text:
If a professor refuses to elaborate on the contents of the cheat sheet, what becomes fair game?
I'm a student from Germany and currently preparing for some exams. I got an email from one of the professors that contains information about the cheat sheets you are allowed to write and use in the exams. These consist of four DIN A4 pages (so default writing paper) you can write your “Formelsammlung” (formulary, literally: “formula collection”) on. This is important, since the issue is, what does he mean by this?
Depending on the professor, this can mean anything from “Really only formulas, if you write a single word, it will be counted as an attempt to cheat” to “Do what you want with it, I couldn't care less”. Most professors go with a more liberal approach, but there are some who don’t want anything but formulas. What almost all exams have in common is that you are allowed to use one of those cheat sheets. Usually I would just ask the professor, but he explicitly stated in the mail that he refuses to elaborate on that:

Ich werde auf Nachfragen der Art „Was darf auf die Formelsammlung?“ nicht antworten. Eine Formelsammlung ist eine Formelsammlung.
(I will not answer questions in the style “What is allowed on the cheat sheet”. A formula collection is a formula collection.)

Which is the cause of my question: If the professor refuses to answer, what becomes fair game?
EDIT:
Due to numerous complaints the professor has just written another email. He clarified what he meant, which was: No examples of appliances of formulas with example numbers, and no labeled graphs. I assume no circuits either, but now I know that I can at least put somewhat descriptive labels on my formulas and put graphs without labeling.

Zahlenwertbeispiele, konkrete beschriftete Skizzen o.ä. sind NICHT erlaubt.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

I would suggest this question be edited to replace instances of "cheat sheet" with "formula collection" (or possibly "formula sheet"). It's clearer phrasing in multiple ways.

In high school, a history teacher once told us we could make our own cheat sheets for the upcoming test; it could be a single, standard-sized index card with anything you could fit on it.  One student transcribed the entire chapter on it by translating it to Japanese, which has a ridiculously compact script.  The teacher never made an offer like that again.

I have updated the question, the professor clarified himself, Thanks for your helpful answers and comments :)

I disagree with the other answer here by Buffy; write whatever you want and as much as you want.  If your professor refuses to communicate allowable scope or restrictions then there are none.  He cannot reasonably hold you to restrictions that exist only in his imagination.  (Also, keep his email in case there is a dispute over this.)

Update: Additional information has been added to the question after my answer, showing the actual email lines the professor sent.  In my view, his statement could be taken to imply that he is one of the professors who wants to you restrict your sheet to only formulas (i.e., no accompanying textual explanation) and so he has elaborated on what he means (contra the original question).  This complicates the matter, but his refusal to clarify further still operates in your favour.  Since many people already voted on the original question and answer I am posting this as an update rather than revising my original answer.

Not all universities protect students from a professor’s imagination, and this piece of advice may be a recipe for a bad grade or for failure altogether, and little would do keeping the email in such a case.

This answer makes the assumption that the school will apply contra proferentem to the professor's policies. While doing so would certainly be a good thing, is it something you can actually rely on?

Submit to the arbitrary (non-communicated) dictates of bad actors, due to the possible failings of the institution they are in, seems like bad advice to me.  All the more so if we concern ourselves with the general health and functionality of academia rather than just the immediate results for the questioner.

Also, contra the comments, keeping the email helps a great deal.  If the professor wants to impose a penalty on the student then he would have to use the university's procedures for breaches of exam rules and would have to follow the due process of that procedure.  Having an email from the professor where he allows a cheat sheet but explicitly refuses to clarify the allowable contents is virtually irrefutable evidence of the absence of any wrongdoing by the student.  A professor who tried to impose a penalty on the student for breach of exam rules in such a case would come out of it badly.

If the university is acting in good faith, then it will keep a copy of the professor's email.  If not, then why bother?  Not saying the student should not keep a copy of the professor's email but assume the professor says nothing, the student in good faith makes a cheat sheet, the professor dies, and someone else is in charge of the exam.  That someone else accuses the student of cheating.  The university should have a copy of the professor's email.

In fact, the students saved email proves nothing.  If we are to assume a dishonest student then the professor immediately emailed back that that was not allowed and the student deleted the email.  I believe that if a proctor takes action against the student, the student should say that they emailed the professor about this and the professor did not email clarification.  The university should probably just believe the students but if they don't they should search their own records for the email they believe the professor sent.

@emory due to the importance given to data protection in German public institutions, it will be close to impossible to get IT to release a copy of the professor's email. It is much better if the student keeps one. On the other hand, in my experience in Germany, "a four-page Formelsammlung" has always meant "four pages of absolutely anything as long as it is handwritten. Let the contest for the smallest handwriting begin!".

IMO this is very bad advice. If the professor clearly states that it must be a "formula collection", the students should definitely not "write whatever you want and as much as you want".

This is like walking into traffic because you have health insurance. Just because you've got recourse doesn't mean you should do it.

@Ben I don't know in Germany, but in many countries, going to trial would be costly and slow. The professor doesn't need any rules to impose a penalty, maybe in 5 years he is in the thesis jury and asks difficult questions, there are many ways a professor can take revenge.

"... I disagree with the other answer here ..." - you should probably EITHER clarify which of the dozen or so other answers you disagree with, OR remove these words.

There is actually a book genre called Formelsammlung (typical example). Those works that I am aware of contain words and even whole sentences. You might want to keep the relative share of formulas and sentences in a range that you can justify with a printed Formelsammlung.

This answer does not get enough attention. All other answers seem to assume that "formula collection" is an ad-hoc description, but "Formelsammlung" does have a defined meaning in german (see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formelsammlung), and I very much assume that the professor did mean that definition.

There isn't a "fair game" because it isn't a game at all. The best advice in such a case is to interpret the words strictly and conservatively. If you make more liberal assumptions and are wrong, you don't get points for trying. Is there a "ref" than can call fairs and fouls?
Perhaps, however, you can get some information from former students of this prof how they have behaved in the past.
What you need is a "safe game", not a "fair" one. And gaming an educational system isn't always winnable.

FYI: The phrase "fair game" has nothing to do with gaming, or implying that education should be an adversarial game -- it comes from "game" in the sense of hunting, where wildlife protection regulations dictate what is and isn't "fair game." You seem to be reading a lot of strange intent into OP's words that isn't actually there.

Etymology does not trump usage.

As for the ref, isn't that the role of the Dept Chair, Disciplinary Committee, Honor Council, or whatever body would (attempt to) punish the student for violating the exam rules?

If you make more liberal assumptions and are wrong, you don't get points for trying. – I disagree: If you can store other information than pure formulas on the sheet and thus do not have to memorise it (or not have it at all), you have an advantage in the exam.

@JonathanZsupportsMonicaC except here it's clearly interpreted in a totally different way than OP used it. What "fair game" usually means (and what OP intended here) was "what is acceptable to do in this context?".
So specifically: "what would be acceptable to write on this sheet, within the boundaries of the very vague and ambiguous limits the professor gave me?"

I also disagree with this answer. What is fair does not equal what is wise. The professor refused to elaborate, so the student can do whatever he or she pleases. However, it is indeed true that this holds the risk of it being considered cheating at the exam. It all depends on how bold you are willing to be.

@Matt I don't imagine/hope a formal cheating accusation would get very far, unless there's a clearly established precedent outside of the vague words of the prof (which may include e.g. the commonly accepted or official definition of "Formelsammlung"). But the prof can give the student 0 for the exam. In some cases the student would be able to challenge this as misconduct, in other cases no-one else would care.

I will just say what I would do.
First, evaluate how much would you benefit from writing anything else but formulas. If the benefit is small I would not bother and follow Buffy's advice.
If the benefit is very big, I'd make two cheat sheets. One that is strict, and contains only formulas that I'd keep just in case and one that is useful for you. Then I would send an email to the professor, with the attached cheat sheet saying something along the lines

Dear Professor X.
Since I was not absolutely sure what you meant by "Formelsammlung" I
am attaching my cheat sheet in here. If there are any problems please
let me know before the test.
Thanks in advance,
monamona

Or whatever you feel comfortable with. That way the professor is at least more responsible to whether or not your cheat sheet follows the lines. (and you have already prepared a back-up if the Professor has problems with your current version).

It's an advanced electrical engineering class. The biggest benefit comes from  example diagrams for certain circuits, so both would be located on the sheets. This is not negligible in this case

@monamona, I've still upvoted this answer because it's a good strategy regardless. Part of my exam revision process (including advanced electrical engineering courses!) used to involve writing anything I couldn't remember on 1 sheet of A4 which I'd then carry around with me to look at while I tried to memorise the things I couldn't remember. Doing this will help you memorise some of those circuits, so even if the cheat sheet is not allowed in the exam, you'll have had some benefit.

Be aware that when following this, "no response" brings absolutely no guarantees and is likely to be the default choice for any professor. A professor isn't obligated to check student's exam material ahead of time. Worst case, the student will face extra scrutiny right before the exam.

The benefit of creating the more comprehensive cheat sheet is that, even if it turns out it is disallowed (even if discovered 2 minutes before the test), is that the mere production of it will cement the material in the student's mind much more firmly...

