain research funding and advance the university's status.
Most Universities take about half of all research funding from the grant awards as overhead for running the schools.  A successful professor can earn far more in grants than they can in their three or four hours of tuition.  Putting an even greater burden on the professors in ways that don't advance their career or the university's continued existence is frowned upon by everyone (except the student).

Actually, a lot of professors do allow this. I have seen many courses where the instructors allows students to take, say, 4 exams and drops the lowest from the final calculation. Also, some professors are willing to give you extra homework to boost your grade if you approach them.
Also, some schools allow retaking the whole course if you finished with a low, but passing grade, as if you failed. In mine, they allowed retaking courses if you got lower than a C. Usually, people would retake these in the summer semester where you had to pay 10x in tuition per credit hour, and also instructors got paid extra for teaching summer courses. Anyways, it's possible to, if you don't feel confident, deliberately fail an exam or even not attend, and then either ask for a make up or simply retake the course after failing it. So in this sense, they all "allow" it, just not as conveniently as you imagine.
With that, what you're really asking can be interpreted as:

Why do the other professors not allow retakes?
Why don't schools require all professors to allow it?

1 has an obvious answer: Ask them. I'll try a realistic take on 2.
I don't think because the compassionate administration wishes to spare the poor grad student from burdensome work. I don't think it's realistic to claim that academic administration as a whole has much compassion for TAs. They have terrible work conditions and mostly accept it (maybe with some grumbling), grading exams even without retakes is already a huge amount of busywork depending on the course. Also, if a school gets a reputation for working its TAs too hard, it doesn't really impact it in a material way. Academia has a culture of glorifying overwork, and this may even be seen as evidence of how rigorous and excellent the school is.
While I'm not in university administration, I would assume that administrators (people who make the rules like "no retakes") mostly care about their school's (and their own) reputation with other high status academic administrators, high level government bureaucrats, wealthy donors and captains of industry. It is not hard to imagine how a university, and its administration, would be harmed by displeasing these groups.
If a university allowed infinite retakes, the obvious consequence would be that students would be able to get higher grades compared to other institutions with the same amount of effort and talent. The institution would get a reputation for inflated grades. This would devalue its diplomas to employers, and devalue the school's academic achievements to administrators and bureaucrats. Donors might see this as falling standards. For alumni, there might be some element of "I had to suffer, so the new generation should too". I think this is the compelling reason why retakes are not more common.
Arguing grade inflation does have a hole - other forms of grade inflation are reportedly common in top institutions these days. The first question is whether it's perceived or real - indeed, it's possible for "consumers" of graduates to rationalize it as the students just being smarter and studying harder. Such rationalization is more difficult with a school that allows retakes. Moreover, the familiar forms of grade inflation is normalized, so perhaps schools feel secure in allowing them because "everyone else does it too". With retakes, whoever does it first would be unprecedented, so they probably perceive the risk as greater.
I don't know if this is convincing, and it's hard to fairly treat grade inflation in a (not so) short StackExchange answer. But ultimately the main reason discouraging administrations from retakes is that it would give them a reputation for grade inflation.

