text:
Defining book co-author
Must a co-author of a book have written literally half? Or can her role refer to significant contributions that actually made the book publishable, such as extensive rewriting and editing, knowledge about publishing, navigating manuscript through the publishing process, writing queries, etc., etc. The book, though very steeped in science, is written for the general public. I am the author of many books and the author approached me to navigate her through this process. She is now exploring whether I shouldn't be co-author because of my contributions. I know this is common in scientific journals, but can't find answer re books. Thank you!

It sounds to me like your role has been closer to that of an editor than a coauthor.

A co-author is

An author who collaborates with another to write something.

There is nothing in the definition that states that each author must have written literally half of the book. Obviously, if there are more than two co-authors (perhaps more common for articles, your question seems to indicate that you realize this), they cannot all have written exactly half of the book, and it is rather unlikely that each will have written exactly one-third or one-fourth or...
In your situation, if the original/first author offers you co-authorship, accepting is a judgment call on your part. You have authored many books; is this one worthy of being added to your list? On the other hand, if you are not offered co-authorship, but will be acknowledged otherwise for your contribution, it is probably best to accept this with good grace. Next time--assuming that you might collaborate again--be sure to clarify potential authorship roles before beginning the actual work.


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University Test Bank Website- Potential Liability Issues?
I have an idea for a website, which I'm afraid may land me in trouble. I want to create a website where students from the university I attend can submit exams that they took (with scores of 90% or above), and they will be publicly posted on the site for other university students to utilize and study from. However, would this cause any violation of academic dishonesty rules? Would the professors try to hunt me down and get me suspended from the institution?

I think you should discuss this with the officials at your Uni. Even if it would break no rules, you don't want to step on too many toes. Personally, I'd be O.K. with the idea (I've published almost all the exams I've prepared, and most of them with the "official" solutions), but that's just me and my exams. When I published other people's exams, I always asked for a permission. Your Uni is yours, whit its people, customs, rules,... none of which we here know anything about.

Sounds like copyright infringement to me. The student may or may not "own" the rights to the answer but either I or the university own the rights to the exam.

Of course, we don't know what your university's academic dishonesty rules say.  But in most cases they are pretty broad, and there is probably a clause that could be interpreted to include your website, if your university's authorities decide to do so.  I think the odds are good that there will be at least one professor who is upset enough to push them to do something about it.  They might just try to get you to take the site down, they might try something harsher.  There's no way to know.
In general, I think most professors are aware that students may be informally sharing their exams with one another.  For that reason, they usually change exams from term to term, and if they reuse questions, do so only after several years.  However, some may be startled to see it done as systematically as you propose, and try to stop it.
I am not a lawyer, nor do I know your local laws, but posting an exam on your website would probably violate the copyright of the professor who wrote it (unless you have his or her permission).  This would be another avenue someone could pursue if they wanted your website gone.
Finally, professors could try to prevent their students from posting their exams on your website.  For example, they might stop letting students keep their graded exams.  Or, they could add a line to their syllabus that "you may not share your graded exams with anyone", on penalty of failing the course or academic dishonesty sanctions.  This could not only deprive your website of material, but also make it so that students can't even share their exams informally anymore, which I assume is contrary to your goals.

This depends greatly on your university policies. It could result in some serious formal problems for you which could haunt you for a long time.
Regardless of the policies, I think it is simply inappropriate to do this without the teachers' permission. While I do take extra care to never re-use questions on my exams, others do not and they could easily consider the exam their intellectual property. Whether or not there is any validity to their claim is not really the issue. The fact is that some will feel this way and because of those feelings they will be very unhappy with you.
I think a better solution would be to offer a prep site where previous questions are analyzed and then new questions are proposed which are similar but not identical - that is they would depend on the same knowledge base and thinking skills. There should be no reason a teacher would complain about this (in fact, I would think the teachers would be quite happy about this as it would help students to better prepare for the exams).

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text:
If transitioning into academic position, should I buy my PhD graduation cap and gown?
My graduation ceremony is coming up in a few months,
and I have the option of buying or renting a graduation cap and gown.
I will be starting an assistant professor job this year, so I suspect (but am not sure) that I will need to wear the dress at graduation ceremonies at my new institution.
If I were to buy the graduation dress, would I ever need to wear it again?
Location: My new job will be in an Asian university.
What I did I asked a colleague at the institution where I will be working,
and he told me that indeed, I could rent a gown for free
if I were to attend a graduation ceremony.

How cool is your gown?

May depend on degree type: https://www.herffjones.com/college/capgown/gowndifferences

Different institutions have different policies on robes for faculty members at graduations, although most will arrange for robes for faculty who do not have their own. However, if you take advantage of this option, you might not get much choice in your regalia - so if the institution that you are graduating from has its own particular design for regalia that you love, it might be worth getting your own. I have heard that there are institutions who will require that all faculty members wear the same design of regalia for graduation ceremonies, in which case spending a lot of money on a non-traditional set - which you then cannot wear at commencements - would be less than optimal.
Since you have an assistant professor job lined up, you could just ask someone at your new institution what the policies are there.

As noted in the comment, the location might change our opinion of the problem, however I will make notes from my experience.
When I graduated with my first degree I hired a gown as I could not see the value of owning one and knew I would study for higher degrees, and perhaps I could buy one later in my career. I received my second degree in-absentia because I knew that I would graduate again with a third degree in due course.
Now I attend ceremonies on a regular basis my institution can provide my gown for any formalities. Someone really parsimonious might say that you never need to buy a gown.
However, I have great regret not getting the earlier gowns. Time has changed things in a way I could not predict when I was making the decisions. The gown from my first university was designed by the hippest fashion designer of the 1960s. It was real 1960s cool in colour, shape and cut. No black gowns and mortarboards for them. As the institution matured they felt hip fashion icons of the 1960s were no longer cool and switched to plain black gowns and mortarboards. Now, in present times, it is impossible to source the original gowns. They are collectors items that rarely come on eBay and go for huge prices. All the original graduates, like me, now realise what a fantastic item they missed and want to get them. (Because, today, they look quite fantastic again).

The Computer Science Class of 1976 - Note the curved Hats
The gowns from my second university, which some of my colleagues own, have changed in quality over the ages. When I graduated they were made by fine tailors from excellent cloth with fine silks and quality trimmings. Today they are polyester and so forth and mass produced identically to all the other university gowns.
My rented gown just does not impress half as much as the originals that others wear at these fine ceremonies.
Only you can know how fine are the gowns that you could buy. No one can know what the future brings.

Wow, fascinating. If it isn't too much trouble, could you perhaps provide a picture of such a cool 60s gown? We have no real tradition of gowns over here in my country, so I can't even imagine a cool gown.

@SáT I can't seem to find one on google images or eBay. Have to scan some old 35mm film - take a while. Will try.

@SáT - Found one on Picasa!

Don't bother. It's over 10 years since my ceremony, I've been in academia all that time, and I've never seen the need. I've also seen very few faculty with their own robes. For graduation most institutions I know of will organize robe hire (and pay for it), so there's not even that incentive.

You don't say where you are; the asker doesn't say where they are. How do we know that your experience is representative of what their experience will be?

My institution expects you to provide your own regalia for commencment ceremonies. As does my father-in-law's. Mind you, in both places you need only attend once a year, and it is common to borrow a robe from a colleague  if your own is unavailable.

I bought my Harvard doctoral robes in 1973.  And I have worn them a few times over the years.  Probably fewer than 10 times.  Deans and higher administrators probably attend many more of these events.
At Ohio State, a representative group of faculty attends each commencement ceremony.  You can wear your own robe, or our department had a few generic robes for use by those do not have one.  Of course I would always be noticeable in my crimson robe among all the black.
The robe is made of some synthetic fabric, and should be dry cleaned, not just stuffed in a washing machine.  I only needed that once: we were in a procession walking through the rain.