Speaking from my own experience as teacher at German universities: If the professor cannot be bothered, then they believe the cheat sheet will not make a huge difference anyways. Even more so because four pages is already quite a lot. The professor is simply not into testing your memorization skills. So simply follow their instructions by the letter and you will be fine.
But also be aware that investing all your time and effort only into preparing the "best possible" cheat sheet is probably not the best way to allocate your ressources. I'll try to explain to you why.
I think that cheat sheets are particularly common in math courses. Mathematicians do not value memorization pretty high. What's more important to them is the understanding of the concepts and the skills to perform computations and logical deductions. (And with regard to computations it is often considered most valuable that the correct algorithms are used; small errors in the computations typically result in only moderate score reductions.)
A typical exercise in such an exam is to perform Gaussian elimination on a small system of linear equations. A cheat sheet would not help you much if you have not thoroughly practiced the algorithm before the exams. Even if you put all steps of the algorithm onto the sheet, you will simply lose too much time when you try to reproduce it for the very first time.
Another example is computing an integral by substitution or by integration by parts. You can put these rules on the cheat sheet. (It is indeed a good idea because it is easy to get them wrong when one is nervous.) But you would hardly be able to apply these techniques without having developed an intuition on where and how exactly to apply them.
Writing a cheat sheet is a good idea nonetheless because the process of writing

helps with memorization;
is a good warmup  (you can refresh your knowledge and load it into a region of your memory that can be quickly accessed by your "central processing unit");
gives you an overview of all the material, and it might tell you which topics might be worth more practicing.

Note that for all this to happen, it is crucial that you write you cheat sheet yourself. And it might be a good idea to do it in handwriting, not with the computer.
Also, having the cheat sheet with you during the exams is a good psycholgical trick and might help to lower your level of nervousness.
And remember: The best cheat sheet is the one onto which you don't have to look during the exams!

It's an advanced electrical engineering class, so mostly applied mathematics. Usually some diagrams come in handy, as well as rules for creating said diagrams. I'm well aware of what would come in handy, and I always learn as if I weren't allowed a cheat sheet at all, with that strategy I've had a lot of success over the years

Then you should really not worry that much about this formality. Good luck with your exams!

"And it might be a good idea to do it in handwriting, not with the computer." Some of the most elaborate, thorough cheat sheets that I ever made (and that I knew entirely by heart at exam time) were on a computer (I had to grudgingly copy them by hand before the exam using time that would have been better spent elsewhere). This advice is strongly subjective.

@CodyGray Thank you for the remark. I corrected it.

Wikipedia has this on the "Formelsammlung" page:

Eine Formelsammlung ist ein Nachschlagewerk, das fachgebietsbezogen
meist naturwissenschaftliche oder mathematische Formeln enthält.1 Es
werden in Formelsammlungen in der Regel keine näheren Erklärungen bzw.
Beweise dargestellt. In Form eines Buchs oder einer Broschüre dient
die Formelsammlung unter anderem als (zugelassenes) Hilfsmittel in
Prüfungen oder als Lernmittel im Unterricht.

Translated by my favourite AI automated statistics-based translator this means:

A collection of formulas is a reference work that usually contains
scientific or mathematical formulas related to a specific subject.
As a rule, no detailed explanations or proofs are presented in
collections of formulas. In the form of a book or a brochure, the
formulary serves, among other things, as an (approved) aid in
examinations or as a learning tool in class.

This seems pretty straight-forward to me, and matches my experience in the past. In school (Bavaria) we had a little blue Formelsammlung IIRC, and it was exactly as in the quote. Lots of formulas, no explanations. Of course there were words and sentences to structure the formulas where it made sense, or to explain something about the syntax.
I cannot remember to be allowed to use a Formelsammlung at Uni, but I would go with that. Cram your 4 pages full with formulas; use titles or little intro words as necessary, and you should be quite fine.
Check out this Formelsammlungen Sekundarstufe I - Bayern - Realschule: Mathematik - Physik - Chemie - Formelsammlung - LehrplanPLUS and use the "Blick ins Buch" feature to read some of the pages. If your prof gives you trouble for your four pages, and if worst comes to worst, you can show him a book like this. There are plenty of words, sentences, explanations etc.
And to elaborate on what you should not write:

No proofs.
No elaborate explanations (like a whole paragraph with free text on how to use the formulas, or with the "algorithm" how to solve problem X in general).

Here are more examples:

Geometric formulas
And another one
And another one

I had no problem reading your answer until the last line: "use titles or little intro words as necessary". Would you please explain it? For example, if I write Maxwell equations on that cheat sheet, can I put "Maxwell equation" literally in front of the equations?

I guess the formula A=4 pi r^2 isn't too useful on its own. Write "Surface area of a sphere" above it and it becomes more useful.

Yes, @Nobody, exactly that. I'll add an example from a "Formelsammlung" book to the answer.

@DavidA.Craven: When talking about an exam, I disagree: Most likely, the user would know that "surface area of a sphere" is something with A and pi and would immediately recognize it.:)

I personally would do 1 of each kind. If you are allowed to use and are told "that one is not allowed" you have the other as backup. I have had to do this for a few of my classes.

I'd be careful with that. In my time as a TA, we'd do things like ID and material checks during the exam so people could get started as quickly as feasible. But once you've turned over the question sheet, you've started and it's potentially too late to say "oh I won't use this one then".

So who should when tell you? Wouldn't that imply that you need to ask someone before the exam?

First of all, exam conditions should be properly specified, as it is unfair to make the exam a guessing game as to what you can do and what not. Most examination rules, boards, etc. recognise this. I would consider organising to contact the professor centrally, e.g., via the student union to urge him to specify what he means. This does not only help you but also future generations of students. (You could also just show him this Q&A to demonstrate that things are not as clear as he thinks they are.)
However, going by your quote, I wouldn’t assume malice or laziness on the side of the professor, but rather a common misunderstanding of how language works:

he explicitly stated in the mail that he refuses to elaborate on that:

Ich werde auf Nachfragen der Art „Was darf auf die Formelsammlung?“ nicht antworten. Eine Formelsammlung ist eine Formelsammlung.
(I will not answer questions in the style “What is allowed on the cheat sheet”. A formula collection is a formula collection.)

This second sentence strongly implies that your professor thinks that “Formelsammlung” is a clear specification. His preemptive rejection of questions on this suggests your professor has given out a similar ruling before, received questions and was annoyed by this – since he thinks his statement is clear. (Note that being generally annoyed by student questions on exam details is an occupational hazard for professors. The amount and kind of questions students can ask even on clearly stipulated exam rules can be staggering.)
Of course the problem is that “Formelsammlung” (formula collection) is not sufficiently clear but can, e.g., be interpreted:

literally, such that it is only a collection of formulas (including explanations what the respective symbols mean);
following the style of a particular “Formelsammlung” your professor has in mind;
broadly, including everything that can be deemed worth memorising, e.g., algorithms, circuit diagrams, descriptions of devices and experiments.

Somebody who writes “Eine Formelsammlung ist eine Formelsammlung.” is almost certainly the kind of person who interprets language overly literally (and assumes everybody else should too) and thus means Interpretation 1. So if I had to put all my stakes one interpretation, this would be it. There is a slight chance of Interpretation 2, in particular if there is one very established standard formulary for your field.
This is further evidenced by the amount of pages you can use, which is very high:
For every exam I ever took, I could fill the relevant information on a single sheet (without writing particularly small).
Four pages suggests that your professor think a space restriction is not necessary, since he has a content restriction in place.
If I allowed for four pages in an exam (without content restriction), I might as well have an open-book exam, as some student will manage to write every solution to every exercise ever made on that sheet.

The fact that the professor itself doesn't want to answer and spent his time explaining what he thinks belongs on the sheet doesn't mean that TA's won't give you answer when you ask them.
Especially if you already have a set of sheets prepared you can easily ask your TA whether or not it is allowed when you meet them.

In my experience the TAs are often the ones supervising the exams (or at least present if they are not the sole supervisors). They can be expected to know what is allowed and isn't allowed as exam aid and are also generally more approachable than professors. This is the "safest" option. If the TAs don't know or don't respond (or don't exist) then the options in the other answers could be tried out.

What you describe is kind of a limited "open book exam". You're allowed to look up things, because you're expected to solve transfer problems. Let's say you can write down the value of pi to the needed number of digits, as the professor expects you to solve problems involving pi and not remembering many digits of such a constant.
Limiting it to one page has some advantages, as students need to think about what's important and write it down. This selection and noting is already a repetition. In addition, a full "open book exam" may lead to people bringing tons of books (Scripts, formularies, etc.), so it is reasonable to give a limit.
One (possibly two-sided) Din A4 page is, what should be reasonable for the things needed for a fair exam. If you need more, you probably didn't know how to select the really relevant things.
In that spirit, I would say you can write down anything. I think the refusal to answer questions in the e-mail has the purpose that students cannot ask "Will I need section 2.37 of the script on my cheat sheet?"
The problem is, when you really fear that "write a single word" is cheating, you will need clarification. Maybe you can find someone who took the exam last year and can tell you about their cheat sheet? Maybe they can even provide you their sheet and some hints what the exam was about.