I have worked in the UK university system, and now I am in Italy. In the UK (at least where I was) it wasn't possible to retake a passed exam, unless you could claim extenuating circumstances. Who failed an exam has just one chance to retake it, and the mark was capped at the pass mark. This means that somebody who failed the exam in the first attempt wouldn't have an advantage over somebody who passed with a low grade, as it was impossible to achieve a good grade in the retake.
In Italy (at least where I am) there are several exam sessions in the year, and students can decline a pass mark in order to improve.
If I compare the systems, there are pros and cons of both. I do think that students tend to learn something if they can try to improve their result, so this possibility, having the experience from a first exam attempt when potentially preparing for a second one,   overall helps students' learning (even though this doesn't hold for all students, particularly if they don't take the exams seriously enough because they think that later they can improve anyway).
Another advantage of the Italian system is that there is no need for an extenuating circumstances procedure. I don't need to be interested in the reason why students don't do well, and they are not encouraged to make up something in order to have extenuating circumstances accepted. I just tell them "try again next time" and that is that. I was in an extenuating circumstances commission in the UK and I hated it. You basically knew that some requests were very real and some weren't, but very often the documentation wouldn't allow us to tell them apart, particularly (but not only) where the reason was psychological.
That said there is awareness in Italy that allowing retakes for improvement of the result creates work, and many of the academic staff don't like it. Of course one can argue that exam retakes are necessary anyway for the students who fail and those who make themselves fail in order to retake, but in the UK system that I know, it doesn't make sense to fail on purpose, and catering for the failed students just required one retake exam (in fact because of extenuating circumstances there was a procedure in place for a second retake exam, but that was organised in a low level manner, would often not be used, and required very little work overall). And then communicating to the students in an unambiguous manner that the first exam counts will encourage them to fully focus on it.
In my department in Italy there have been initiatives to reduce the number of offered exam sittings for retakes in order to reduce the workload, and in order to encourage the students more to concentrate on the first exam and to do things as quickly as possible. Obviously retaking several exams can also to some extent compromise work on other courses and exams. By and large I think we're moving in the direction of a good compromise between offering lots of resits and allowing unlimited retakes, creating lots of work and delay in student "careers", and the very harsh British approach where one bad day can leave a bad mark on the student's transcript. In fact I can accept taking an exam twice even if passed as a factor in helping the students to learn, and I'd support that. However my experience is that who didn't achieve a good result in two attempts will normally not achieve a good result later, so this shouldn't be encouraged.

The marks represent how well a student picks up a topic. Take a math curriculum, it starts with basic linear algebra and analysis. Later it becomes more advanced and the first courses are taken for granted. Re-taking these basic exams two years later is pointless, as anybody would score great, they are using the basics routinely.
Same is true for at least to some extend for Physics, Law, Computer Sciences, Engineering.

Retaking an exam to improve a low, but passing grade. Why do universities not allow this?

My experience is that this is not a university policy, but a policy which an individual professor may choose or not choose to implement. Where I taught, my grading was, what some might interpret as "harsh". I had seen other professors giving partial credit for "attempts", and felt that students were getting high grades even though they were actually not competent in the field. I believe that giving honest grades, teaches students that they must learn how to actually solve the problems which are presented to them if they are to get passing grades. But just as I graded harshly, I also gave students unlimited opportunities to retake tests (except the final) (with variations to prevent cheating)  so that they would not be penalized if they learned the material by the end of the semester. There were some semesters in which all students got A's, and only in a few semesters did anyone actually fail.
With regard to the work required of the professor to allow test retaking, it is the job of the professor to provide education to the students. In my opinion, my method worked, and I was happy to do the work that made it successful.

In some countries (e.g. UK) this is a University policy, not professor's personal choice

The rules exist because they're the right thing for 95% of people. But then what happens to the remaining 5%? They have to live by the same rules because everybody thinks they are in that 5%.
What would be considered a low passing grade? You can have the case that some neurotic straight-A's kid wants to retake the exam just bc they got an A-. If you set a threshold, you leave the door open to arguments of unfairness, especially in this age of delicate flowers.


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How to publish a simple machine-learning approach that cannot compete with the state of the art?
I am proposing an approach which is simpler than current approaches, but does not come close to the state of the art on benchmark metrics. But, I think my approach is still cool and much simpler in implementation. I want to avoid comparing my approach to the state of the art in the research paper I am writing. How do I go about this situation?

Post on arXiv ?

why mention a comparison to 'state of the art' at all?

You'll need to say something about the trade-off between simplicity and poorer performance on benchmarks. Random guessing is way "simpler than the current approaches, but does not come close to state-ot-the-art benchmark metrics." OK, that's a joke. But you'll need to show that your approach is not a joke, and that will probably require saying how far it falls short on those benchmarks and then discussing why its simplicity compensates for the shortfall.

But, won't the reviewers just look at the table and say that it's below state-of-the-art? What is the best strategy to convince them?

You need to state, very clearly, especially in the abstract, your reasons for considering your approach interesting despite it's weaknesses.

In determining whether your approach is novel, you will need to do a deep literature search. I've been following machine learning, off and on, since the early 1970's. My impression is that many simple approaches were implemented, evaluated, and overtaken by more complicated but more effective approaches. What you are doing may have been published 40 years ago.

I am sure this is not the case because my approach is grounded in recent technologies.

And recent technologies are firmly grounded in older technologies. Which are often based on what some really smart people did early on.