I also bought my Harvard doctoral robes, and I've had occasion to wear them again three or four times.  When my children were small, my doctoral hood served as their superhero cape (and it survived!).

I didn't attend my final graduation and didn't see the reason to buy a gown with so many other expenses adding up moving to my tenure track job. However, I quickly found out that at my new institution, I had to wear regalia for freshman convocation, 1-2 commencements, and now a few other special events, and at $60-$75 each for rentals, I paid the same amount renting as I ended up paying for my decent (but admittedly bargain basement) doctoral hood/gown. I also splurged for the cool soft hat because I hadn't seen the fancy flock of seagulls option of the poster above. Until today, I hadn't regretted that.

When I got my doctorate I bought the whole set - gown+hood+octagonal hat. The friendly people at the ND admin building overseeing the orders strongly advised me to also rent one for the commencement festivities. Their reasons: A) the fully tailored robe would not be done in time, B) there's the risk of getting champagne poured all over the robe at the commencement party. They exaggerated item B, but item A was compelling enough.
During the last 25 years I have needed to wear the set less than ten times at various academic festivities: At the defences of my own grad students (in these parts they are very formal occasions in comparison to US) when I've been presiding the event. And elsewhere in doctoral defences as an opponent / external examiner / whatever. This is not too often, so the argument that it's wasted money is not without merit. However, getting extensive use of it was not on top of my list of reasons for buying the doctoral outfit in the first place. It has always also been a souvenir / memorabilia and also a uniform / badge of rank.
And I still get sentimental every time I dig out the gown, dust it and put it on. Also, because it's different from our local norm academic white tie + top hat outfit, my robe always attracts some positive comments. I'm too vain to fully ignore those :-)

I actually wish I had. (At this particular stage in my life it seems no longer necessary, but fifteen, twenty years ago I seriously contemplated it --- and then promptly procrastinated.)
It probably does not make much sense to buy one just for your own graduation (I didn't even attend mine), but if you intend to make a career in academia, you will likely be expected to attend commencement ceremonies for your students. Sure, you can rent a gown once or twice a year, but the rentals are all so uniform, and your institution may not even offer the degree you were awarded, so the colors are all wrong, etc.

I think the biggest question will be whether or not you are required by your department head, dean, provost, or university head to attend some number of graduation ceremonies every year. There has been a push at my university to get faculty attendance up at these events, and they require a cap and gown. As such, and with the increased attendance, there probably aren't enough loaner robes to go around, so at least some faculty need to buy their own.
Now, since you're still a presumably poor student, why don't you rent your robe for your own graduation and then get the lay of the land when you get to your new university? There's some lost money, but in the long run it will seem small in comparison to the sunk cost of buying a robe that it turns out you don't need. You can always buy one next year at your new university (even in the style of the one you graduated from) once you get there and find out if it's worthwhile.

The best point at which to make the transition from renting to buying is when you get tenure, if you are in a tenure-track position: it means that you're likely in this for the long haul, and don't have to deal with the expensive and frustrating logistics of renting anymore. Before that point, there's always the possibility you'll leave and go to industry, or something of that sort.

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Is there a possibility of educational redirection for an IT student?
I am a student at an IT school, I study to become a computer engineer.
During my scholarship, what I did was:

6 month intership at the beginning of 2nd year.
6 month internship at the end of my third year (before the master began).

Both internship subject were about Java backend.

Today, I am at the first year of my master (I just finished my third year), but I actually decided to do a sabbatical year, because I have to do my 4th year at international university.
There are multiple reasons preventing me from continuing my studies for a year (financial, administratives, personal, etc...).

But that doesn't bother me, because I can work at the place of my internship for another year, and then go back to my studies, with more knowledge, money and confidence.

But here is the thing: This year also, I will work as a Java backend developer.
My question is:

I kept doing works and internship as a Java developer, is it possible for me to change my path, and work as security engineer? (My dream job)

P.S : I am sorry for the tags, I couldn't find great ones.

Universities do not form "Java developers", they form computer scientists/engineer.
Your experience does give you a specialisation with Java, but this is not everything. While it surely gives you an edge to get a more senior position in that particular area, many of the skills of a Java Developer are in fact Developers skills. And these are the same regardless of what language you are coding with.
Some of these skills are also transferable, being able to solve a problem, to prototype solutions etc. So it is entirely possible to still work in infosec (or even totally non related work for what matters). Focus on the high level competencies you've acquired from your experience.
I would not even call this an educational redirection. It is more of a specialisation, and most courses in computer security would anyway be starting as a master 1 or 2 level.
If your goal is to work in infosec, try to find a university that teaches it as part of their master courses. Getting a diploma from this specialised master would indeed be more valuable for finding a job in the field, though not necessarily a requirement.

Thank you for taking your time to answer. I think, what I may have forgot, is that the skills, I've acquired as Java backend developer, will very likely be useful, regardless of what I will do in the future.

Yes. You could start changing by getting expertise in java security problems.
After school you'll be considered a software engineer. It's up to you to get your specialization.
You could start tacking some online certificates regarding security and work on some security jobs. From here on is mostly certifications and experience, so school wont have much impact on your specific field as it already provided you with the broad basics.

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Is it alright not to include my previous supervisors as co-authors, when publishing PhD work, now that I graduated?
I completed my PhD almost a year ago. I had 3 advisers for my PhD research and I could say that all the three hardly had any idea what I was doing. During my PhD days, I used to write papers and include them as co-authors of the work. It was frustrating indeed. Much part of the work is still not published. I am looking forward to publish the same in reputed journals. I really do not want to include them as the co-authors of the work as they are no way involved in the work. Now that I am done with the PhD studies, will it be alright to send the papers with single author?

There's the obvious burning-bridges question: would this upset your old advisers in a way that might cause you problems in the future? If you don't list them as authors were you planning to acknowledge them at least? It may be simplest and most prudent to just make them co-authors this one last time, even if it is a higher-profile journal than before, but I understand your frustration.

The reputation of the journals is irrelevant to whether they should be named as co-authors or not. Why are you mentioning this?

@Cape Code. yes, by reputed journals, i meant international peer-reviewed journals. It can just be thought of  as an adjective.

@Rup Yes that is the reason why I am asking this. I really do not know if it will offend them as I/they am no way communicating to each other and they hardly bother about this. Sure I do not look forward for any problems in the future. I would be glad to acknowledge them which I would highly appreciate. Adding them as co-authors looks unjustifiable based on my conscience. But I look forward for any advise.

I really do not know if it will offend them --- Have you tried actually talking to them?

If you'll ever need a reference letter from one of them (e.g. you apply for a  postdoc/faculty position somewhere in the future), definitely talk to them.

Authorship standards vary a lot between disciplines, but generally the hierarchical relationship between you and the other authors should be irrelevant. In other words including them before only because they were your supervisors was wrong* so is excluding them now only because you feel they have no leverage anymore.
You mention the reputation of the journals, this is not a relevant factor. It's true that some more reputable journals describe authorship criteria explicitly, something that lower-tier journals rarely do, but the expectations is always that the listed authors contributed to the presented work according to the customs of the field.
It's impossible for anyone not closely related to your personal situation to tell you if they deserve authorship or not. What can be said is that quite often do graduate students underestimate the scientific contribution of their supervisors.
Your only option is to discuss the matter with them. Do they actively ask to be co-authors? Have you told them that you think their contribution is not significant enough?

*I know that this still happens, in some fields too often. That's why I wrote should be and not is.


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Why do editors sometimes reject manuscripts for being out of scope even though they cite references from the same journal?
I wonder why editors sometimes do reject  submitted manuscripts for being out of the journal's scopes while the authors have utilized published papers from the same journals.
Is it just a polite way of rejection?

Journals can have all kinds of scopes, so there could be many reasons.  A methods themed journal, for example, would not be suitable for most of the papers that cite the journal because they use the methods found in the journal but do not develop new methods.

Consider a recent paper I wrote about Ebola control - it cites a number of papers from computational chemistry journals. Is there a reason to think it's in scope for those journals?