I am working at a German university, and from my point of view, he has answered the question quite clearly.
"Eine Formelsammlung ist eine Formelsammlung" is a clear statement that he only accepts formulas on the sheet. Nothing else. End of discussion.
That he does not want to answer any further questions on this topic only means that he does not want any further discussions about this.
If you don't want to get into trouble, you should follow the rules and stick to formulas.

while I'd not try and rules lawyer this, it's a sort of amusing idea that you might be able to write a paragraph by, say w +r + i + t + i + n + g=w + o + r + d + s - is there somewhere that sets allowable lists of formula? or is there a basic reasonableness test, like "this should be something that someone in your field would recognise as a formula?

I read it exactly the same. And he probably gets way too many queries from students that want more than the standard formulas.

@lupe: For such clear cases, a German professor could simply say "that's cheating" and the student would not be.able.to complain.

@sisee: There are many different answers and comments. I think this establishes that the answer was clear.

Couple of things.
Firstly, referring to the materials or notes allowable in a formal examination as a "cheat sheet" seems like it reveals something about the mentality here.
Secondly, your professor may be sufficiently familiar with you to know that you're attempting to probe the outer limits of the wording and defeat the constraint, rather than align your own understanding of a "formulary" with his.
There is a school of thought which is not that you will be held to the letter of the law, and the obligation is on those laying down the law to be unambiguously precise about the form of every possible violation.
Instead, the law is laid down merely to note that there is the existence of a policy, and it's incumbent upon you to familiarise yourself with the purposes of the policy (such as, to relieve the students of the need to memorise a large number of formulas), the conventional shared practices around it (such as what others are putting on their sheets), and use your good judgment to cooperate with the policy.
You may be asked to account for yourself later, and you may be judged and penalised if someone else thinks your judgement was not normal or correct.
The exact information that ends up on the cheat sheet is probably not important. What is important is that a group of students conform to a shared norm about it.
Depending on your appetite for the risk, you can either be conservative and write down only formulas, or you can take your chances on what you write and risk being declared a cheat.
What you probably want to do, but cannot, is simply write down whatever you want but risk no consequences.
The reality is that all the time spent considering the margin of what might or might not be acceptable on the formulary, would probably have been better spent studying and memorising whatever questionable information you had wanted to include in the formulary.

"referring to the materials or notes allowable in a formal examination as a "cheat sheet" seems like it reveals something about the mentality here." Huh? About whose mentality? In exams in STEM fields in Germany it is pretty common that the "allowable materials" are simply a sheet of paper where you can write down formulas, etc. It is quite common in Germany (also for faculty members) to refer to those as "cheat sheets" (which is meant tongue-in-cheek, of course). No mentality issues here, except maybe that one doesn't take every single word deadly seriously.

@JochenGlueck "a sheet of paper where you can write down formulas, etc.". I thought the point is about exactly what that "etc." is.

Agree with Jochen. The German word I am familiar with is Spickzettel  (notably, no direct reference to cheating in the word itself) and this is the word professors in my time typically used when colloquially talking about these sheets of paper.

@Nobody: Yes, sure. My comment was not supposed to answer the question of the OP - it was merely a response to Steve's claim that the word "cheat sheet" would indicate somekind of mentality issue. What precisely is allowed on the sheet is of course relevant for the OP, but not for the rather common description of the sheet as "cheat sheet". I think the main reason why it's often referred to as a "cheat sheet" (and also the point which distinghuishes it from other kinds of materials that one could allow the students to use) is the size restriction.

@JochenGlueck, I'm familiar with the term in general. But in a context where we are discussing the prospect of actual cheating, I think it speaks volumes about that person's underlying thinking and good judgement (to which I referred in the answer). Exams are the one place where "cheat sheets" are not allowed. It's not even how the academic staff refer to it - they call it a "formulary".

@Steve: Thanks for your response. Maybe we are talking past each other. It happens quite frequently that academic staff at German universities refers to those sheets by the German word "Spickzettel" (whose translation to English seems to be "cheat sheet"). I'm a faculty member myself and sometimes use the word with this meaning when talking to students, and I've seen several of my colleagues (at several different universities) do it as well. I don't see any poor judgement if somebody refers to a concept by a word that is commonly used for this specific concept.

(One might argue, though, that this is a translation issue - indeed, for this very reason I would have avoided this particular word if I had posted the question. But again, a misunderstanding based on language does not imply anthing about OP's mentality)

@JochenGlueck, once you start referring to it as a "formulary" instead of a "cheat sheet", the general question about what should go on the formula list is obvious: formulas. And the professor's curt reply becomes more obvious, too: "a formula list is a formula list". "Cheat sheet" is well understood in English (with the tongue-in-cheek meaning), but it doesn't come across as something that would be used when people are trying to communicate seriously or formally about "what is allowed on a formula list?". Other word choices too, suggest to me an issue with mentality and intentions.

@Steve: I pretty much agree with everything you wrote in your last comment - in particular after I saw the most recent edit of the question, which states that the professor very explicitly used the German word "Formelsammlung", which literally means a "list of formulas". So yes, after this edit, I agree that OP's reference to the sheet as a "cheat sheet" seems like a bit of a stretch, in order to interpret the intstructions more losely than they are likely intented.

"Cheat sheet" is an usual term used by academic staff in the small number of Canadian and American universities I have experienced in similar situations, even on syllabi. Reading into OP's mentality from the use of the term is unfair.

I disagree about especially the last sentence and also about calling it a "margin". There is a really big range between only allowed to write formulas or everything (see the question) and it makes quite a difference on the exam.

Your school will have an academic integrity office whose purpose is to investigate academic misconduct (so cheating, plagiarism etc.).
If your professor won't lay out what the restrictions on the cheat-sheet are, refer the matter to the academic integrity office and they'll be more than happy to find out for you.
The last thing they want is a professor arguing a student has cheated when the student reasonably believed that what they were doing was allowed just because the prof was too lazy to answer questions.

I doubt that this answer is applicable to many public universities in Germany. In fact. I wouldn't even know a German word for "academic integrity office". There is a committee which is often called "Prüfungsausschuss" (but I'm not sure whether every university uses precisely this word), which can roughly be translated as "exam committee", but it seems hardly comparable to an "academic integrity office" (assuming my interpretation of the term "academic integrity office" is correct).

Fair enough, I guess I'm missing the cultural context, just assumed that this would be the same in every country to be honest. Whether it's a literal office or not isn't really important, I more meant that there should be someone who is in-charge of dealing with academic offenses no?

"I more meant that there should be someone who is in-charge of dealing with academic offenses no?" Well yes, that would indeed be (at least at my current university) the "exam committee" (="Prüfungsausschuss"). It's just that dealing with academic offenses is only one of several different tasks of this committee and that, even more importantly, the committee is merely composed of professors from the department, who certainly won't consider this committee work as their main priority. So when you say that "they'll be more than happy to find out for you", [...]

[...] this might apply to an "academic integrity office" if there are people in this office who consider this one of their major tasks. For a "Prüfungsausschuss" at a German university I wouldn't bet that they'd, in the situation described by the OP, be happy to find out for the OP. And even if they were, there's not much they could do to influence the professor's decision except for having a nice chat. I think the main point regarding the cultural context here is that German professors enjoy an extremely high level of independence. (But by the way, I wasn't the one who downvoted.)

I'd find it extremely odd that the people responsible for charging any student with cheating wouldn't be inclined to ensure that students have a fair chance to know what constitutes cheating... Must be a cultural thing then

Hmm, I think there might be another misunderstanding, as I probably phrased things a bit to sloppily: it's not the exam committee's task to charge students with cheating - for most cases of cheating at German universities, there won't be "charges" (in the sense of something that needs to be verified and requires a decision) at all. All that happens in many cases is that the person responsible for the exam (in most cases the professor or some of their assistants) who finds a student cheating, will document this and will report a "failing grade due to cheating" to the administration. [...]

[...] The exam committee only gets involved if either the student complains, or if more serious actions are considered, for instance if the student has already cheated multiple times. That's another reason why I'd be reluctant to compare such an "exam committee" to an "academic integrity office" - the exam committee does not automatically get involved (in the sense that they need to make a decision) in cases of cheating.

That's odd... Seems like that system is far too open to abuse if a professor doesn't like a student. Either way, I guess my answer was making too many assumptions about UK practice being common across Europe

@ScottishTapWater: The system is indeed open to abuse by bad professors. It comes from "older times" where professors were more seen as all-knowing "gods" who would never behave badly and has not been much reformed.


text:
Will plagiarism software find my drafts in Overleaf?
I am a Ph.D. student in mathematics and soon will start writing a thesis on my published papers. I think Overleaf (online cloud) would be more flexible to write the thesis instead my TeXstudio editor. Our university library checks the thesis through Urkund plagiarism software. I have no worry on that part because my papers are already published and properly checked by the library.
Before my question, I just want to mention that if one replaces an article in arXiv with a revised version, then Urkund or any other plagiarism software also counts the previous version towards the similarity score, but in that case our university doesn't count the earlier version since the author is the same.
Since Overleaf is an online cloud editor, every LaTeX file will be stored digitally.
In this case, does any plagiarism software track the saved file from Overleaf?

I would advise against using overleaf for writing your PhD thesis. You we want your manuscript somewhere where you are not reliant on an internet connection to access and edit it. An offline tex editor, and using git for version control is a better option for the task at hand.

Please note that the sentence "our university doesn't count the amount of plagiarism from the earliar version" cannot be correct: there simply is no "plagiarism from [an] earlier version" since updating a paper on arXiv has nothing to do with plagiarism. Your university simply acknowledges this fact rather than not counting some kind of plagiarism.