To take an arbitrary example, probably irrelevant to your research, GPUs are new, Some things for which one would use a GPU today have been done previously on vector or SIMD parallel processors. "It uses a GPU" is insufficient to show a technique does not predate GPUs.

If you try to avoid the benchmark metrics comparison, it is going to be the 900 pound gorilla in the back of the mind of everyone reading your paper.
The alternative is to deal with it from the start. You obviously think there are reasons why your technique is interesting despite its benchmark metrics. You need to communicate those reasons. They should be first mentioned in the abstract. That way, readers are more likely to suspend thinking about the benchmark metrics issue in favor of thinking about what makes the technique interesting.
At some point in the paper you will need to present some metrics, in order to support a claim that the simplicity of your technique outweighs the metrics for some situations.

Thanks for the answer. However, will doing what you suggested convince reviewers at top-tier venues? It might convince middle-tier reviewers though.

@shaunpollock Remember I have no idea what your technique is, what problems it might apply to, what your basis is for thinking it is novel and interesting, or anything else about it other than that it does not match state-of-the-art on common benchmarks. If you want an informed opinion on what sorts of venues might accept your paper, run it by trusted researchers in your area.

Also, you probably won't convince top tier reviewers if it's actually not convincing.  Omitting important comparisons won't fix that.  On the other hand, if there are merits to your method despite not being uniformly the best, an accurate and candid comparison is how you'll convince them.


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Master's Degree Curriculum and its Effects on Teaching Opportunities
I have been working as a entry-level web developer for approximately a year now.  I am looking to go back to school to get a Master's Degree in hopes that I will be able to teach programming/development at the community college level (which requires a Master's Degree).  I'm not interested in a PhD because I have to work full-time to support my family and I'm not interested in doing research.  I have narrowed down my options to 2 programs:

Brandeis University has a Master's in Software Engineering, which teaches a lot of very specific, high-level courses (primarily Java programming and development).
Boston University Master's in Computer Science - Web Development, teaches a more holistic approach that spans several domains, but doesn't go into as much detail.

Do you find that a particular academic background makes one more marketable for teaching at the community college level?  I feel that having a deep mastery of a specific technology is great, but community college courses generally do not get that deep into the material.  I'm also a little nervous that if I take a more general curriculum that introduces me to many topics, my transcripts may not show that I have a deep enough understanding of a specific subject to teach at the college level.
Does anyone have any recommendations/insights or experiences with this type of career transition?
Thank you and have a great day.

Let me note (partly because of some misconceptions I see in answers here) that some community colleges are extremely high quality and provide an excellent education for the first couple of years. Some faculty do hold doctorates, partly as a result of the academic economy lately, and some do research, though it is more likely to be pedagogical than otherwise.

But, unfortunately, the question here is something of a shopping question asking for evaluations of specific programs. That really isn't on topic here.

...in hopes that I will be able to teach programming/development at the community college level (which requires a Master's Degree)

While this is technically true for many community colleges, it is also true that with a Master's degree vice a PhD, you will be less competitive for positions, as many PhDs also apply to community colleges.  A friend of mine from graduate school worked successfully as a programmer at Microsoft for 20 years, and when he started looking for teaching positions (with his Master's already) at community colleges, he was told that he would not be competitive for available positions.
A further caveat: because community colleges generally do not have research requirements for instructors, they tend to rely on teaching experience as much as a particular degree when hiring instructors.  I would suggest that you consider trying to get some computer science teaching experience as well (if you don't have any).  You might want to see if either of the two schools you mentioned will allow you to TA classes -- you may not be able to get paid, but you could do it for free for the experience.
You might also want to consider approaching the graduate school of education at BU (if you attend there) to see about education courses -- they have a number of teaching classes, and taking one of those would also bolster your resume.  You could also see about trying to get adjunct teaching positions at various community colleges -- teaching a one-off class may be possible, and you'd be able to leverage the experience.
Bottom line: unfortunately, there probably isn't a short path to being competitive for teaching positions at community colleges.  If you are going to go down the MS route, your best bet is to do as well as you can in a program, and to try to get some teaching experience under your belt.