Some answers to these closely related questions apply here: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/17942/19607 and http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/43012/19607

I'm not able to parse this question. What are "the same journals"?

I wonder why editors sometimes do reject submitted manuscripts for being out of the journal's scopes while the authors have utilized published papers from the same journals. — I'm going to take a wild guess here, but, possibly, because citing a million articles from the same journal doesn't guarantee in-scope-ness of a manuscript?

Cape Code has given a good answer, but it's not the only possibility for such a rejection.  Suppose you publish a paper in, say, "Topology and Its Applications", in which you prove some topological result using (among other things) a set-theoretic lemma. And suppose I later prove some result in algebra using (among other things) your lemma.  Of course, I would cite your paper, but that doesn't put my algebra paper into the scope of "Topology and Its Applications".

Citing articles form a given journal does not automatically mean your paper is in its scope.
Even if the subject and methodology of your work seem similar to the ones of the articles in a given journal, the scope can also include quality criteria. As an example, Nature Chemistry, in the description of its scope says:

Nature Chemistry is committed to publishing top-tier original research in all areas of chemistry [...]

Or, some journals decide to accept only papers based on their impact potential. If we look at the New England Journal of Medicine, the scope description states:

We are interested in original research that will change clinical practice or teach us something new about the biology of disease.

etc.

I do agree. However, we have faced it differently. I helped my colleague to prepare his paper according to the journal's scope and we found the objective of his work in some published papers from the same journal (the one we submitted our manuscript).

@user34526: Then you have other (much more important) reasons than the cited papers to argue that your paper is on scope. Those may all be very justified but that’s not what you have been asking about.

@user34526 What about the methods used to achieve the objective. Are they different enough to justify that the older papers are in the scope of the journal, but your new paper is not?

@ Wrzlprmft: Exactly

@ DCTLib: Well... The methodology was quite the same as practiced by previous researchers, however, the material used in his study was totally new and he got new results in his field of study.

I'm not saying his work was perfect but whatever it was, It wasn't out of the journal's scope for sure.

We would really appreciate it if the editor could directly tell us the problem. That's what I'm expecting

@user34526 It wasn't out of the journal's scope for sure Well apparently the editor disagrees. And it's her/his call. Editors are free to reject papers without giving specific reasons. While it is true that it is not particularly useful to you, there is not much you can do about it. Just submit somewhere else.

@Cape Code: The paper is published now. I'm trying to understand the policy which is practiced in different journals. BTW, thanks for sharing your opinion.

I wonder how "teach us something new about [the field of the journal]" differs from almost every journal's requirement that papers contain novel research...

@DavidRicherby the new trend in fashionable journals seems to answer your question: "The world’s first multidisciplinary Open Access journal, PLOS ONE accepts scientifically rigorous research, regardless of novelty."

I'll add another example to the several already given. There are a number of journals (e.g. some or many of the Letters on...) which have a somewhat fast review process, in order to publish results on "hot topics" in a relatively short time.
However, to publish in those kind of journals, not only does your work have to be on-topic, original, innovative, etc. (the usual stuff), but you should also justify the need for such a fast publication track.
Now, even if you produce an original high-quality work with the aim of publishing in such a journal, and even if your paper is apparently within its scope (and even citing references from that same journal), you might have worked on a topic which was hot ten years ago but now barely warm, and your paper would definitely fall out of scope.

One of the most common cases for being out of scope for the journal in such a case is that the paper is not at the right level of the theory-practice scale.
In particular, an application paper can make use of a lot of concepts of earlier theoretical work. Yet, that doesn't meant that the application paper is in scope. If the readership of the journal most likely does not understand the details of the application that are needed to understand the paper, then this is a good reason for rejection.
Likewise, for a theory paper, the problem studied may be well-motivated by practice. Yet, if the novel result builds on concepts that are out-of-scope for the rather practical journal, then the paper is also likely to be rejected.


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How can co-authors check the status of a submitted manuscript in Elsevier Editorial System?
I know that after submitting a paper through Elsevier Editorial System, the corresponding author can check the status of the submitted paper online. But how about co-authors? Can the corresponding author give a permission to the co-authors to enable them to check the status of the paper as well? If yes, how that can be done?

I guess you can ask the corresponding author for the reference number. Then you just register in the Ensevier webpage and add an accepted article to your webpage. Then you can track its status.

Ideally, you bug Elsevier to fix their system, and after a few years, you might see some improvement. This makes it better for everyone :-)

@artalexan The OP is asking about submitted papers, not accepted ones.

I found the answer myself  here

@Stat: it would be useful if you summarise the answer you found and include the link as an answer to your own question. (Yes, on the SE network answering one's own question is quite allowed.)

The answer is No, he/she cannot cannot give any permission to the co-authors after submission to EES and before acceptance, as mentioned here:

I am a co-author on the paper, I would like to be able to see the
  status of the manuscript. I have the manuscript number and I am
  registered on the journal website.
After submission, you can only see the status of a submitted paper via
  the corresponding author's EES homepage. You will not be able to
  search for this submission via your own author's EES homepage.

So just the corresponding author can check the status before acceptance. But after acceptance, co-author can track the status as well:

After acceptance, the article is recorded in our tracking system, you
  can use the production reference number along with the Corresponding
  Author's name to track your paper status and add your paper to your
  personal homepage on http://www.elsevier.com/trackarticle.

You have received an email just after submission which gives you a link to check the current status of your manuscript. the text of the email is something like this:
"The link below takes you to a webpage where you can sign in to our submission system using your existing Elsevier profile credentials or register to create a new profile. You will then have the opportunity to tailor these updates and view reviewer and editor comments once they become available.
http://www.evise.com/profile/api/navigate/....."

Is "You" in your answer and link the corresponding author or all co-authors?


text:
Where can I find industry postdoc hiring statistics for Canada?
Could anyone help me with the data of hired postdocs in company and private sector in Canada? I want to find out the number and the rate of the industrial postdocs in Canada (including the postdocs in university, company, government, etc) in recent years, which is important to my research.

Mitacs provides information (data will need to be compiled) about number of fellowships, participating institutions, expenditures, and so forth on its reports page.
However, I do not believe that Mitacs has historically been the only source of grants. See this article in Science (2005) and this notice from the NSERC.


text:
How to make students learn prerequisites
Throughout this year (at least some of) my students found it hard to follow the theory part of a computational physics course I thought. This was mostly because they lacked the mathematical foundations they should have learned already years ago.
Since I did not want to lower the course level to that of an introductory course in mathematics, I adjusted it only insofar that I tried hard to simplify the presentation.
In addition, I offered my help in consultation hours and the possibility to discuss selected exercises in detail during the lectures if I get detailed questions (which I almost never got). Finally, I tried to design exercises in a way which should make them learn basics as well. I also announced very early that knowledge of basics will be a strict requirement for the exam. The students already have a Bachelor degree and should in principle know how to learn from books by themselves. However, many of them preferred to stay idle throughout the year and to wait for the sample solutions I slowly and reluctantly handed out. They then tried to learn those (more or less by heart) instead of learning the methods behind. This happened even though I had announced that this would not be useful, especially because they are allowed to use all written/printed resources.
Now a relatively large number (1/4-1/3) opted out (did not hand in a solution) and will repeat the exam in 2 month. This apparently means that they want to use more time to prepare themselves. Others will speculate that the next exam will be similar (since I thought the course for the first time they did not have any old sample solutions).
For at least the first group of people the declared goal of making them learn the basics might therefore be reached. However, I would like to achieve this in a less forceful way such that the lectures become more enjoyable for them. So, how can I make them start to learn the the prerequisites early? In a sense I would like to change their general strategy to wait until the end and to solve the problem of completing the exam by learning by heart.
The problem is complicated a bit by the fact that the audience is mixed from different fields with different degrees.
The obvious solution to improve the teaching of their early math courses is unfortunately not something I can provide without a general strategy change by the University. Obviously I will always try to improve the quality of my own teaching but I do not want to reduce the level of the course to zero. My course already included a brief repetition of required basics.