@JochenGlueck, well thanks. What is advice regarding overleaf and phd thesis ?

@learner: I think Coder's answer already contains all the relevant advice.

@TimRias - having multiple backups in multiple separate physical places (i.e. not all on your laptop or at your house - different cloud providers are likely separate physical places) is the way to go, whether using version control or not.

If your university is getting hung up on the fact that your PhD work is already published (by you!), I'd say the mechanics of Overleaf are the least of your problems...

@DanielHatton, yes, exactly that is what I meant.

@JonCuster - I remember, in years past, seeing sad - even pathetic - signs pasted on telephone poles in several different college towns - people begging someone who broke into their car or stole the entire thing to please please please just return the manuscript of their thesis - the only copy in existence, you can keep the rest, just please ....  It would be a shame if, in this digital age, people didn't back up their work when it is so easy to do so.

There are a couple of ways to sync Overleaf with other cloud services (which in turn are easier to sync to your local system), but unfortunately they all seem to be premium options now ... sigh ... https://www.overleaf.com/learn/how-to/Working_Offline_in_Overleaf  . Less conveniently, you can also export zip files of the project regularly (e.g. daily): https://www.overleaf.com/learn/how-to/Exporting_your_work_from_Overleaf . You can unpack these and work on them locally if Overleaf craps out on you (although syncing your work back to Overleaf could be a pain ...)

@davidbak - even now, may people think a second copy on their laptop is a "backup" somehow. You would think that a Google drive and just emailing yourself copies would readily come to mind, but...

The chance of Overleaf servers going down or anything happening to them before you finish your PhD thesis is vanishingly small.

@TimRias You can use Overleaf and just sync to GitHub/Dropbox and still be able to work offline if needed.

@TimRias Overleaf is completely compatible with that workflow — including exposing its cloud storage as a Git repo (which you can sync elsewhere if you like). If you use it sensibly it helps with data redundancy, not hinders :)

@JonCuster But setting your account on github and use git for version control will serve as the backup repository and version control. The bonus is, when connection fails, you can still work and update the cloud version later. But note that git si very efficient with plain text but sucks with any other data.

@Crowley Then .gitignore non-text.

@RodrigodeAzevedo True. But if you NEED to track non-text, typically graphs and schemes, then you should look elsewhere. Either use TikZ to compile the graphics form text, or use other version control tool for it.

Overleaf doesn’t make any documents public. ArXiv hosts preprints, whereas Overleaf is an online LaTeX editor where the files owned by a user are secure and private, equivalent to how nobody from outside can access your emails in Gmail.

Are you sure nobody from outside has access to your emails in Gmail?

Ha ha. Let’s not go there @MaartenBuis We live in a strange world.

I'm Tom and I work for Overleaf as a Support Manager.
Overleaf does not make any data you have on Overleaf public, unless you explicitly choose so by enabling link-sharing and sharing the link on the internet. So unless you do that (or expose your project e.g. by sharing it with untrusted people), the project cannot be scanned by a 3rd party.
So in short: You are safe preparing your projects on Overleaf :)

Thank you so much for the information

Overleaf is an outstanding platform that makes a researcher’s  life so simple and easy. You guys deserve a huge respect. In fact, I have acknowledged Overleaf in my thesis too.

@Coder That's great to hear! Btw, I didn't mean to steal the attention from your answer as it's 100% correct, I just thought that an authoritative response might be useful in this case!

Haha. I also liked an answer from OL. I have +1-ed it myself :-)

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text:
Is this methodology or results?

2. Materials and Methods
2.1. Specimen Collection
A total of 460 human stool specimens were collected between January to December 2020 from General Dhamar
Hospital and different medical diagnostic laboratories located in
Dhamar Governorate, Yemen. The stool specimens were collected from 250
males (rural: 120; urban: 130) and 210 females (rural: 95; urban:
115). The age of the participants ranged from <1 to 80 years.
—Population- and Gender-Based Investigation for Prevalence of Helicobacter pylori in Dhamar, Yemen

How come this is part of the research methodology? How did they know they were going to find the circumstances that made them able to collect 460 specimens?
The cited article is one of many that have these statements as a part of the research methodology. I think I have lost the line that discriminates between methods and results.

Actually, it is neither, but rather the process they followed to implement the methodology to determine the results. As you note, it is unlikely that they knew the number of samples beforehand, but possibly specified a minimum number that would get them meaningful results.
But where it is placed in the paper is probably unimportant. If it is in the methodology section it may just be their interpretation of the meaning of the word.
While methodology needs to be specified in advance for most purposes, "what we did" is also a form of methodology. Don't overthink it.
And, it isn't results, of course, as it doesn't describe what was found or the conclusions.

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How to talk to PI about dropping out of graduate school?
There are a lot of threads about whether people should drop out of grad school, or PIs forcing students to leave. My situation is a little different, some people might call this ungrateful, but I want to ask how I should actually talk to my PI about leaving the lab. How to start the conversation, and do it in the most professional and kindest way.
I'm in the first year of my graduate program, and my PI is extremely nice. Like to the extreme. To the point I've never heard any criticism come out of his mouth. I also thought I loved my project very much upon joining the lab. Everything was off to a great start. However, I have soon realized that this is one of those projects that will likely lead nowhere. I am not Edison, and I don't plan on failing 10,000 times before success. It will break me down. My professor is also not very good at mentoring. Nice, but incompetent in a way. He is a new PI and I'm sure will get better with time. But I feel like I'm his experimental subject, the one that is meant to fail so he can get better at what he does. He does not know how to lead me on, and gives me 100 different directions to try. I'm becoming very unhappy in the lab.
On the other hand, I have recently been offered a job. A good one, one that I can make a career out of. I don't feel that I will ever love this job, but it is the smartest thing I could be doing. However, this means that I have to drop out of my program and leave the lab first. As you can imagine, I do not know how to have that conversation with my PI, just given how nice and encouraging he is. He keeps telling me that I am doing great work, but I am just so tired of the way things are going. He is also a new PI and need prelim data for grants. Which makes me feel worse about this because I feel like I'll be leaving him to the dogs...
So long story short, I haven't completely decided to go through with this, but if I was to, I had a few questions:

How should I start the conversation? I'm actually at a complete loss for what to say
Is there anything I can do to not ruin the relationship? I really respect him as a researcher, just not a mentor, and would hate for him to hate me... Although maybe this is too much to ask for
Am I doing the right thing? If I was leaving a job, I wouldn't think twice about it, but for some reason leaving academia seems like I'm committing a sin...
Any other suggestions for when I have the conversation with him?

Additional info: one thing I forgot to mention is that he is also very busy. So although extremely nice when we do talk, we've barely spoken for the past month with only one actual meeting...

"I don't feel that I will ever love this job". Oooh, that's a big red flag for me. I'd much rather fail at something I love, than succeed in something I hate (or simply don't love).

Your expectation of what a PHD entails were unrealistic: "gives me 100 different directions to try". "I don't plan on failing 10,000 times before success". But this is exactly how PHDs are supposed to work. Trying 100 new approaches to a single problem until finding something that works better than previous methods. However, you do not have to feel bad for trying for a PhD and realizing that is not for you. It is your life and if you exit politely, timely and gracefully and treat your advisor with respect, you have nothing to worry about.

My advisor threw a lot of ideas into the mix at each research meeting. He did not seem to expect me to use all of them. I took notes, thought about them, organized them, and picked any that seemed useful.

@alexandros I do not feel that they are unrealistic. If these directions are good ones, I would be very excited to try them. However, that is not the case. These are easy suggestions that he throws my way because he does not know what other options to offer. Often times these experiments have already been done and were not feasible. He just did not know as he got the idea from 10 minutes of reading. Upon talking to other PIs in my field though, it seems common knowledge...

Of course, I could sort through all of these myself. However, the frequency with which I get them is such that I would have to spend all of my time reading. And given that I'm just starting grad school, I do not feel this is fair. I should be given more directions for my project so early on in my time here.

@ConfusedStudent007 This is the key sentence "I'm just starting grad school." Yes, you spend all your time reading in the beginning. Expanding. This goes on for about a year. You dabble and try during this time. In the second year, you consolidate, and then, around the third year, you really home in on the most promising targets. That's the caricature of a thesis. It is perfectly fine to be confused at the beginning. Try out everything that you find attractive and see what gets moving. Occasionally, but not typically supervisors will give you something concrete to try right at the beginning.

How long are you already a grad student?

@Captain Emacs I've been here for 9 months. Not sure if this will change your opinion but I'm in the experimental wet lab setting. I don't think what you've outlined is exactly typical in my field. Results depends on me running experiments, and experiments take time in them selves. I've been pitched projects by other PIs and all of the are very clearly laid out, with mini component projects. Maybe not everything will work out, but at least parts of it are organized enough that I can hit the ground running

Related (dup?): http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/66248/19607

One of the points I see in the above message, is that these feelings are so far entirely with yourself. I can of course not know for sure, but it seems to me at the moment that you have not talked to him about this yet.
You say, for example, he points you in 100 directions. I can empathize with that, surely, but do you know if he is doing this on purpose? Is he aware of this? Have you spoken to him about this?
I would say that the best way of opening this discussion is to actually open the discussion by telling him about your feelings. Perhaps he is willing to do things differently, perhaps he is actually afraid to be guiding you too much. All these things are now uncertain.
In any way, if you discuss these things (respectfully, aimed at improving the situation for the both of you), he gets to know you are not quite happy. If you decide to leave he knows you were not happy.
Also, I would like to agree with 101010111100, in that doing something that makes you predictably unhappy is a huge red flag.
Good luck!