Chris, thanks for your response.  I do have some teaching experience.  I have a Master's in Education and I previously taught secondary science.  I just realized that the subject material and student population weren't the right fit for me.  Maybe I'll just have to pursue the Master's, get some experience (and save some money) and eventually maybe a PhD will be able to fit into my life.  I was hoping I wouldn't have to go this route, however.  I guess only time will tell.

@JavaJeff Ah -- this does change things.  With the MEd and the high school experience, you will be much more competitive with the MS in CS.  You might want to think about looking around for adjunct positions in the science you taught with just your MEd -- you might be able to land something (Bunker Hill CC, Roxbury CC, or UMass Boston, maybe?).  With your foot in the door, once you get a MS you may have a good shot at a full time CS position.

I would suggest that you go for a Masters degree,if you wish to teach in a community college. Where I live ,Industry experience is also a big plus for teaching.Lets say if two candidates applied for teaching a java course and one of them has industry experience as well as a Masters degree then he would be the preferred candidate for the job.
Ofcourse , phd candidates are still preferred over the Masters.But where I live ,phd candidates are considered more suitable for the theoretical courses like Automata,Operating Systems etc.Guys with industry experience are considered more suitable for teaching programming languages.
Again, a Masters degree is very important for teaching positions.So I suggest that if you wish to go for teaching then go for Masters.

Thank you for your message. I was under the impression that most Community College instructors were educated with a Master's degree. After perusing local school websites (and attending community college classes), I haven't seen many PhD's among the faculty.  As far as Master's degree curriculum is concerned, do you find the classes you take affect your teaching options? I.E. Do you think I would need a curriculum heavy in Java to be able to teach Java even if I have experience? I'm not sure if BU's CIS program would have enough programming courses to make me a strong teaching candidate or not.


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Does your Alma Mater and U.S. News Rankings Really Affect Future Job Opportunities?
I'm in the process of trying to decide on which graduate program to attend.  I am pursuing a Master's level degree in Computer Science in hopes of furthering my web development career.  I would love to be able to teach web development/programming at a community college someday after getting a few more years of industry experience (teaching requires at least a Master's degree).  Previously I taught secondary science before transitioning into web development.
I've been accepted to the following programs:
Boston University - Master's in Computer Information Systems / Web Application Development  (U.S. News ranked #51 nationally)
Brandeis University - Master's of Software Engineering (U.S. News ranked #31 nationally)
University of Bridgeport - Master's of Computer Science (not ranked nationally)
I keep going back and forth in regards to which program I should choose.  University of Bridgeport seems to have a good curriculum and it looks like it will be cheaper (I may get a scholarship), but I'm concerned that it's not viewed as a "top" school.  I would be happy to pay for a more expensive school if it helped provide greater opportunities in the future.
Do you find that going to a "better" school has affected your resume to the point that you may have more teaching opportunities after school?  I realize that a certain school won't earn me the actual position, but having a highly regarded school on my resume MAY lead me to getting more interviews.  Any insights are greatly appreciated.
Thanks and have a good day.

Here are a few points.
1. Industry Jobs
IMHO, "brand" is more important in the industry than in academia. E.g. in general, the HR department is more likely to forward a CV with Harvard on it. Also, people in the industry are probably not able to understand the academic content of your program.
2. Similar Questions
How does the ranking of a university relate to a future career in mathematics?
University rank/stature - How much does it affect one's career post-Ph.D?
Although these are for PhD programs, there might be interesting bits in there with regards to industry.
3. Look
It might be helpful or informative to look at the CVs of the companies or positions you are interested in. This might give you a clue if only the "branded" universities are hired or if there is a wide range of backgrounds. E.g. with regards to mathematics departments, if you look at the CV of professors, a lot of them are Ivy League or MIT, Stanford etc.
Personally, I would pick the most "branded" program I can get into.

IMHO, "brand" is more important in the industry than in academia - [citation needed]

@JeffE, It's an opinion, so it doesn't need a citation. However, such a provocative statement certainly begs for some back up.

I agree with both comment; I should have some evidence. Perhaps something like this would suffice: http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools/articles/2012/05/14/where-the-fortune-500-ceos-went-to-school? There is a table showing that most Fortune 500 CEO went to top schools - not exactly solid evidence but might suggests that industry "likes" brands?

@Legendre You can find similar evidence for the importance of branding in Academia (see, for instance, this Academia.SE thread.