I think you can't make students learn anything, and it would be especially difficult to make them learn something other than what you are teaching at the moment.  Still, I can think of some things to address the problem (many of which it sounds like you are already doing):

You can make sure that the unprepared students see early on that they are unprepared and liable to fail the course.  This might not motivate them to learn, but it is still a nice thing to do.
You can give exercises that require them to learn prerequisite notions incrementally, giving them hints on where to find information not covered in the lecture. Just don't expect them to learn more than they need for each problem.
At the end of the term, you can make sure not to pass the students who didn't learn the things you said they would need to know in order to pass.  (Otherwise you justify the very behavior that you complain about.)
You can pitch the course at a lower (but still nonzero) level.  In my opinion the only reason not to spend more time on the basics would be if there were a significant number of students who would be bored by this.  But maybe they would appreciate a review anyway.
Instead of changing the course, you could change the course description to try to deter more of the unprepared students.
If the students vary too widely in their backgrounds, you could try to create different versions of the course in future years.

The title question was of course not one for the Nuremberg Funnel. I.e. I don't expect to implement knowledge about a specific topic in no time. It might have been a bad choice in fact. An important aspect is that, for science/engineering students, math is also a meta-lesson. It is one of the most important things they learn as without it the will later be unable to read any advanced literature. Partly it is necessary to overcome the inner (and somewhat natural) resistance they have against dealing with formulas. This is what really prevents them from following the course.

I wanted to add that, if I become more basic, I risk of course to fail myself in providing the prerequisites for other courses. To some extent I suffer from the fact that they have apparently not been challenged sufficiently in their introductory math courses.

@highsciguy Although it is important to some extent that the students learn the prerequisites for later courses, I think it was is more important is that they learn something, which they might not do if the teacher "covers the material" in a way that goes over their heads.  But of course if there are some students who are ready to learn everything in the course description and others who are not ready to learn anything in the course description, then problems are unavoidable.

Well, I think that, at least some of them are learning now something in their semester breaks, because they know now that they need in order to pass the exam. However, this has to me more a school character than that of a University. In addition they will always eventually learn math at home only, when they try it themselves. I think that the task of the lecture itself is rather to trigger the interest to do this.

+1. However, I disagree with your "only reason not to spend more time on the basics". One very good other reason is that there is a finite amount of time and a certain amount of content to be covered in this course. Every minute spent on the basics that students should already know is one minute less spent on the actual content.


text:
What to do when PhD is becoming hell due to non-cooperation from supervisor?
I have a nightmare adviser, who is also the head of the Department. The problems are:

he has too many students,
never reads my chapters,
he is trying his best to sabotage TA or RA opportunities that are my only source of funding,
he discourages me from attending conferences, and
refuses to introduce me to anyone in his network.

The worst thing is that I am an international student in the social sciences in Germany where professors have too much power, and there is no system of redress.
I have a second supervisor from another university, but he does not want to get involved as he is not the primary adviser.
I am three years into the program and have a nearly completed thesis. Without his comments on my chapters, I fear that I will end up with a lower grade (PhDs are graded here) which marks an end to my academic career.  I was the top student in the Masters program and that is why I was offered a fully funded PhD. My adviser was very happy with me until I spoke to him about trying for a job in Germany or in Europe. Since then he is distant because I think he expected me to go back to my Third World country and create links for him.

What can I do?
Should I drop this PhD and apply for another one in the US or Canada? (I am not sure he will give me a recommendation)
Should I complete this PhD in a multi-disciplinary field (Global Studies/Global Integration) and start another one in a related discipline such as Political Science or Geography or another traditional discipline, in Canada or the US?
Should I apply for post docs and hope he will give me a recommendation?

Any other ideas. Please help. I am severely depressed.

While there are potentially a number of questions in there, it currently reads like a rant. It is clear that @rpsf is having a hard time, maybe if the question (and title) were cleaned up we could provide useful answers.

The OP does have a question about life as a graduate student which is very much on-topic - see faq. And he is asking advice as what to do. The title merely reflects his own feeling - a little emotional but understandable. I am wondering why he cannot approach the dean.

I never had to use it, but in Belgium there is a "Ph. D. committee" that meets annually with the advisor and the student to discuss progress and potential issues (of course, you shouldn't wait for the meeting if the issue is as serious as it is in your case). Isn't there something similar in Germany that you could rely on?

I don't understand how question 3 is related to the other questions? Where do the multi-disciplinary and traditional fields come in? Do you mean: should I complete this PhD and start another in a related discipline?

@user6298 What? How are you not allowed to submit a paper on your own?

My 2 cents :

Graduate as soon as possible, The fact that this is with high or low grades is not relevant here
Apply for a postdoc position in a place where PhDs are not graded (France for instance)
Publish the (very good) stuff that you intentionally kept hidden until your graduation

After step 3 your record will be clean, and all this "hell stuff" will be far from you. To obtain a position in academy, the only thing that matters is the quality of your research (that can be seen in the papers) and of your teaching (for that you requires references), nobody will care about what happen during your PhD.

"To obtain a position in academy, the only thing that matters is the quality of your research (that can be seen in the papers) and of your teaching " is utopian nonsense. Much more matters, including advisor rec letters. However, steps 1-3 might nonetheless be good advice.

@AJK A letter from the advisor is maybe useful to obtain a postdoc, but for a position it's no longer the case ; either the person and her (good) work are known, or she will not have the position. I'll add that if one applies at a place where the letter is more important than the results, then maybe one should think twice about applying at that place.

I am three years into the program and have a nearly completed thesis. Without his comments on my chapters, I fear that I will end up with a lower grade (PhDs are graded here) which marks an end to my academic career.

You won't miss anything. Trust me.

I was the top student in the Masters program and that is why I was offered a fully funded PhD. My adviser was very happy with me until I spoke to him about trying for a job in Germany or in Europe. Since then he is distant because I think he expected me to go back to my Third World country and create links for him.

Which third world country ?

What can I do? Should I drop this PhD and apply for another one in the US or Canada?

No. You are too far in the thing to pull out. Complete it, get the money and the title, and then reconsider your path. Career is not something you pursue, it's something that happens. There's nothing wrong with it, and academia is not that paradise so that you will miss it.

Any other ideas. Please help. I am severely depressed.

If you are depressed as in depression, seek medical help. If you are in a bad mood, just finish and look for something else. Life is more than that.

Do you only have a single supervisor? In Sweden, we always have at least a primary and a secondary supervisor. I know some people where the primary supervisor has little time, and the secondary supervisor(s) actually spend a lot more time in helping out. If it's for publishing a paper, you could offer co-authorship to other faculty if they can contribute to helping/advising on the paper.

I have another supervisor from a different university but he does not want to get involved as I am not his primary student. My supervisor is head of the Department and I fear that going above his head will mean that he will refuse to allow me to stay which would mean returning home with nothing.

If the primary supervisor has insufficient time, it should be the moment that the secondary supervisor can get involved. If neither can, I would discuss with relevant people if it's possible to get an additional secondary supervisor. I suppose your primary supervisor acknowledges not having enough time, so that should be a pretty strong rationale.