+1 Also, I've never heard of a project that leads absolutely nowhere. Even when a project fails, there are typically many things to take away. For example, parts of the project may be salvageable, or you may have learned what not to do, or you've developed some tools/techniques that could be used in other projects. And there's also no guarantee that you will be managed any better in industry, which seems like your biggest complain, OP.

Thank you for the suggestions. I will consider  trying to talk to him first, but feel that I need to make a decision fast. About the job that I don't love though. I don't think this is uncommon to take on such a job. With be current job market in science, there is really a slim chance I'll be able to do what I love in the long term anyways. So the question becomes, do I take on a job I don't love now, or do I wait it out for a few years doing what I like, only to put myself on the job market struggling to find a job i might not like anyways?

@ConfusedStudent007 what is the job? If it is engineering/IT, then you can find a job like this all the time. I guess you should always have a backup plan outside PhD/postdoc by learning something like web programming(java, php, frameworks, etc), matlab, mathematica. There are plenty of companies which seek for someone all the time. Don't worry so much. Also, since you are in the begining, I guess you can switch PhD advisor or go into another group.

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text:
In a yes/no question, a student gives the right answer and an unnecessary but wrong explanation. How to grade?
Example:

Q: Does Venus exhibit retrograde motion? (1 mark)
A: No. This is because Venus orbits the Sun and not the Earth.

The first part is correct: Venus does not exhibit retrograde motion. But the explanation is incorrect: the reason Venus doesn't exhibit retrograde motion is because it's closer to the Sun than we are. Mars for example also orbits the Sun and not the Earth but does exhibit retrograde motion.
Do I award 1 mark or 0? On the one hand, for obvious reasons, the grading scheme only covers whether the student said "yes" or "no". Based on that, I should award 1 mark. Further, if the student hadn't written the incorrect explanation, then the answer is perfect, and it feels wrong to penalize the student for going beyond what the question asks for.
On the other hand, the explanation is clearly incorrect and the student should've known the correct explanation (it's part of the curriculum). It also feels wrong to award full marks for semi-incorrect answers. For example, if the student had written something silly such as "This is because Venus is made of Swiss cheese", do I still award 1 mark?!
Ideally, I'd award 0.5 marks, but for various reasons, fractional scores aren't permissible.

Answers in comments and discussions about astronomy have been moved to chat. Please read this FAQ before posting another comment. In particular, all further comments about the astronomical accuracy of the example will be deleted. This really belongs to chat or on [astronomy.se].

I'd think usually this would be all part of some list of true/false questions. So did the student give a justification for each question?

You asked for a yes/no answer (which, as you've discovered, has its disadvantages) and got one plus some other stuff. You should grade the yes/no answer and ignore the other stuff. If you like, you could add a note like "You got lucky! This is actually because..."
The whole point of yes/no or MC questions is that you grade only the answer, and assume that type-1 and type-2 errors cancel out or are normalized out. That paradigm doesn't work if you don't uniformly ignore everything other than the answer.
More concretely: other students likely got this question right using the same incorrect reasoning, but didn't write their reasoning down. There is no way to identify these students; so, you need to make sure they get the same score as this student.

+1 for "other students likely got this question right using the same incorrect reasoning... [but you can't] identify these students"

I'd say "the whole point" of any test is to grade a students understanding of the material.  It was decided ahead of time that a yes/no answer was good enough to determine that understanding, but now this student has given us clear evidence that they do not understand something.  That makes the answer wrong.  As far as the other students, all we know is that they got the right answer.  They presumably understood.  They also understood the question didn't ask for further explanation.

The last paragraph is pretty sharp.

Because there may be more students with wrong reasoning, if I were an instructor I would take a copy of that answer into the next class and tell the whole class that this particular reasoning is wrong and what is the correct one.

@Alexander I wouldn't take that specific example (or say 'one student has put...'), because it effectively embarrasses or shames that student in particular (who went above and beyond to explain why), when more than one could have the understanding wrong, perhaps for differing reasons. It's simpler to simply (re)introduce the topic of why Mars is retrograde, and if asked why, simply say that based on the test results you feel students need a refresher.

@JPhi1618 Why would you presume other students understood when the only insight into the student's thinking is indicating they didn't?

@DarkwingI was trying to counter the argument of other students likely got this question right using the same incorrect reasoning.  My point is you can't infer anything about the other students.  They got the answer correct based on the instructions - The End.  However the student in question certainly doesn't understand the question and therefore got the answer wrong.

I agree with giving a whole-point for the incorrectly reasoned answer, but suggest adding another important reason: you don't want to give students a reason not to provide such an explanation, because that reduces your awareness of their knowledge/reasoning and hence your ability to help them.  Of course, you could go the whole hog and ask for explanations on every question and would then have much more such insights to work with, but the MC question is a practical time-saving compromise.  You can still circle the explanation in red, write "nope" or a longer explanation if you have time.

@SSight3 - why should an anonymous student get embarrassed? Being taught how to answer questions is as important as getting facts right. Make a point of it in class!

@JPhi1618 : You say "That makes the answer wrong."  This is incorrect.  It makes "that a yes/no answer was good enough to determine that understanding" wrong.  Since the defect is in the assessment method, the corrective action is to improve subsequent assessments.

@JPhi1618 That approach would be extremely unfair, and bordering on dishonest. A multiple-choice exam (of which this is a variant) is structured with an implied promise that a student who gets the right answer will get a mark and a student who gets a wrong answer will not get a mark, regardless of whether they understand the reasoning or not. If the examiner wants to be able to grade the student's understanding then they choose an exam structure which demands more than just a MC answer. It is dishonest to trick a student into thinking you have given them a MCQ and then grade them differently

@JBentley, I like your reasoning, but no one "tricked" this student.  The directions were clear, they did not follow them, and they ended up writing down the wrong answer because of that oversight.  If you were the student, could you honestly argue that you should get credit for this answer, knowing that you either didn't follow the directions or you didn't understand the material?

@JBentley 1) The OP did not state that this was a multiple choice exam, just that one question happened to be a "yes/no question" 2) The question does not actually say "answer only yes/no". IMHO as a student seeing a question and a line to write on I'd expect to have to justify my claims hence I disagree with OP opinion that that question of the exam is "just a yes/no question". 3) What other students might have done is irrelevant to what you certainly know of a given student. 4) Adding something when not required comes with a chance to get a bonus and a risk to get a malus.

My two cents: when OP gave a T/F exam, they accepted that some students would get credit when they didn't deserve it. Even randomly guessing will lead to 50% accuracy -- but after normalizing and averaging, students get approximately what they deserve. While it may be justifiable to penalize students for providing unsolicited, incorrect reasoning, this will create a lot of rancor (which you may or may not find to be justified, based on the factors discussed on this page), and will harm the exam's ability to provide an apples-to-apples ranking of the students' understanding.

@JPhi1618 Yes, I could argue that - "the grading scheme only covers whether the student said "yes" or "no". (from the OP's description). In the majority of cases MCQ grading schemes will direct the marker to ignore anything that the student writes in addition to the answer.

@Bakuriu I disagree. As per my comment above, the grading scheme only covers a yes/no answer, and as a student, I would expect this because the question states that it is worth 1 mark. Questions demanding explanations usually give more marks than that. I strongly disagree that "adding something when not required comes with a chance to get a bonus". That directly contradicts the fact that it is a 1 mark question. Giving bonus marks where the grading scheme does not provide for it is unjustifiable.

@Tim Just because the student who made the error is anonymous to the class in terms of exam doesn't mean you should isolate them as the sole example of an error, because they will know what they put, and will feel such remarks are directed at them (whether or not you know it's them is irrelevant). Given it's unlikely they are the only ones to have made an error (not necessarily the same kind of error), highlighting that specific error is redundant; you're teaching an entire class, so just highlight the correct answer. The student is smart enough to work out for themselves it was an error.

@SSight3 - what I mean, actually, is highlighting to everyone that it wasn't the best way to answer, regardless of who wrote it. That part is inconsequential. No need to tell who it was, except that person, and all his  fellow students, will benefit from it being brought to everyone's attention. Part of being a student is to learn how to answer questions properly, and with this one, instead of purely 'no' which may get the point awarded, he shot himself in the foot. If I was marking, he certainly wouldn't get the mark, as it's obvious his knowledge is lacking. But that's why tests are given.

@Tim There's no need to highlight how 'not' to do something (this induces unnecessary cognitive load. It's also why telling people 'not to do something' often leads to failure, as you have to think of the thing you don't want to do, then not do it, which increases the odds of you actually doing it). Tell them simply what they should do (which in turn, allows them to forgot the incorrect way).

@Tim Example: Do not think of a pink elephant. Do not think of Mars being retrograde due to two moons.