First, I have questions for you.
Your (1): "he has too many students."
   Why would you be bothered? Is it because he is too busy to pay attention to you? If so, why (3) (sabotage)?
Your (4) and (5): "he discourages me from attending conferences", and
 "refuses to introduce me to anyone in his network."
   Can you talk to your secondary adviser to help you? Do you really need your primary adviser to introduce you to people? Do you need his approval to attend conferences?
Your (3) "he is trying his best to sabotage TA or RA opportunities that are my only source of funding" is a problem. You need funding to support your study. I am not familiar with German. Can you find a job somewhere to support yourself? Would it have to be TA or RA?
Your true problem is (2) "never reads my chapters." You need him to finish your dissertation. For that, you need to talk to him.
I do believe there are some serious misunderstandings between you and your adviser. Generally speaking, a student and his adviser are on the same side. Do you believe he would be proud of your failure? I would like to tell you this, if you fail, he fails, too.
I would urge you to have a sincere talk to him. Tell him what you want to achieve. Tell him what you'll do and where you will be after you get your PhD is really your own decision. Ask what he thinks of you and what kind of problems he thinks you are having so that you can improve yourself. Maybe he thinks you have not done research in depth enough so your chapters are not ready yet. So on and so forth. Once you two can have an open talk and clear up the misunderstandings, it will be a happy ending.

Someone with many students is successful at applying and getting grants, but that's not guaranteed that is a decent manager. It is certainly one of his business if this translates into poor training and management.

@StefanoBorini, indeed, this is one of my questions for OP. If the adviser has lot of grants, why OP is having trouble with funding? I think there is a problem between the two, not the issue of too many students.

First of all, thank you so much Artem for the excellent editing.

Thank you so much Artem for the excellent editing. Yes, my advisor has a lot of grants, and students, of which he favors some. I was in that group, including a prestigious exchange program that he proposed my name for. However, after I discussed my plans, he has turned distant and cold. Earlier, he would reply to my e mail the same day, and return my chapters within a week. After I told him my plans, the problems started. I cannot take a job beyond my field according to German laws if I want to stay on. I cannot go back I want to talk to him but he refuses appointments claiming lack of time.

@rpsf, I think the exchange program is the key. There might be some requirements that the participant will have to go back to his home country after he gets PhD. You'll have to think about it. Either withdraw from the program to save his reputation if you don't want to go back home after PhD. Or, fullfil the requirement so that he can maintain his creditability. It's your decision. Nobody else can help you about this.

@rpsf: If I was right about the exchange program, you really should withdraw from it if you change your mind about going home. Let somebody else have this opportunity if you don't want it.

No, the exchange program had nothing to do with it. It was in another European country, and is something I did not even apply for. This was in the first year. He suggested that I go and do research there though there were others who wanted the oppurtunity.

@rpsf, Sometimes student-adviser relationship is like marriage. Outsiders can only understand a little. Sorry about intrusion of your privacy. As you're well aware of, you might still need his recommendation if you want to go anywhere else. I will stop here and let others who know better help you. Good luck!


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Can college professors alter their grading scale to pass students? How often does this happen?
I have recently completed a Multivariable Calculus class. I struggle a lot with math, and failed the first and second midterms and I feel that I failed the final exam as well. The first midterm was worth 25% of my grade, the second was worth 30% and and the final was 35%. I am absolutely convinced that I failed the final, yet I passed the course with a C, although homework was worth 10% and I maintained a 96% on it.
My question is, how often do professors alter their grading scale such that they don't fail someone? My professor did mention that if we do very poorly on the final exam, he would just give us a 'C'. How often does this happen?

Many professors never intend for the grading to follow this scale. I certainly don't, in my classes - that scale has too much compression at the top for my taste, it makes it hard for "really outstanding" students to distinguish themselves from "very good" students.

When you say that you failed the first two exams - did you receive a letter grade on the exams, or just a numerical grade?

First, please consider removing the school's name. It contributes no extra information but provides enough information to identify the faculty member(s). Second, what is the mechanism of grade assignment? Was it based on absolute or relative scale? If it's relative, it's hard to judge if grading scheme has been changed.

Kramsiv1994, I think you should include the passing marks and grade equivalents. A C in your univ isn't necessarily the same as a C in mine

I've had professors in the US who were willing to bump you a half-letter grade if you prove that you're putting the effort in and are just having difficulty with the material.  My own multivariable calc prof actually did this for me after I brought my grade from a D- to a B+. It was painful, but the prof appreciated the effort I put in for the rest of the course. TL;DR: sometimes profs are nice people too! ;)

I had a math class which followed a similar pattern to yours (most students failed or scored very low on most/all tests). I freaked out after getting a D on my first major test - as I had studied a lot for it. Speaking with the professor, she said I was actually doing quite well in her class, and that her tests were designed so that nobody passed them. At the end of the semester, she applied a large curve and I wound up with an A. Her tests were challenging to see how far students could apply the course material. Top students would set the curve, and the rest falls into place.

As a current graduate student (in Germany): grades get adjusted pretty much to satisfy whatever expectations the professor had in terms of passing rate/average grade.

@tonysdg  That prof was not nice to you.

@JeffE: I'm confused - what do you mean?

@tonysdg Grades are supposed to reflect your mastery of the course material; in particular, they are supposed to signal your preparedness for later classes that use the material.  If the prof gave you a high grade even though you did not understand the material, they lied to you and to anyone who might use your grade to predict your ability to do multivariate calculus.  That's not "nice"; that's pandering.

@JeffE: Lemme put it this way - I had a 60 on the first midterm (D-). I had an 85 on the second midterm; I got a 90 on the final (aggregates to B+ when you include homeworks). That was after literally doing every odd-numbered problem in the first 6 chapters of the textbook over the course of spring break (and I mean literally). And seeing as it was a progressive course (i.e., you kept building on the previously-learned material), I'd like to believe that I had demonstrated my ability to do multivariate calculus by that point - it just required a bit more effort on my part.

@tonysdg  In that case, the prof still wasn't being nice to you; he was giving you the grade you deserved!

@JeffE: Po-tat-o, Po-tot-o ;) Given that she and I didn't have the greatest of professional relationships, I like to imagine she was being nice in the end. Makes my memories of her class far more positive. But thank you nonetheless for the clarification :)

@JeffE Giving someone the grade they deserve may well be being nice, if it requires you to go through extra trouble finding out what grade the student deserves (as opposed to just using mu)

Teaching is hard, and writing exams is hard.  Anyone who thinks they can set the exact criteria in advance is probably being arrogant.  At Chicago (at least in the 1980s) every single course is graded on a curve so essentially every course had its criteria set by the performance of the students.  On the one hand this compensates for mistakes in teaching or in writing an exam, on the other hand your performance is partly determined by how good your classmates happen to be.
One of the professors at MIT I tutored under was very angry that students had demanded (so the Institute regulated) that the percentages given to the various midterms and exams were set out in advance, because before that "innovation" he'd been able to adjust the percentages if he'd written an exam not up to his own standards, something you can often only find out after you've given it.
In the UK, these sorts of practices are banned.  Every student is supposed to be marked to criteria set up when the course was approved.  To make this work, UK universities require the exam to be written very early in the term, checked by a colleague, and then checked again by an external examiner.  Then at the end of the year there is something called an exam board, where a panel decides if something went wrong in a course and moves all the marks for the whole course up or down in response.  This is better than marking on a curve because the students can help each other learn without hurting themselves, but in other ways it's worse in that the professors cannot innovate and it can be very difficult to update material.

The Chicago style seems really bewildering to me (and never encountered it in my own academics); personally I don't find writing college math exams very hard, and I after one or two semesters I can usually predict within 5% what the course average will be. I have an acquaintance at a top school who used the Chicago method and the students figured out the following: if none of them took the final then everyone would get 100% by default, and they actually did follow through on this, much to my friend's embarrassment.

@DanielR.Collins All the times my classmates pointed out this "flaw" in a curved system, nobody actually enacted on it. It's very difficult to convince the class' top performers to not perform on their own level, just to help other, less advanced/more-lazy students slide by. Not to mention the professor can just state in their syllabus (and many do) that if you do not take the midterm and/or final, they will fail you regardless of your current standing in the class. This forces students to at least show up and put their name on the paper, and makes it less likely everyone will turn in nothing.

@SnakeDoc: Yes, that's exactly what my friend thought too, right up until his students called his bluff, and then he wound up in the national news for it. Magister cave.