@JPhi1618 There's more to this than just whether the answer is right or wrong, I think. Creating a comfortable learning environment makes it easier for students to learn, and their perceived ability to trust the instructors/graders is a big part of that. Whether or not you actually trick them, if they feel tricked it will be harder for them to learn, because now they're focusing more on trick questions than on whether they understand the information. Awarding the mark with a note makes it clear to the student that they can trust you to keep your word, leaving them to focus on learning.

I think that if you would allow full marks for just yes/no without an explanation at all, then you should allow it here. Otherwise the question is flawed and can't be properly and fairly graded. But a note to the student would be good, also.
To be more precise, if it is possible to answer a question with inconsistent parts it isn't a valid question for examination. It should be clear and clean.
But your job is to educate, not to grade. Give the marks and write the note. And think harder about the questions you ask and how they are presented.
If the explanation is required, it is a different situation. In that case, and if you weight the explanation heavily for other students, then probably 0 marks is better than any other alternative.

"your job is to educate, not to grade" Rarely said. Thank you.

This is a very good question - I hadn't even considered that the question itself doesn't specify the student needs to provide an explanation - the fact that they do anyway should not count against them, but leaving a mark that this is wrong (and why!) is absolutely the correct way to do this.

@Zibbobz - the fact that they do anyway should not count against them - I disagree in general.  The issue, as SolarMike points out, is not having a clear grading scheme in advance.  I often give problems where no justification is required, but state that they will be graded on what they write.  This includes taking off points for writing down bad justification (serious conceptual misunderstanding, not minor calculation error) for the right answer.  (Much more often, this rule means they get partial credit for the wrong answer.)

@Kimball Actually I completely agree with you - when the question specifically asks for an explanation as part of the grade, that explanation should be part of what they get graded on - but the key words there are when the question specifically asks - and in this case, the question did not specify that an explanation would be graded.  In this specific case, it would be unfair to grade the student on this answer - and in the future, the professor should make explaining the answer part of the question explicitly, complete with its own allocation of points for an adequate explanation.

I disagree with the conclusion. "Your job is to educate, not to grade"; giving a bad grade for writing nonsense is also a form of education.

@MartinArgerami In a good world, the examination is also a teaching moment.

@Kimball that encourages students to write as little as possible. To make answer only, and not provide any explanation. Which in turn leads to a mindset where no "feedback" is given to what they do. That leads to people who don't comment code, don't explain the mathematics and try to keep as most information to themselves as possible: also while in a work environment.

@mickeyf: My employer, a public university, pays me to grade as much as it pays me to educate. Certification is an objective as much as is learning. I don't completely like that it is so, but it is so (though in engineering, medicine, law, etc. certification is necessary).

@Kimball I think here the grading scheme is perfectly clear.  It's a yes no question.  That fact that OP set the wrong question, and tried to test the students knowledge rather than understanding is a very different issue.  That is the lesson I think OP needs to learn from this.

'Your job is to educate'. The whole point. The point of testing is to ascertain what knowledge has been understood and retained. That answer certainly made it clear that the student wasn't educated in that particular part of the curriculum. Giving a point for something that the student obviously didn't understand will make him think everything is o.k. But to the teacher it's a clear sign that more needs to be done. Or should be!  It's a poor question anyway!

This is a discretionary matter, and different lecturers will treat it differently, depending on their own educational preferences.  However, I disagree strongly with some other commentators on this thread.  In my view, there is nothing unfair in marking a student down for unsolicited and incorrect information.  Indeed, I would say that this is generally a good practice, since it ensures that the student is held responsible for the correctness of their assertions, even in cases where they offer unsolicited information.  This implicitly gives the student some broader training in the importance of ensuring that they give correct information even when they choose to advance information that is unsolicited --- something that is a broader life-skill of importance.
In my personal practice, if a student gives me more information than was requested, and that additional information is wrong, this incurs a marking penalty just as if that information was part of the question.  I warn my students in advance that this is my practice, but it is a justifiable practice even without giving a warning.  In this particular case, if I were marking the question, I would not give the student full marks.

What kind of graduates do we want? We are training students to become professionals in difficult fields.  So, in considering this issue, I think it is important to consider the implicit lessons we give students by what we penalise and what we don't.  Imagine that this student graduates and practices in your field.  Would it be okay if this practitioner gives unsolicited information to people on the subject area, and that information is wrong?  Would you be comfortable working with a colleague who gives information to you or others that is sloppy and incorrect, but then he faces no penalty just because that information was not requested by others?  Is that the lesson you would like to impart to your students?  Is that what you want to teach them about the world?

Do you want graduates who never say anything for fear of being wrong? Marking off for incorrect, unsolicited information seems reasonable on an essay, where clear argumentation is important, but for a true/false quiz, it seems highly unfair to say "this is true/false" and then "surprise! I marked your correct answers wrong because I also saw incorrect stuff!"

Actually, unsolicited information that exposes a misunderstanding is hugely valuable. Even more so when communicating cross culture/language. I think you're solving the wrong problem here (even though the intention is good, and the problem of off-topic information is real).

I agree it's very valuable, and so are (solicited) wrong answers on an exam.  Both show the student that there is something they are getting wrong, and the penalty spurs the student to get it right next time.

...or to keep their mouth shut.

And keeping one's mouth shut instead of giving wrong information is also a useful skill!

-1 If this student had been trained to engage with the question minimally, in order not to lose marks, they would have just answered "no" and missed an opportunity to learn about retrograde motion. Whether or not learning to "keep quiet in one's ignorance"
is valuable (very disputable), it must come second to learning Physics in a Physics class.

@SeanHoulihane:  Information like that is incredibly valuable in a formative context, where you're trying to help the students learn. The question is whether tests are supposed to be formative, or whether they're purely evaluative.

“What kind of graduates do we want? [...] I think it is important to consider the implicit lessons we give students by what we penalize and what we don’t.” Agreed 100%. We should do our best to teach them to be accountable for what they say by being accountable for what we say. So if we said we’ll award a point on an exam question for writing “yes” or “no” (the correct one of the two), that’s what we should do.

... Conversely, taking off the point teaches students the lesson that while they are required to always be logical and consistent, the people in authority are allowed to act capriciously and say and do anything they please because they hold all the power. Is that what you want to teach them about the world?

@DanRomik "Is that what you want to teach them about the world?" Was that a rhetorical question? You described how the world is, but that last sentence makes it sound like you think teaching that reality is a problem. Yes, we should teach them that the world is unfair. We don't want to teach them to be that way, but we need to teach them that the world in general is that way.

@DanRomik: There is nothing capricious about marking down incorrect information given in answers, even if it was not solicited.  And no, we didn't say " we’ll award a point on an exam question for writing “yes” or “no”" - you just made that part up.  Please read my answer again and you will see that I said that I specifically tell my students the contrary.  Even in the absence of this, the mere setting of a true/false problem does not imply that there is no penalty for unsolicted false answers.

Maybe you should read your own answer again. You said that you warn your students, and then you added that ”it is a justifiable practice even without giving a warning”. So yes, with a warning it’s perfectly consistent and uncapricious to deduct the point. Without a warning, if you just write “answer the question with true/false” then you are representing to the students that that’s what will get them the point, period. It’s not really subject to interpretation IMHO, and if if someone is writing that and doing something else, I think I can reasonably call that capricious.

Usually that is not what is written.  Usually, all that is written in these types of questions is "The moon is made of cheese (TRUE/FALSE) (1 mark)".  In either case, there is no explicit guarantee that a TRUE/FALSE answer, accompanied by wrong information, will receive full marks.  So if the student writes "FALSE, the moon is made of milk", then in my view, that is not a full-mark answer.  You might regard full marks as implicit in setting the question as TRUE/FALSE, but I don't.

... Unless there is an explicit instruction on the test saying that a correct TRUE/FALSE answer will receive the full marks, I think it's perfectly legitimate to mark an answer like that (comment above) down.  Personally, I would probably give it partial marks, but not full marks.  Others might give different marks - I think there is room for discretion here.

And incidentally, if you want to be literal about things, if you actually wrote "answer the question with true/false" in the instructions, and they instead answered with a longer elaboration, then that is already a breach of the instructions, and hence could be penalised.

@Ben I actually don’t feel very strongly about this. I disagree slightly with your position, but also think it’s not an unreasonable position to have. And I agree that the professor may have some discretion, depending on the precise wording of the question. Thanks for an interesting discussion.

I agree that a wrong explanation, unsolicited or not, should not get points, but the explanation in this answer misses something. Exams, where guessing is better than not answering, are not the same as real life, where “I don't know“ isnt penalized equally harsh as a plainly wrong answer.

+1 for "I warn my students in advance that this is my practice." If it's on the syllabus, it's OK. There might be some loss of learning, but that is mostly due to the question format. If folks want to prevent loss of learning, write better questions that solicit the stuff that maximises learning. Teaching people to try and avoid making wrong statements on tests and other places they will be judged is a valuable lesson. That said I probably would give them the points.

"there is nothing unfair in marking a student down for unsolicited and incorrect information" <- Not true.

"<- Not true." <- Not true.

"Unless there is an explicit instruction on the test saying that a correct TRUE/FALSE answer will receive the full marks, I think it's perfectly legitimate to mark an answer like that (comment above) down. "  I disagree. I have never seen a multiple choice exam where anything but the answer you choose was important. I think it is reasonable to infer that this holds for all multiplice choice exams in my country and a professor who grades otherwise has to explicitly state so.

Say we had a True/False or multiple choice question that could involve a calculation. Suppose I did the calculation as scratch work next to question. Should I be marked off if my scratch work is wrong even though I arrive at the right answer (assuming it wasn't requested to show my work)?

Give him the point.  If you want, mark on the paper "wrong reason" in red.
If you wanted to evaluate reasons, you would have made it more points and required an explanation.  But you didn't.  So treat it like a normal true false or multiple choice problem.  Reason not graded, just getting the right answer. Luck allowed.  Etc.  Similarly right reason but wrong result gets hammered.
If providing an answer was required then I guess you could mark wrong any case where both answer and reason were right.
P.s.  This is if you are the teacher.  If you are the student, don't debate 1 point.  Get it all perfect next time.

I debate 1 point questions on tests and the like simply as a matter of principle (but of course, I am respectful and not trying to bother the professor), though I do make sure to get it next time!

There are a few schools of thought here, and it really depends on your teaching style.
From a fairness perspective, you shouldn't mark this student down. I'm quite sure that there are a few other students in your class who could not explain why they got the right answer (a good number of them probably just guessed at random). Unless you have a system to find out who those students were and penalize them, I think you'll have a hard time justifying why this student gets marked down and all those other students are not.
From an instructional perspective, there is some merit to marking this student down. Students have a tendency to write down random stuff with the hope that something sticks. If you incentivize your students to write less bulls**t and more to the point, you are teaching them a valuable lesson. You will be signalling to this student that you care about how they reason about answers, and not just the final product. I know of some lecturers who give their students 1 point in essay questions if they write nothing, just to provide an incentive to not write nonsense.
I would lean towards a fair verdict, but this is really because your question was very limited in answer scope.

+1 I agree with your second big paragraph. I think that changing future questions to evaluate the reasoning separately might fix both problems.

You will be signalling to this student that you care about how they reason about answers, and not just the final product. – If you want to signal that, you should arguably issue an exam that actually asks for the reason and not just the final product.

@Wrzlprmft s/arguably// (in other words I don't think it's arguable) but otherwise you nailed it. Rewarding the other guessers who keep mum and penalizing the one who explains her reasoning is exactly the wrong approach.

The cause of the problem would seem to be the lack of instructions on how to answer the questions.
If the exam paper clearly said "answer the questions with either yes or no," the answer given is wrong because the candidate did not follow the instructions. That might sound harsh, but that's the way the real world works, unfortunately.
If candidates were expected to explain their reasoning, the answer is also clearly wrong.
This is no different in principle from the converse situation where candidates are expected to show their working, and someone simply writes down the correct answer. If they really were smart enough to see the answer immediately rather than do the expected half-page of calculations, they need to learn to be smart enough to also explain why their answer is correct, in real life!

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

It depends on the actual title above the questions (if there is one). For example:

"Are these statements true?" (or synonyms):
In this case, the actual answer is only "Yes" or "No". There are two options: marking it as incorrect since it's not fully complying with the title (writing further information was not asked), or marking it as correct since its actually complying part ("No") is indeed correct (and potentially crossing out the non-compliant part).

"Are these statements true? Justify your answer." (or synonyms):
The answer would be it as a whole. In this case, I'd mark it as incorrect since it does not answer all the title's parts correctly and thus it's not fully correct.

In case there is no title, it becomes a difficult situation since the mark turns out to be subjective. Besides, the student would be in their right to complain about what they get.

Conclusion: always make your exams with clarity in mind, clearing all technicality loopholes for justifying wrong answers, and no one will be harmed.

It is absolutely absurd to mark down for providing additional information just because this was not asked in the title. This is not the case in any exam I have seen and should be explicitly stated. (Is a student also not allowed to scribble on the paper? Or remove a wrong tick when they change their mind because this is an "additional information"?)

It seems you were giving a point (a) to students answering "yes" for the correct reason, (b) to students answering "yes" and wasting their time by writing down the correct reason, (c) to students throwing a coin and answering "yes" because they were lucky, (d) to students answering "yes" for the wrong reason, and you ask whether you should give a point (e) to students answering "yes" and writing down the wrong reason.
Since you are willing to give a point to groups (c) and (d), it seems unfair to me not to give a point to group (e). (But if papers are returned to the students, the wrong answer should be marked as wrong).
Of course, asking for an answer and giving reasons would make more sense.

I would usually give no credit for a correct answer supported by incorrect argumentation, particulary when the argumentation contradicts the putative answer, is irrelevant, or is absurd. However, given the grade-seeking, formalist/legalist behavior of many students, it is imperative to indicate in the exercise statement that answers will be regarded as correct only if adequately justified. In the current case I would not give full credit, but would not give the 0 I would like to give, unless this had been my practice throughout the course and was known as such to students, because the problem or exam formulation should indicate what sort of answer is required.
It seems to me educationally irresponsible and entirely unfair to award points for an incorrectly reasoned "correct" answer. Such an answer reflects a lack of understanding, and should be graded accordingly.
Here is a concrete example, understandable to some. One asks a student if a given matrix is diagonalizable. One student makes calculations, indicative of conceptual confusion and poorly performed, that would clearly indicate that the matrix has nontrivial Jordan form, but answers that the matrix is diagonalizable anyway. A second student makes a minor arithmetical error that leads via otherwise correct argumentation to the erroneous conclusion that the matrix has nontrivial Jordan form and answers accordingly that it is not diagonalizable. Some seem to think that the first student should be given more credit than the second, when the second student has clearly demonstrated a high level of mastery of material and understanding. (Neither answer should receive full credit).
This isn't a hypothetical example. In mathematics and engineering exams this sort of situation occurs fairly frequently.
Grading serves to indicate whether certain standards have been met. Guessing, or obtaining accidentally, a factually correct answer does not meet reasonable standards for demonstrating understanding of content.

Is this a standardized exam? Will the score acquired by the student affect his chances of getting into college? Will it be carried onto the future? If so, award full marks. You were not testing the mechanics behind it. There is a good chance that other students didn't know the right explanation either, and thus, on account of fairness, you should give the student full marks.
The question only asked the student to answer Yes/No to the statement presented. Consider this: on any given test, there are going to be a number of people who answered "Yes", but didn't give an explanation. What if they didn't know the explanation either? What if they just guessed it? What if they tossed a coin? There are lots of facts that we know without knowing why they are true. Plenty of students in your class would not have known the explanation.

If this test is not for some standardized exam and if it'll not have any bearing on the student's feature, we can throw the fairness criterion out the window entirely, and concentrate on the more important aspect of testing: to see if the student has gained the required knowledge. In this case, whether or not you award 1 mark will not matter. You have two options:

Award full marks, but leave a note.
Award zero marks and leave a note.

What you choose is entirely your preference. Ideally, you'd want to award 0.5 marks; but since fractional scores are not permitted, I'll make a case for (2). Students are most likely to review questions for which they are marked wrong. If something is correct, it's correct and most students wouldn't want to bother with it. If they're marked wrong on a question, they'd want to know why. A student might review the whole paper, in which case your comments would be noted in both cases; but this is less likely to happen. It'll also encourage a student to not go beyond what's asked in a question. You don't have to present everything you know to the examiner in a test. While "sticking to instructions" may not always bode you well in life, in a test, it will certainly help you very much.

If you want to be absolutely right, treat the answer as wrong.
The purpose of marks is to accurately reflect the level of student's learning. If there is clear evidence that the student hasn’t learned the correct concept, marks should not be awarded.. unless you are grading their luck. (The student is clearly lucky here.)

But, really... marks are secondary. Won’t hurt if you give them the marks and make sure that they get the concept too. That’s your job as an instructor.
So, give them the points and explain the correct concept to them. Win-win for everyone.

In most institutions one's job as an instructor involves certifying whether students have learned such content. Grades do matter whether we like it or not, because our employers and our clients give them importance. They should be taken seriously, or one should go teach in a context where there are no grades (with the correspongind remuneration).

@DanFox: I don’t object to what you are saying. Therefore I’m not sure about the point you are trying to make.

"But, really... marks are secondary. Won’t hurt if you give them the marks and make sure that they get the concept too. That’s your job as an instructor." In many institutional contexts, from the point of view of many students, and from the certification point of view it is not true that "marks are secondary". Like I think also you, I wish it it were otherwise. That it "won't hurt" just to "given them the marks" seems to be questionable from the educational point of view also.

Whatever you do, you need to do it consistently for all students. For this reason we have a marking scheme. Presumably, you are not the only person responsible for the course? Are you working with a professor or colleagues? Ask them what they would do and do the same.
If there is no marking scheme and each marker makes an independent decision — discuss and work out a marking scheme that everyone can accept. Then write it down and ideally incorporate into the questions to make students aware, e.g. You need to explain your answer - correct answer with incorrect or absent explanation is worth 0 marks. Then simply stick to it.

Except that not giving an explanation is a valid answer and was assumed to be valid before giving the test. The issue is that the student gave more information than needed.

@TheGreatDuck Still, we assess student's understanding and provide constructive suggestions for improvement. We do not just tick the "right" answers. By providing incorrect explanation student gave evidence of their lack of understanding.

I’m referring to your paragraph about making schemes and the last sentence.