@DanielR.Collins Well, that's a first for me! If I were the professor, I would have called their bluff back and failed everyone ;-P If it's in the syllabus, you can fall back to it (at least in principal). I suppose we can say "majority of the time" it works out as intended.

@DanielR.Collins I can't help but think that your friend could have claimed that one or a couple people had taken the test. And that everybody else is now failing. But, you know, he'll give everyone one more chance to take it, because he's a nice guy.

(1) My friend was asked about that implication in advance, and verbally confirmed the conclusion to the students, thinking it would be a non-issue. (2) The students stood as a block outside the exam room to monitor if anyone actually went in and were ready to all file in if anyone "broke the strike".

About M.I.T.s regulations: If you say the homework is worth 10% of your grade, students will skip assignments in weeks when they are overwhelmed by the workload in the rest of their classes. If you then decide at the end of the term to make the homework worth 40% of the grade, the students will be upset and complain to the administration. I don't see anything wrong with this regulation.  (And I have been told that things like this have happened.)

@Peter Shor, I don't think whether students complain is as important as whether they learn, and not just whether this year's students learn, whether the following years' students learn too.  Students shouldn't get good marks for finding loopholes, they should get good marks for demonstrating knowledge of the course materials, and they should know that's what their university cares about.

@Joanna: I don't see how M.I.T.'s regulations interfere with learning. Saying you are going to disregard an exam's scores after you've given it doesn't help the students learn (although it might help you assess the students' performance better if the results of the exam are uncorrelated with the students' abilities).

@PeterShor The point of exams is less to teach and more to rank students -- an unpleasant part of academia, but something society requires of us.  If one exam is much poorer at assorting (e.g. if a significant question had a "gotcha") then it's nice to be able to decrease that one and increase the others to compensate.  I can't believe one thing would ever be quadrupled in value.

@Joanna: So you agree that it would be unfair if the professor quadrupled the value of the homework? Why wouldn't it also be unfair if it was just increased by 50%? (And I said, this has happened at MIT – although it probably wasn't quadrupled. it is against the rules, and the students complained to the administration.)

I'm not willing to say without the full context what would be fair or unfair.  The question is what would be most unfair given what is presumably already a messed up situation.  But unfortunately, these days instead of optimising on fairness, we are often forced to ignore fairness and optimise on legal defensibility.

See this question.

WRT the MIT questions, that particular prof (who was a teaching legend) only wanted to be able to rebalance marks between the two midterms & the final, so the students got the most marks for the best exam he'd written. Maybe other profs were less considerate, or maybe some loud MIT students didn't like any indeterminacy about grades. I myself always valued learning more than grades & took a lot of grad classes. WRT setting math exams, OK, sounds easy but boring. The MIT course was programming not math.

The Predetermined Minimum Scale
In general, at least in the US and according to my experience with a few institutions, grading often goes like this:

The professor sets up a grading scale (generally percentage to letter grade conversion) and puts it in their course syllabus at the beginning of the semester. This commonly goes something like 94% >= A, 90% = A-, 87% = B+ ... < 60% = F.
The syllabus also includes an outline of weighting of grades - for instance 10% "attendance and participation", 40% assignments, 50% midterm + final.

These guidelines as noted in the syllabus reflect a "guaranteed minimum grade". This means that if you get 90% in this course you are guaranteed at least an A-. However, this also means that the professor generally reserves the right to adjust grades upwards, especially in borderline cases. If you got a 93.7% and participated actively in class, they might bump it up to an A solely at their discretion!
In this scheme, students are protected against wanton harshness, like a professor suddenly decides the final wasn't hard enough and so suddenly anyone with less than a 95% gets a B.
Please be aware this is not the only grading system!
Forced Curve Grading
Another system uses what is sometimes called a "forced curve", and is designed such that - for instance - only 10% of students can get an A of any kind. It doesn't matter what your score is - just that your relative ranking is compared to other classmates that semester. I'm told the Airforce Academy uses this system extensively (or at least use to), among other institutions and sometimes even individual professors choose this system.
So you can theoretically bomb the final and get a miserable score, and if everyone else did too then your grade might still be excellent.
Hybrid Grading Systems
Bespoke systems implemented by various professors abound across the USA, which is part of the reason most graduate schools take GPA with at least a few grains of salt (it is understood that a 4.0 in one program might be equivalent to a 3.5 in another, to say nothing of whether or not a 4.0 student in one program might be otherwise inferior to a 3.5 student in the same program due to different student focus).
One system I've found somewhat common is using the predetermined grading scale, setting the scale strict as shown above, but then giving very difficult exams where they note that even they themselves would not be able to score 100% if they didn't have their answer key at hand. In these classes getting even a 90% is truly difficult. The goal is perhaps to be more discriminating, and a score of 100% isn't very informative in this outlook. I found math professors much more likely to fall into this category!
So what the professors do is at the end of the semester they plot out all the grades (in a histogram, scatter plot, or sorted-by-grade spreadsheet), and then take a look. They find some sort of 'gap' in the actual grades, and decide anyone above that gap gets the maximum score of A. The next 'segment' gets the next highest grade, on down to the end. No one gets bumped down to a lower grade, but many students can/do get bumped up.
Discounting Aberrant Grades
Many professors also compare the grades on a final exam to scores in the rest of the course, and adjust grades up in certain cases. One example is if you did well all semester long, then somehow did poorly on the final. If this seems like a weird aberration and you participated and clearly worked hard in class, sometimes a professor will think the grade is a poor reflection of your understanding of the material and will lower its weight - effectively giving you a better grade than your final would indicate.
Other professors look at the final as the most important/difficult test, and if you did significantly better on the final than in the rest of the class they will assume you must have learned the material (or you wouldn't have done so well on the hardest test!) and bump your grade up - effectively discounting your earlier less-spectacular grades.
Of course, some professors do none of this. Some give lots of extra credit, or "easy A" assignments so you just have to turn something in, etc. In the USA professors usually have a tremendous amount of independence in determining grades, and they often just have to have a sensible system they can defend if 'challenged'. But some don't really care and pretty much do what they want. YMMV.
Your Specific Case
In your specific case of wondering how you got a good grade even though you thought you bombed the final, it's possible you did not actually bomb the final - and it's also possible you did and got 'curved' up, or the professor discounted your grade on the final because you otherwise did so well in the course.
If you are really concerned or wondering, you can generally ask the professor or meet with them to share your concern that you bombed the final, etc. I personally wouldn't "look a gift horse in the mouth" (question someone who graded you kindly), but if you really feel uncomfortable with the grade then by all means you can politely ask to go over the final with the professor or discuss your grade more generally.
One final note- I have known a number of people exhibit a mentality I like to call "reverse paranoia": the belief that people are secretly out to help you even though you don't deserve it! It's very possible you did better than you think or even that you earned the grade you got (I know, crazy right?), and the professor just gave you the grade you deserved. This may or may not be related to the impostor syndrome, or just a past experiences that were negative. But this is just a pet theory/observation of mine!

My question is, how often do professors alter their grading scale such
  that they don't fail someone?

I cannot easily answer this for the whole world as the frequency may differ wildly across universities as each may have different policies. However, based on studying in three different universities in three different countries, I can tell you that I think that this practice is very common as many professors (at least those in the institutions I attended) are required to have a certain pass rate for their classes. If, therefore, too many students fail, then they will find some way to ensure that a sufficient number pass.
Do you have a more specific follow up question that you would like to ask?

There are some very high reputation schools where they still will have very loose pass criteria, for a basic pass (i.e. a C). However, what is very hard to achieve there are the high marks.

Indeed; there are some high reputation schools where the average GPA is very high (e.g. http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21615616-not-what-it-used-be-grade-expectations ) and so a C, although "passing", may actually be a very poor grade.