Where does this "grading scheme" come from?
If you made it yourself, cross it out and make a better one that gives zero marks for both "yes" and "no" and only gives marks for an answer with a correct explanation. Students should by this point know that an unexplained answer is worthless, unless the question specifies otherwise, and your example does not.
If you received it from somewhere else, don't ask strangers on the internet to adjudicate, go back to the person or organisation that gave you the grading scheme and ask them for a ruling. This is the only way that the grading can be fair between different graders.

The question is only worth one point though. If it were worth five then yeah, one can expect an answer and an explanation, but with only one point it hardly seems fair. Besides it's not hard to word the question to ask for both an answer an explanation - just add "why?" to the end.

Students should by this point know that an unexplained answer is worthless — Only if you actually tell them that an unexplained answer is worthless!  If your exam only says "Yes/No", then you're only asking for "Yes/No", which means you must give full credit for a correct Yes/No.  Students should not be expected to read your mind.  More strongly: Students should be expected not to read your mind.

@JeffE But the example does not say yes/no. If it did then you'd have to accept yes/no otherwise it's a failure to answer the question.

@JackAidley It only asks a yes/no question. If you want more than a yes/no answer, ask for more than a yes/no answer. Use your words.

@JeffE: Perhaps it's a cultural difference, but I would expect any student older than about 14, and certainly any university level student to know not to give yes/no answers without an explanation unless it's explicitly made clear that a yes/no answer is sufficient. Students should be expected to understand the conventions of exams, and answer accordingly. And, yes, a better worded question would be nice, but it's already been asked.

Students should be expected to understand the conventions of exams — You're assuming that there are universal conventions for exams.  There aren't.

@JeffE If you are so naive as to imagine you've ever set an exam which doesn't rely on the conventions of exams you are very, very much mistaken.

@JeffE there are universal conventions. If there is a question like in the asker's post and 5 blank lines spanning the page it should be fairly obvious that "Yes/No" is not acceptable. I would say the default is to assume an explanation is wanted unless specifically stated.

@TheGreatDuck And where did OP say there were 5 blank lines? You and I might say the default is to assume an explanation is required, but not everyone has that default. Even different instructors in the same department might have different defaults. Even if your university has mandated conventions that everyone actually follows (which would be a miracle), you still have to be fair to new/visiting/1st-year students who haven't learned the default yet. Use your words.

@JeffE There aren't 5 blank lines because explanations were not required for that question. Where did I say that this was the case of the askers question? You said there are no exam conventions. There are and anyone who graduated high school should already know at least by common sense when an explanation is expected. When it isn't expected might be different. However, given the example questions numerous unwarranted edits it is also likely that the actual question says (yes/no) with a one word blank after it. Unless this student writes absurdly small they are ignoring clear signals.

@JeffE and why do you assume this is some magically university policy? It's just that if someone gives you a question with a large portion of writing space you should logically assume they want a long answer. If it's short, it would make sense to give a short answer. And if the student is unsure they should err on the side of more details than less details because that is the proper thing to do in life period. If someone asks a question via email and you don't know how much information they want you give them more details not less. Not 200 page book more, but more than "yes" or "no".

because that is the proper thing to do in life period — Except when writing an exam, apparently.

There are two methods to use in this situation, and it really comes down to the environment you have made in your classroom.
Let's start with method one. Disregarding the response, giving the question full marks, and leaving a note for the student describing what was wrong with their explanation. There is nothing wrong with this method, and it educates, not punishes the student, because at least they gave effort. However, do cross it out and make sure the note explicitly states that the answer is wrong.
Method 2: Mark it wrong, and leave a note. While this doesn't "punish" the students, per se, though it does help them learn something and prepare for the field that they want to go into. Many of these students will want to go into fields that involve specific (correct!) answers. In this case, you would mark it wrong in the hopes that they may review it. If this seems a bit harsh, maybe invite him to do a correction of sorts.
Inviting him to do a correction seems like a compromise without resorting to fractional grades. It also allows him to make up the question while preparing him for the workplace, and making sure he learns and reviews the material, which will be beneficial later in life. If this isn't allowed, then it is more of a personal preference and a moral compass type situation, in which case you should look at both of the methods above and decide which one most supports the atmosphere that you have created in your class.

I personally would award the point (but disclaimer: I'm not a professor), but probably implement other answers' solutions (like write on the test an explanation). I'd like to point out that if this one question or a similar one were worth a huge amount of points on a test, of course it would be necessary to award points because the question never asked for reasoning. That question could simply ask for an explanation to avoid this whole issue.

A recommendation I usually give when someone has an analysis paralysis:

Grab a coin. Head for 1, tail for 0.
Toss it high, so that it will spins as long as possible on the floor
During the spinning, your expectation will show up most. Which side do you DON'T want most?

After you have know what you want, you can know why you don't want it.

I use this a lot too but I simply ask if when it landed were they disappointed or relieved.

What one person arbitrarily wants is not a good standard for marking a test.

@MatthewRead no, this is just a mean to get out of the analysis paralysis, so that the OP can be aware of what they actually prefer. After that, they can justify their preference and stick with it.

Ask them to give a confidence score (1 to 5 say) for their explanation. A high confidence but wrong explanation suggests a real lack of understanding for example.

The exam is over.

I'm upvoting this answer but the real problem is with the OP's himself/herself needing confidence and expertise scores in astronomy.  You can see it in comments and in the edit history of the original question. Astronomy has been "butchered" there. I have nothing against the technical terms "prograde" and "retrogade" but there's more to hard sciences than flaunting vocabulary and putting all efforts into making happy-go-lucky tests. I'd say a lot more: confidence, knowledge, proofs, and derivations. Voting was disgusting here. This comment is necessary.


text:
How to address a professor in an office setting
I will be working at a private company as an engineer (but in a heavily research oriented team), and I just learned the contact information of my manager. I will be sending an email to introduce myself, but I am not sure how to address him.
Just by searching his name online, I learnt that he works as a professor at a university (but is on a leave of absence, at least his page says so) but his current title in the company is engineer. So, in this case, should I address him as "Professor surname" or "Dr _surname" in the email or just by his first name (which is the preffered way at this company)?

Will you write a single email to all your new colleagues, or write to each individually? If the former, why not use "dear colleagues"?

I will only write to him.

Every place I started at new, I was introduced to the team and managers as organized by them - seems poor that you have to find out and introduce yourself...

If you're here in the US, I'd go with Dr. You're addressing him as your supervisor at a workplace, not at an academic institution.  He's not a professor there.  His title there is probably something like "Director of Research" which is definitely not how you'd address him. But he is a Dr. and, in my experience in 40+ years in industry, that is how he'd be addressed.
But also, at most universities here in the US, lots of instructors who do not have PhDs and are not on tenure track are still called professor.  Like me.  I don't have a PhD and my official title is lecturer, but students and others commonly address me as professor nonetheless.  (And yes, it makes me a little uneasy because, to me, there is a difference and calling anyone a professor regardless of whether they really are seems to cheapen the title for those who've actually earned it, which I have not.)

If this person has earned their PhD, I think you are safe to address them as “Dr. Surname” in an introductory email. Since you are not working in a university setting, using “Professor Surname” feels out of place.
I think it would also be permissible to address the email “FirstName Surname” because that is all the information you were given by the HR department, and it seems likely that they will reply and sign using their preferred name. Along this similar vein, using “Mr. Surname” would also be acceptable, however I personally feel this is less formal (and I would err on the side of formality).
It seems likely that, as you’ll be working closely with this person, they will prefer to be called by their first name, so I would chart a middle course (“Dr. Surname,” “FirstName Surname”) in the introductory email.

Go for Professor so-and-so, he can tell you if he prefers to be called something else and you've applied the maximum respectful title at the start.


text:
abusive teacher failing my life partner
this teacher has done the following in a required, non-elective class:

forced students to provide personal reflections in their health, including those with trauma for whom that is triggering
responded critically to said personal reflections, sometimes in mocking tone, sometimes in all caps
provided contradictory and confusing instructions
refused to respond to requests for clarification for said instructions
failed assignments submitted by students who picked the wrong interpretation of said confusing instructions
failed assignments for picking the wrong subset of a list of ten options when instructions indicated they could pick any of the above options.
refuses to meet with students to discuss any of the above issues

the students in this class have already sought assistance from their advisors, who directed them to the vice dean, from the vice dean, who revealed their identities and complaints to the abusive professor, and to the dean, who instructed them to contact the disability office about trauma, or to tough it out. The disability office has not returned complainants phone calls.
The affected students have begun building up a paper trail, and are discussing contacting the accrediting institution for the university.
Has anyone experienced anything of this magnitude? Did you contact the accreditors? What did they do? What other recourse do this teacher’s victims have?

Don’t walk. Run.

Maus, questions asking about other people's experiences with similar situations are usually closed here.  Since you mention accreditation, I guess you are asking about the United States.  Accreditation agencies in the United States do not handle student complaints.  The students involved should follow the University's complaints procedure exactly.  If that is unsuccessful, litigation is your remaining option.  I am not a lawyer, but this sounds like a law suite the University would loose in the United States.

Put all the evidence together with supporting statements (calendar, who contacted, responses including emails etc) and send to the Governing board as well as the accrediting institution.
However, this may get you back more attention than you wish so make sure it is what you all want.
But, I don't think the teacher should be allowed to continue and the behavior of the vice & dean may be called into question...