I don't know if you're going to be able to get an answer for "how often". I would assume this varies heavily by country, university culture, department culture, and individual differences in teaching styles.
From my experience as a TA and other TA's I've worked with, it is fairly common in the department to modify the grading scale a little bit if necessary - a practice similar to curving. Whenever I've been involved in these discussions, there has always been a lot of very careful deliberation before the choice is made. Why? Because teaching and learning both have an element of subjectivity and imprecision. No question is absolutely perfect, no exam will perfectly represent the material, and sometimes it's difficult to know the problem is the students or the inability for some concepts to sink in.
Some other reasons:

Equalizing between two different classes. In theory, both classes should have the exact same grade averages for all exams and for the final course grade. This never happens in practice. Sometimes the grade cutoffs need to be equalized between both classes to make up for this.
Poor performance on the final exam. What if students are doing well the whole semester and they do poorly on the final? It's very difficult to know if this is because the exam was problematic or if the students were taught poorly or if they were lazy or a number of other reasons. Sometimes the exact same final will have totally different grades between two classes even if the material taught is the same.
Unforeseen issues. Five years ago, I taught a course in which the fire alarm went off during an exam. As a result, we had to postpone the exam and give the students a make-up one week later. But then the other class that didn't have the fire alarm, complained incessantly and became rabid in their attempts to grab free points by badgering the TAs and arguing answers on test regrades. They claimed that it was not fair that the other class got an extra week. The average for the exam between the two classes was unequal by a large margin so adjusting cutoffs seemed fair.
An alternative to curving. Many professors curve their exam in some way to alter the grade distributions. Some professors think this isn't necessary until the end of the semester and "curve" by altering cutoffs rather than adjusting final averages.
Sometimes you, as a student, deserve the grade you got. I am always asked by my professors if the students I TAed really deserve the grade they received. What if a student comes to my office hours every week, does well on all the homeworks, participates in discussions, clearly knows their stuff, but performs poorly on exams? [I was one such student for my early undergrad so I can sympathize] And what about the student who crams the night before but understands little of the material and makes a really good grade on the exam because they are good test takers? Sometimes you need to adjust cutoffs for students who are on the cusp that deserve to be one letter grade up.
The aim of Freshman courses is not to weed-out but to instruct. I find this is more common in Freshman courses. Freshman year is hard and just because you don't perform amazingly in your first semester doesn't mean you aren't cut out for your topic of study. Sophomore classes and beyond tend to be much more weed-out courses. If it's clear that that you understood the material then maybe you deserve to pass the class. The point of teaching is to encourage and not discourage. And if a student passes that shouldn't, it will catch up with them eventually. They will reach a course where a cutoff can't save them or they will find their upper-division courses are far harsher when it comes to passing students.

Summary: the overall aim for adjusting cutoffs is to strike a balance between creating a fair course for the students and ensuring the students learned the material. However, It is wholly unethical to only alter individual grades or cutoffs for specific students. The most important thing to ensure is that whatever changes you make apply to the entire class.

How often does this happen? I have a feeling this happens quite frequently based upon my one personal experience/data-point that I have. This took place at a very well known, high-rep, American university. Most of the students in the class were probably engineering students.
I was taking a junior/senior level probability class. The class averages on the exams we utterly horrendous. We're talking in the 25%, 35% range. The averages showed the entire class to be in a state of utter failure. The professor was almost universally considered to be terrible...with the exception of one student who kept obliterating the exam averages by getting in the 90s each time. I knew that student personally. She was superb.
According to the class averages, I was in the "C" range. If a student had an "A" going into the final exam, they weren't required to take the final. Unfortunately, I had to take the final exam. I bashed my brains in preparation for that final.
Would you believe I ended up with an "A" for my final grade? It is the most undeserved "A" I ever received. You should have seen the totally confused look on my face when I found out! That "A" still stands out on my transcript as a diamond amongst coal.


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Is it legit to change from one university to another?
Currently am doing my first year in bcom (accounting). I enrolled with a certain university earlier this year did my first semester and wrote my first semester examinations, but because of financial problems my faculty administrator did not register me for my second semester modules.
Therefore I would like to know if I could get funding next year will I be able to register with a different university?

This depends on where you are. It might be possible some places and not others. This is an international site, of course. Also, moving and funding are different issues, generally.

There is no way to be sure about this—but what is certain is that you would need to be apply for admission and be accepted at the second university if you want to enroll and attend classes at that university. Whether or not this is possible depends on the policies of the other university. Note that many universities will require you to provide transcripts from previously attended institutions as a condition of application and enrollment, while financial holds are often used to "block" the release of transcripts from universities. So you may find yourself in a bit of a catch-22 situation.


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How to not lose focus after each disruption in flow
I have observed that whenever I'm studying something, or solving an assignment, whenever I would hit a question which I am unable to solve or is taking too long for me to do, my mind wanders away from that task, no matter how urgent or important my current task is. I would maybe end up surfing the net, or thinking about a conversion ,etc. I end up wasting 15-20 minutes of my time . This is very frustrating. How can I curb this problem ??

Avoid reading Academia.SE and other SE sites for too long.... :-(  If only it were so easy!

A very simple solution, that might work, and is worth a try. When you reach such a block, jot a note to yourself that captures the problem or the crux. Then get up from your desk and take a ten minute or so walk. Get your blood moving a bit and break the flow explicitly. Take the note and a pencil/pen, so that you can write ideas that might occur.
You may find that the solution will come to you, but at least, the break may help to clear your mind of the reason you may be pursuing the wrong solution.
This won't work for everyone, of course, but it is a painless way to experiment.
Oh, and don't be checking your phone on the walk or texting, or ... It might even be best to leave it behind since you will only be away for a few minutes.

Try to print out your assignment and the relevant notes. Keep all tech (laptop/phone) out of reach.
I'm sure you catch yourself visiting a website or checking your messages, not consciously remembering when you stopped working. Breaking this habit will require training your brain to focus for longer periods of time. Having physical copies of your work helps with that. If that's not possible, download a program called SelfControl, it allows you to blacklist websites for a set amount of time.
Also, remember to take breaks and get exercise. It will help with maintaining focus.

additionally also a very important aspect is, to get enough fresh air and to drink enough water to be more concentrated

This is quite common. There are few things to consider. Possibility of ADHD is one of them. More on that is left for medical proffesionals. Other things to consider,

almost every piece of digital content you consume is designed to catch your attention. Companies often use incredibly sophisticated deisgn choices to abuse the human element, very often in a similar fashion to what casinos do. Getting rid of all electronics would probably help. Getting paper copies, going to a corner of the library, with no (including a smartphones) electronics possibly can improve your concentration.

similar to Erik's comment about exercise, you should try to supply your body with its basic needs (if you weren't). A healthy dose of exercise, healthy diet or social interactions usually help me.

your mind is not your slave. You can't force it to work or concentrate. This is one of the reasons why cramming often does not work. You have to negotiate with yourself.

compartmentalizing also help some people. Obvious example would be to change the room when you want to study. Get to a desk different than the one you surf the web. It can be in a library, a university working hall or even some picnic table. I sometimes even go and work on the dining table in the kitchen.

Another tactic might be to "abuse" your sense of shame. For example, if you go to your library and start to procrastinate, you might feel being judged by the others. Hence it might be a good way to control yourself. Going to your department's communal areas might work better if you are more "afraid" of "judgement" from your proffesors / colleagues.
It is not likely that every single one of these will work for you. These are the tricks I use or see other people use. I hope it helps a bit.

Boaty McBoatface's suggestions are excellent, but I disagree with getting rid of all electronics. Struggling with distraction will not go away after university, and often your work will require that you are online. Here is what works for me:

Make yourself accountable to another person. This is a permutation of Boaty's "sense of shame" suggestion. You can have a study partner, or a significant other who asks you how focused you were during your study session. Working in the same room as someone else, with them able to see your screen, can be very helpful as long as this person is not a distraction in and of themselves.
From consulting: track your hours at the end of the day. It is incredibly depressing to have to stay late at work because you spent an hour on Wikipedia. If you were to be charging someone for your study time, could you reasonably charge them for 7.5 hours of work? Does the product (notes, knowledge, flashcards, etc.) reflect that? The simplest way to do this would be a spreadsheet.
Be honest with yourself. Can you focus with music playing? Can you focus with a 15-minute facebook break every two hours, or does this balloon into a 15-minute break every 30 minutes? No? Then set hard controls on your access to these distractions. Try removing access to music, or using a browser extension such as StayFocusd.
Others' suggestions that are vital: sleep, eat, exercise, make dedicated time for social engagement, and leave your phone out of reach if you don't need it.
Lastly, if this is a serious problem, ask a doctor about being tested for ADHD. I've been putting that off indefinitely... Mostly because of distractions like Stackexchange!

Good luck on that exam.

Your mind can only focus for so long before it needs a break. This is completely natural. Eliminating sources of distraction will only help so much, and if you can't eliminate them all the time, they will be even more distracting when they are available. If you notice it happening a lot, you may be burnt out and need a real break, or you may have an attention disorder that a doctor may be able to help with.
There is no "magic pill" or single solution to fixing this, and some options are harder than others to enact.
Others have already mentioned good options that work for me as well, so I don't repeat them. Some things that are miss are:

Simply realize you are off topic and get back to work. If you struggle to do so, you need a real break.
Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths, maybe take a few sips from your drink, maybe a bite or two from a snack, and refocus. (This really is different than the suggestion above.)
Try to realize your mind staring to wander before it gets very far and refocus on your work.
Open floor plans in offices and libraries are full of distractions and we are finding people actually like cubicles at work. If you can, move to a location where physical/real life distractions are minimized. This includes getting away from the kids, laundry, dishes, dusting, mowing the lawn, etc.
If you work from home, take a walk or drive around the block when you "go to work" and "come home", which may include entering a different door than you left. This helps to disassociate your home life from your work life, even when it's in the same building and helps to remove the distractions of home life listed and hinted at in the previous bullet point.
Finish out the train of thought that distracted you so you don't rehash it again later, then refocus.
Take a note of the topic that got you distracted so you can consider looking at it later, when you aren't working or studying, and refocus.
Schedule regular, real breaks every 1-2 hours so that unscheduled breaks happen less frequently.

And last but not least:

Close StackExchange when you aren't actively using it.

FYI, even when you aren't actively working on something, your subconscious mind still is. That's why you can wake up in the middle of the night with "the answer" to a question you struggled all day and it'll be "so obvious". This can happen at any time. Sometimes I will purposely take a break from a tough project so that my subconscious can take over. This works especially well when you "hit a wall". When that obstacle seems insurmountable, sometimes you can beat your head against it until you overcome it, and sometimes you need to walk away and let it crumble away on it's own. Sometimes you can even just get a fresh perspective from leaving it for a while. Breaks definitely have their uses.

As a variation on Buffy's answer, set a timer for a maximum of about half an hour - say 25 minutes. When the time is up, STOP WORKING, physically get up and do something else for 5 minutes, then reset the timer for another 25 minute work session and repeat.
You will gradually condition yourself not to give up or get distracted before the timer "gives you permission."
If you can't keep working for a 25 minute period, even when you know the timer is going to "tell you to stop" at the end of the time interval, that would suggest there is some underlying cause that needs professional diagnosis.
Once this technique is working for you, you might want to increase the length of the work periods - but you may find that regular short breaks every half hour are more productive than one long session anyway, and you don't need to use the timer to maintain that working pattern.


text:
Which journals make peer review history documents publicly available?
Nature Communications has had a policy since 2016 that authors are given the option to publish the peer review history of their paper.
Are there other journals with the same initiative?

Authors can always do that. Personally, I started adding the "answer letter" to the reviewers as supplementary material to the paper itself.

Will that option for authors become compulsory?

The BMC Series journals publish an article's review history alongside the article.

In the biologies, I know of at least:

eLife
BMJ
PeerJ (Optional)
F1000 Research

as well as the BMC series mentioned in the comments. Thats just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are others.

The peer reviews for several highly regarded machine learning conferences (most notably the ICLR - International Conference on Learning Representations) can be found at https://openreview.net/. While these are not 'journals' in the strictest sense, they do have a peer-review process. The setup is however double-blind.
The website, e.g. for the ICLR allows you to do the following:

Read the reviews and the answers from the authors
See the revision history
Check withdrawn papers
Add your own (anonymous) comment to any review

The publisher Cooernicus has an open peer-review process, i.e. all peer-reviewer reports as well as the answers of the author(s) are published open access.


text:
What if clinical leadership refuses to protect research time?
I'm a physician-scientist currently on year 4 of a K23 (early career grant for physician scientists in the US), recently awarded first R01 (multi-year major research grant for biomedical science in the US) with 20% effort.  Problem is that despite the 'protected' time from these awards, my division/section chief refuses to commit, and as the only non-full time clinician in the section I seem to to be the first one asked to cover the clinical scut work (calls, service, etc.).  My division chief specifically said, "No one really holds to the protected time", so it doesn't matter if I get three more grants, it's not clear they'll ever actually protect my time.
It seems like the only option (other than leave) is to sacrifice myself by reporting to NIH, in which case I'd probably just lose the grants.  Has anyone ever successfully managed this situation without leaving?  Anyway brought in ombudsman, or other independent institutional resources?
Obviously, I'm posting this anonymously...

Is this question better at workplace? https://workplace.stackexchange.com/

And a lot of your terminology isn't universally known here. K23? R01? It might be useful to know your country.

@Buffy These are references to US NIH grant types; they'd be easily recognizable to anyone doing biomedical research in the US. Basically, if someone has gotten a K23 and then an R01, they are doing quite well in funding their research as a clinician-scientist. I've added some context for those outside the US. I definitely don't think this question would be better at workplace, this is about allocation of clinical and research time and is not the type of conflict a typical employee outside of academia would confront.

Take a look at the rules governing the ombudsperson before you go there. Good rules will ensure confidentiality and that the ombudsperson won't take any action unless you say so. That will allow you to freely discuss your problem. If your institution offers an ombudsperson with good rules, then talking to an ombudsperson would actually be very useful in your case. I would not start with the idea of taking action, but just as exploring what is possible.
Also don't take this personal. The leadership has to make sure that all tasks are performed with the resources at hand: if you do less, somebody else has to do more. If your grant compensated your department for that in full, then that should not be a problem. Though even then, if the departments resources are stretched already, then the leadership will still be faced with impossible choices. It should not be the case, and solving those impossible problems when they happen is not your problem, but understanding it can help not to take those choices personal. If your grant contains no or only partial compensation, then the "protection" from the granting agency is very cheap: basically the granting agency is not spending its own resources but your department's resources. Your department can be forgiven for saying that that is not going to work.


text:
ArXIV's Different Licenses
I am considering submitting a working paper to the ArXIV archive and was wondering what the different licenses entailed, and whether choosing one might have some future ramifications.
Thank you!

Thanks for the edit.  I think this is a very good question now, which should perhaps become our "canonical" question on arXiv licenses if it gets good answers.

I suggest you post to the ArXiv only after you have an idea of a group of journals to which you will be submitting.  For example, narrowed to economics, or narrowed to physics.  Then you can investigate  a few journals and be sure you have a few places where you can submit after posting to the ArXiv, and with a certain licence.
If I am writing a pure math paper, I just post with what the ArXiv calls the minimal licence, which I have never read. I have never had any pure math journal even ask what licence I picked for the ArXiv.  I hear the New England Journal of Medicine does not publish anything that was on the ArXiv.  The PNAS states "the license selected for a preprint will affect the sharing, adaptation, and reuse of material" so for that level of publication some forethought is warranted.
Perhaps I have bad information and am spreading a rumor.  The point is that nobody can advise you on a licence that will work for every academic journal in the world.  You need to have that narrowed down.  For some journals no option works.  For many, many journals, it probably does not matter.  If you have decided on a basic type of journal you can post here again with a much more specific question.